A Civil War

by Claudio Pavone

  24 Il Partigiano, 23 January 1944.

  25 ‘Il saluto del popolo italiano a Parigi liberata’, L’Unità, Northern edition, 1 September 1944. For an overall view of the ‘expected but missing’ (Foa, La crisi, p. 18) contacts and accords with neighbouring Resistance forces, the paper that Ferruccio Parri and Franco Venturi gave at the II Congresso internazionale di storia della Resistenza held in Milan in March 1961 remains of enduring importance. See ‘La Resistenza italiana e gli Alleati’, in INSMLI, La Resistenza europea e gli Alleati, pp. 237–80.

  26 L’Italia Libera, Northern edition, 22 July 1944.

  27 ‘Ai Partigiani’, editorial of Lungo il Tanaro, April 1945.

  28 ‘Otto anni fa ed oggi’, L’Unità, Northern edition, 7 August 1944.

  29 See the article ‘El Frente Popular’, Democrazia Internazionale, No. 3, n.d. Il Saggio bibliografico 4219 attributes this publication to the Bordigist Partito Comunista Internazionalista, but this is unconvincing.

  30 The text of the song appears in IZDG, envelope 272a, folder II/B.

  31 See the report from the responsible official for military work in Piedmont, Sandrelli, to the PCI leadership, 26 December 1943 (Le Brigate Garibaldi, vol. I, pp. 183–8).

  32 See the report from the responsible PCI official and vice-commissar, Italo, to the Command of the 3rd Lombardy Division Aliotta (in Oltrepò), 10 November 1944 (IG, BG, 01600).

  33 ‘La Spagna e l’Europa’, L’Italia Libera, Lombard edition, 10 April 1944. See also (in its Northern edition, 6 February 1945) ‘Problemi della democrazia europea. Per la rinascita della Spagna’.

  34 ‘Che vuole?’, Avanti!, Rome edition, 30 December 1943, on an amnesty given by Franco, and ‘Inquietudine spagnola’, 12 January 1944, which, however, began from the correct understanding that neutrality had strengthened Franco. In autumn 1944, Spanish exiles, above all Communists, attempted in vain to establish a guerrilla base in the Val d’Aran in the Pyrenees, riding the wave of the liberation of France (see E. Pons Prades, Guerrillas españolas 1936–1960, Barcelona: Planeta, 1977).

  35 See, for example, the propaganda flyer ‘Volontari in terra di Spagna’ (Fondo RSI, No. 966).

  36 On this argument and its development, see G. Carocci, La politica estera dell’Italia fascista (1925–1928), Bari: Laterza, 1969, pp. 197–9. Interlandi directed his polemic against a corrupt Paris and the degenerate Weimar regime, whereas Coppola instead envisaged a great and strong European bourgeoisie.

  37 See M. A. Ledeen, Universal Fascism: The Theory and Practice of the Fascist International 1928–1936, New York: Howard Fertig, 1972.

  38 On these efforts, see Deakin, Brutal Friendship.

  39 Quoted in the laureate thesis of M. Di Giovanni.

  40 See Etnasi, La Resistenza in Europa, vol. I, p. 182.

  41 See E. Collotti, La seconda guerra mondiale, Turin: Loescher, 1973, p. 128.

  42 ISRT, Raccolta volantini.

  43 ‘Ultimo monito ai sabotatori’, 16 September 1944, cited in Flamigni and Marzocchi, Resistenza in Romagna, p. 239

  44 See F. Maugeri, Mussolini mi ha detto, Rome: Tip. Agricoltori, 1944, p. 23.

  45 See Bocca, La Repubblica di Mussolini, p. 217.

  46 See Deakin, Brutal Friendship, p. 668

  47 ISRT, Raccolta volantini.

  48 Fondo RSI, Nos. 330, 385, 547, 669, 672, 991.

  49 Letter from Arrigo Gasparini Casari, from Modena, class of 1922, 11 January 1944 (LRSI, p. 30).

  50 The eighteen-year-old Roman Franco Aschieri (LRSI, p. 102).

  51 Francesco Davolio Marani, a medical officer from Fabbrico (Reggio Emilia), 25 May 1944 (LRSI, p. 50).

  52 On SS esotericism, see A. Del Boca and M. Giovana, I ‘figli del sole’. Mezzo secolo di nazifascismo nel mondo, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1965; F. Jesi, Cultura di destra, Milan: Garzanti, 1979. On the neo-Fascists’ inheritance from the RSI, in contrast with other European collaborationist movements, see E. Collotti, ‘La Repubblica Sociale Italiana’, Ulisse, XXX, Vol. XIII (October 1976), folder LXXXII, esp. pp. 101–2. On the twilight of French SS who fled in 1944, retreating to Sigmaringen Castle, see H. Rousso, Un château en Allemagne, Paris: Ramsay, 1980. See also M. Revelli, ‘Panorama editoriale e temi culturali nella destra militante’, in ‘Nuova destra e cultura reazionaria negli anni ottanto’, Notiziario dell’Istituto storico della Resistenza in Cuneo e provincia 23 (June 1983), pp. 49–74.

  53 ‘Per la solidarietà tra i Partiti’, Risorgimento Liberale, Northern edition, October 1944.

  54 See Andreis’s report, ‘Sulla riunione tenuta a Cortemilia col rappresentante della missione inglese’, 6 February 1945. On 1 February, the Garibaldian commander Nanni expressed similar ideas following a 27 January meeting. In a postscript for his comrades, Andreis added: ‘For our part, while doing everything to strengthen unity, we vigorously struck down any anti-democratic or anti-Italian initiatives by reactionaries if necessary’ (Le Brigate Garibaldi, vol. III, pp. 332–5 and n. 8).

  55 Attività clandestina dell’Associazione professori e assistenti universitari (APAU) e del Comitato di liberazione nazionale di professori e assistenti universitari (CLNPAU) in Milano negli anni 1944–1945, published by the Comitato Direttivo Provvisorio dell’Associazione Professori e Assistenti Universitari, Milan, July 1945, pp. 17–18. The ‘Outline’ was datelined 23 May 1944, Milan.

  56 Il partito socialista e la crisi ministeriale (novembre 1944), Rome: Società Editrice Avanti!, Biblioteca ‘I documenti del partito’, 2, p. 30.

  57 ISRT, Archivio Medici Tornaquinci, envelope 5, 2, 3.

  CHAPTER 6

  The Class War

  1. CLASS, NATION, ANTI-FASCISM

  In April 1916, James Connolly, on the eve of the desperate attempted insurrection against the English that would lead him to the gallows, wrote:

  We are out for Ireland for the Irish. But who are the Irish? Not the rack-renting, slum-owning landlord, not the sweating, profit-grinding capitalist; not the sleek and oily lawyer; not the prostitute pressman – the hired liars of the enemy. Not these are the Irish upon whom the future depends. Not these, but the Irish working class, the only secure foundation upon which a free nation can be reared.1

  The identification, here, of the nation’s enemy with the class enemy is peremptory but not new. One of the most radical of the seventeenth-century English ‘Levellers’, Gerrard Winstanley, had identified the rich with the Norman invaders.2 To this way of seeing things employers and capitalists are, as such, enemies and foreigners. From the Fascist point of view, by contrast, capitalists are enemies only if they are foreigners (or Jews), in continuity with the nationalistic tradition that exalted national labour and declared that it wished to defend it against foreign exploitation.3

  Illustrating his socialisation plans to ambassador Rudolf von Rahn, Mussolini presented them as a punitive measure against the industrialists who were pro-British and guilty of the 8 September act of treachery. Hitler concurred, in the name of inflicting a just punishment on entrepreneurs who sabotaged war production.4 Socialisation thus became a form of political punishment.

  During the Resistance, and not only in Italy, the coincidence between the two enemies – enemies of the patria and class enemies – was called into question by the inevitably interclass policy of national unity pursued by the major parties of the left. It is possible, though, to detect, above all in the Communist leaders, an effort not to allow all class opposition to drown in the waters of national unity. The proletariat thus found itself with an extra burden of national responsibility, which was taken to coincide with ‘its economic interests that cannot be defended, nor its demands obtained if the Nation perishes’. This position was a sort of updated exegesis of the Marxist motto: ‘The proletariat have no country’. This motto, it was explained, ‘does not mean that the proletariat should not feel the need to conquer the country for themselves’, a country that they do not have, another text emphasises, because the bourgeoisie steal it from them.5 At the same time, oscillating in various w
ays according to time and place, distinctions between capitalists were reintroduced, culminating in that between collaborationists and good patriots. The ‘struggle for national independence’ therefore joined hands again with the class struggle against the homegrown alta borghesia regarded as the slave and ally of foreign imperialism.6

  An upended version of the same problem can be found in some Action Party documents: recognition of the elements of social confrontation present in the struggle, and at the same time the affirmation that this is not the whole story. Riccardo Bauer wrote: ‘It is the battle not between two economic classes – even if such a polarisation coincides – but rather between two conceptions of life, between two political religions, namely: the conception of life as creative liberty and that of life as subordination and hierarchic order.’7

  In reality two class motivations are identifiable in the behaviour of many resistenti, above all if they were of working-class or even peasant origin; and these motivations often coexist with patriotic and anti-Fascist ones in the strict political sense. For workers who were to a greater or less extent politicised, the ideal enemy, the clearest and most representative enemy-figure would have been that of a padrone who was also a Fascist and a brazen servant of the Germans, and as such no longer a real Italian (according to the process of annihilation of the national identity of turncoats already emphasised when speaking of the civil war). The condemned men who were shot crying ‘viva il comunismo, viva l’Italia, viva la libertà’ or ‘viva l’Italia, viva Stalin, viva il comunismo!’8 synthesised in this final message of theirs the multiple reasons for their choice. A leaflet addressed to the Bolognese rice-workers, and therefore expressive of an attitude mediated by exhortative and programmatic ends, starts with an attack on ‘our padroni [who] have repeatedly demonstrated that they have no desire to grant us any of our vital demands’; and, in a typical crescendo of concentric circles, concludes with ‘viva la nostra libertà! Morte ai tedeschi e ai traditori fascisti!’ (‘Long live our freedom! Death to the traitorous German fascists!’).9 Blunter is this slogan proposed for the workers of Massa Lombarda: ‘Fuori i tedeschi e 10 lire come minima di paga oraria!’ (‘Out with the Germans and 10 lire an hour as the minimum wage!’)10 ‘Pour la défait de Hitler. Pour l’augmentation de nos salaires’ (‘For the defeat of Hitler. For higher wages’) was the appeal that appeared in a clearly Communist-inspired French newspaper.11 In a ‘Letter to the peasants from a city worker’ the contextual occurrence of the three objectives of the struggle is voiced in accents – we are in Romagna, remember – that echo an old Mazzinian social vision, which in its time was also committed to convincing people of the complete congruity between the interests of the working classes and the interests of the patria:

  What does it matter, fratello, that the oppressor of our patria is called Nazi or Fascist and ours called landowner rather than industrialist? They’re all much the same, they all oppress us … Get it into your head that so long as there is a Fascist lording it in the cities and so long as there’s a German trampling on our soil there can be neither peace, no liberty, nor freedom for you. Remember that if the emancipation of peoples can only be the work of the peoples themselves, the emancipation of Italy from all oppressors can only be the work of us ourselves; therefore you too O fratello contadino, must do your bit, must cooperate with all your strength for the expulsion of the Nazi-Fascist oppressors of our country and for our liberty and for the triumph of the working class.12

  A Turinese resistente and Communist militant, when they wanted to give her the [Bulgarian] ‘diploma Alexander’, said: ‘I don’t want foreigners’ stuff; I’d take it if it came from Italians.’13

  One of the first problems, then, lies in the coexistence of these distinct motivations in the same individuals or, conversely, their being split between different individuals. First of all, there was the fact that not all employers, industrial or agrarian, were collaborationists, nor were they all Fascists, or at any rate still Fascists. And, mirroring this, there was also the fact that, if we set aside the different collective stance towards Fascism, not all workers were, strictly speaking, resistenti; which means that the oft-used hendiadys that the Resistance was essentially the work of the partisans and workers, needs examining, as does the relationship between these two main protagonists of the Resistance movement.

  In fact in the consciousness of the resistenti there were distinctions and preferences that led to the three enemy-figures being isolated or combined in various ways. Thus, the insistence on casting the padroni in a hostile light contributed to that different way of viewing the Germans, not as a pure incarnation of the Devil, which I have already mentioned.

  A February 1944 leaflet, distributed in Cittadella in the province of Padua, after enjoining its readers to hide wheat and to feed British prisoners and German deserters, concluded: ‘Don’t hate the Germans. Let us hate the Italian exploiters, the false prophets, the traitors. Let us hate the arristograzie [sic, misspelling], let us draw up a blacklist’.14 A case of class consciousness sublimated in politico-ideological consciousness may be encountered in that ‘organizzatore del lavoro militare’ (‘organiser of military work’) in the province of Novara who asked ‘how it was possible to shoot at a German who, for all one knew, was a Communist’.15

  The clandestine L’Unità always bore the subheading ‘Proletari di tutti i paesi unitevi!’ (‘Workers of the world unite!’). On 30 April 1945 this had already disappeared from the Milan edition. The Rome edition of the clandestine Avanti! placed that motto next to the other one in its half-title: ‘The first duty of the proletariat is to achieve democracy: Marx-Engels.’ In the period of armed struggle, the internationalist appeal, dear to the workers’ hearts, represented a kind of ideal pole, a natural but remote premise, to offset the policy of national unity, but only in rare cases was it made explicit and argued autonomously, rather than as part of the exaltation of the international role of the Soviet Union. One such case can be found, for example, in an ‘ora politica’ (‘political hour’) held at the 1st Garibaldi-Osoppo division (in the brief period when the formations fighting on the eastern border were unified), when it was explained that ‘the concept of class goes beyond that of the nation, since individuals belonging to different nations belong to the same class’, and are driven to fight against each other by the ruling classes: only the creation of a single state, therefore, will prevent ‘the frequent repetition of fratricidal wars’.16

  In July 1943 a French Trotskyist newspaper had spoken out against Gaullist and Stalinist propaganda that talked of ‘dirty Krauts’ and ‘despicable macaronis.’17 I mention this only to point out how the traditional formulae identifying class consciousness and internationalism were compelled to contend with a reality characterised not so much by the opposition as ‘the contiguity of consciences between the struggle between classes and the struggle between nations’,18 and where ‘partisan internationalism’, mentioned in the previous chapter, took priority over proletarian internationalism.

  In the case of Italy the presence of autochthonous Fascism made the picture yet more complex and gave a particularly strong sense to the objective of ‘achieving democracy’. If the day of reckoning was to be truly decisive, it had to go beyond the dismal epigones of Salò and strike at the very roots of Fascism, which indeed everyone was proclaiming that they wanted to sever. Intransigence in the struggle against the Fascists, who were doomed to defeat, was thus coming to be like the mark of this wish to go beyond Fascism itself. A pamphlet dedicated ‘to the glory of the national hero Dante Di Nanni, a twenty-year-old Garibaldino who fell fighting in Turin on 18 May 1944’, says that in Di Nanni instinctive repugnance for Fascism, generated by his coming from a working-class family, had been transformed into the realisation that ‘one needed to dismantle and destroy the whole social system that had generated and perpetrated this oppression’ and the conviction that the Italian Communist Party (PCI) was ‘the revolutionary party, the only party capable of defending the interest
s of the working class’. After 8 September, Di Nanni had dreamed of seeing ‘the armed proletariat at the head of all true patriots’.19

  The coincidence between armed proletariat and true patriot had moreover to be constantly verified, even in the area influenced by the PCI. This we shall see more clearly presently. But mention can be made even now of one of the first Forlì mountain bands, where the class spirit did not so much evolve in a patriotic direction as violently generate manifestations of social hate, thereby giving rise to a particularly strong link between class war and civil war and leaving the patriotic war in the background. The behaviour of this band has been described as follows in a Communist-inspired book:

  The principal objectives are carabinieri, Fascists and spies, while the Germans are, with rare exceptions, left in peace. This activity was accompanied by requisitions, carried out against the major landowners of the area, medium and small owners … There were many reasons for this conduct: the persistence of a new form of fence-sitting characterised by the renunciation of opposition to the main enemy and the manifestation of a class impulse which saw the solution to ‘foodstuff’ problems in provisioning to the detriment of farmers. The first partisan units mainly consisted of farmhands and workers in general. For the persecution and acts of oppression they had suffered these were prone to regard as ‘enemies’ that category of farmers who had been Fascist and had taken advantage of the favourable conditions to subject them to the injustices of Fascism. The excesses that had occurred created tensions that prevented the formation of collaborative relations with important strata of the rural population. There was a resurgence of the old maximalism which bedimmed the national vision of the Resistance.

  The commander of this band, Libero, was a captain (Riccardo Fedel), a veteran from Yugoslavia, where he was said to have fought with the partisans. He was blamed for having obtained ‘the consensus of his command and the sympathy of many partisans precisely by supporting the mistaken tendencies just described’. A Garibaldi document came down very severely against Libero, and even considered his physical liquidation, if only to bring the formation back to its senses. Demoted to chief of staff, Libero was to desert during the great roundup of April 1944, and after the Liberation his name would figure on the lists of the OVRA (Opera Vigilanza Repressione Anti-fascista). Thus, what was alarming in the social revolt of ‘farmhands and workers in general’ could be laid at the door of a traitor.20