The tragic sense of administering justice was made more acute by the impossibility of inflicting sentences of imprisonment. The penalties inflicted with bodily violence thus leapt to the forefront: the utmost in violence, like execution, or partial but humiliating violence, as in the use of the stake. The partisan formations frequently resorted to this archaic form of punishment,67 even in the very rare cases in which they were commanded by a woman.68 A perverse continuity, almost by way of retaliation for the worst practices of the Royal Army, appears in this episode:
A boy stole wheat from the band and sold it. Zama, his officer, got him to strip completely, except for his shoes and underpants, and had him tied to a stake for several hours in the snow at 1400 meters. He untied him when he became completely blue. He told how in Africa once he was tied to a stake for seventeen hours in the heat of the day, always turned towards the sun, with a small bowl of water under his eyes. We’re arguing as to whether he did right or wrong.69
The sobriety of this comment of Artom’s is a reminder that not everyone saw eye to eye about the stake as a form of punishment, widely used though it was. If the stake inflicted on two partisans who had dozed off during night guard duty was considered by the very men who had undergone it ‘a more than just punishment because they could have come up from the Val de Susa and done the lot of us in’,70 in the Tollot Garibaldi brigade fighting in Veneto it was collectively decided to abolish the stake and all other forms of corporal punishment.71 In another formation, ‘after careful examination’, a whole series of punishments were abolished ‘as not in keeping with the spirit of the Garibaldi formations. Above all it is stressed that the partial withholding of food rations is not moral. Let there be rather the application of simple and solemn disarmament, in front of the assembled unit, temporary or definitive.’72
This is the spirit inspiring the directives that the General Command of the Garibaldi brigades came to issue in this regard: ‘We are against this old barrack-room form of punishment. The “stake” almost always depresses, it does not re-educate, it is a punishment with negative effects.’
Instead, a whole series of other punishments are suggested, from publishing the reprimand in the mural newspapers to expulsion.73 A cook who stole some salami and was then sent packing aroused general satisfaction.74 In the Republic of Montefiorino the possibility of sending undesirables behind the line of the front was adopted as an alternative to the execution of the sentences.75
If what has been described so far is the treatment, containing a high dose of violence, given to false friends and to friends who stepped out of line, things were only apparently simpler when it came to the way enemies were treated. Obviously I am not referring here to combatants in open battle, who were treated in the same way as in regular warfare, even when the typical partisan tactic of the ambush and the surprise attack was resorted to. What I have in mind rather are several features in which the partisan war most clearly displays its specific character. A word or two is therefore in order about the treatment given to prisoners, Fascist deserters, and spies.
Behind all this treatment were the admonitions, warnings and condemnations that were levelled en bloc against the enemies. These solemn stances varied considerably, according to whether they were addressed to the Germans or the Fascists and, in the case of the latter, to army draftees or to volunteers of the Black Brigade, Muti, and so on. Orders issued by the CVL General Command and the CLNAI do not always tally with what was actually practised in single zones and by single formations. They were issued rather in the not always successful attempt to discipline widely divergent behaviour. In these documents, the Germans are, generally speaking, more bluntly named because all that could be asked of them was a pure and simple surrender, with the promise that they would be treated as prisoners-of-war and, in the final phase, handed over to the Allies.76 As we have had occasion to see, it was not an unfamiliar phenomenon for German troops to desert and go over ‘with arms and baggage to the side of the patriots’;77 but the trust that could be placed in such conduct was minimal, and the arguments that had prompted it inevitably less mordant than in the case of the Fascists. In the case of the Germans, rather, doubts were expressed, explicitly or implicitly, against war criminals, of whom the absolute need to punish was particularly insisted upon by the Actionists and Communists. On 27 March 1944 the CLNAI itself, denouncing the atrocities committed against the Italian soldiers interned in Germany, warned that those responsible would be executed as war criminals.78
At times a distinction was made between the German army and the SS; at other times the Germans were bracketed with the Fascist volunteer forces rather than the ‘regular’ ones, almost as it were to disqualify their army more effectively, reduced as it was by now to ‘a band of savages and predators’. In some cases even class appears as a discriminating factor, interwoven with a bias in favour of the Austrians. Thus the commander and commissar of a Pisacane brigade have no doubts about executing two ‘chiefs’, a captain and corporal ‘of Germanic nationality’; but for four soldiers ‘of Austrian nationality’, who were elderly and all ‘workers and peasants’, they proposed further distinctions. And they were thus inclined to shoot a tailor ‘with a petit bourgeois, arriviste and wait-and-see mentality’ who, coming from the Alto Adige, voted for Germany in the 1939 plebiscite and ‘can never be of any use to the people’, whereas, in agreement with ‘almost all the Garibaldini’, they intended to be clement with a second soldier who ‘is in a wretched physical condition and has clearly worked very hard’, with the third, Trentino in origin, who had become ‘a poor peasant of Austria’, and with the fourth, a bricklayer who ‘is our brother and the red partisans haven’t killed Italian workers either’.79
Behind the appeals – promises and threats – made to the Fascists lay a dual purpose. Above all they aimed at fostering the breakup of the enemy forces, by alternating the awesomeness of the punishments provided for with the offer of a way out for those who surrendered or mended their ways.80 The final manifesto, Arrendersi o perire! (surrender or perish!), declared: ‘May no one be able to say that, at death’s door, he was not warned and not offered an extreme and ultimate path to salvation’, and pointed out that, once disarmed, the soldiers of the RSI army would have to be allowed to go free, the Germans handed over to the Allies, and the Fascists of the Black Brigades, the Muti, etc. be ‘kept in conditions in which they can do no harm’.81 Again, on 22 April 1945 L’Unità published an appeal to the militiamen to desert and surrender their weapons as the only path to salvation: ‘Make up your minds, tomorrow will be too late!’
The second purpose was to give a priori endorsement to the physical elimination of Fascists and collaborationists who ‘have shown particular initiative and industry or in one way or another have acted in an executive capacity’. These were all condemned to death and their property confiscated; in the territories still occupied by the Nazi-Fascists ‘the patriotic and armed formations and the partisans, in the first place, are assigned the task of applying these orders, without any formalities’. Both in its Garibaldi brigade Command version, and in the subsequent CLNAI one, the decree blueprint from which these words are taken concludes with the invitation to the partisans to apply the orders without fail ‘as from today’ (‘as from now’).82 Neither of the decrees, however, forgot the first of the purposes mentioned above: they made exception for those who, compelled to collaborate with the enemy, had redeemed themselves by doing him damage with acts of sabotage and by collaborating with the patriotic forces.
On 14 February 1944, in reply to the proclamation issued by Guido Buffarini Guidi, minister of the interior, the CLNAI had already laid down: ‘All those who apply the proclamation of on-the-spot execution to patrioti volontari della libertà caught in the possession of arms will be deemed guilty of high treason against the patria and as such condemned to death. The criminals whom the justice of the patriotic armed formations fails to reach will be inflexibly judged tomorrow by the people’s tribunals.’83
In line with this, a GL newspaper wrote: ‘Let the partisan war tribunals condemn as from now the definite culprits, even those in hiding. Their execution is deferred to the Liberation, but will need no other judgment (which will, on the contrary, be necessary for the uncertain cases).’84
Directives of this kind clearly had a spin-off on the way prisoners were to be treated, once their membership of a certain category that had been condemned to death en bloc had been ascertained. In the forces of the left the tendency was to interpret these texts extensively, at times by following the words used in them to the letter. As we saw in the previous chapter, this could lead to at least some of the class enemies being included among the recipients of the warning and condemnation. A couple of months after 8 September, L’Unità wrote: ‘Those who, militarily or economically, actively or passively – functionaries, agents, soldiers – aid the enemy are to be outlawed from the nation and condemned to death’.85 Pursuing this path of widening the field of those who were punishable, the Tuscan edition of the same paper warned tradesmen against speculating on the misery of the population.86 When on 4 December 1944 the CLNAI issued a decree establishing a special war tax to be paid by ‘all well-to-do persons and organisations’, it stipulated that those who evaded were to be denounced ‘as traitors of the national cause to the patriots’ organs of justice which shall apply to them, by way of example, all those punitive sanctions which the organs themselves shall deem fit’.87 The Communist leadership interpreted these words as follows:
Naturally, it is not enough to send them [the industrialists] the extract of the CLN minutes: popular and partisan justice needs to proceed not only against the desperados of the black brigades, but also and principally against those old financiers and collaborators of Nazi-Fascism who by their refusal have made themselves definitively subject to the death penalty. This needs to be said and published, so that every patriot who has a weapon may know what to do if he meets them in the street.88
The ‘Directives’ for the insurrection issued by the PCI on 10 April 1945 give the following examples of traitors to be killed by the GAPs and SAPs: ‘Questori, commissars, high-ranking state and municipal officials, industrialists and technical managers of production subject to the Germans’.89
In this context the denunciations and warnings addressed to people by name acquired a particular intensity: ‘Prefect Mirabelli, your days are numbered!’ wrote L’Unità on 7 August 1944, including in its denunciation two engineers employed by Ilva, one of whom was defined as ‘diabolical’.90 One CLN, the Ligurian regional one, for its part, cautioned the procuratore generale (attorney general) for not having taken any action against the Fascists responsible for the murder of patriots held in the prisons.91 Even Radio London singled out individual Fascist personalities, reckoned to be war criminals, as targets.92 And in the French underground press lists of collaborationists to be executed are frequent.93
Clearly, these initiatives and stances should also be interpreted as indicators of the ideas that were taking shape over the question of purging. Their immediate effect was to contribute to creating a climate of struggle in which at times the fearsome tones of certain appeals of the First International were heard once again. A message addressed to the Fascists of Monzuno (Bologna), guilty of not having kept faith with the pact stipulated for an exchange of prisoners and for having, in reprisal, attacked ‘innocuous folk who were fighting only with their spades and hoes’, reads:
We warn you that our counter-measures will be terrible and with no half measures. Your destroyed possessions will illuminate with their flames the hour of the just punishment, your relatives killed regardless of sex or age will appease the just ire of those who, thanks to you, are weeping and dying today. Our reprisal will reach you wherever you may be, and no refuge, nor bodyguards, will avail to save you. Even at the ends of the earth we shall strike you.94
Compare this with the challenge launched in 1873 ‘alla Borghesia’ by neighbouring Rimini:
Be warned that in our hearts we have the idea of a vendetta which will be terrible and exemplary; the day will come in which you will know that we are again masters of our piazze. There will no longer be either grace or pity for the murderers of 1848 and 1871. We shall mow down your heads even if they are covered in white hair, and with the utmost calm. We shall have nothing but death to offer. Death for your mothers, for your fathers, for your relations, until your cursed race is completely destroyed. Goodbye shortly, lords of the bourgeoisie.95
The first general directives regarding the treatment of prisoners were issued by the CVL Command on 14 July 1944. These promised that ‘the lives will be saved of those who give themselves up and solemnly undertake to do no further damage to the patriotic formations and the Allied armies’, recommended that the promise of life ‘must on all accounts be kept, and recalled that the prisoners were to be treated with humanity. Rapid exchanges are supported not least as a means of getting around the difficulty of setting up concentration camps.’96
The corollary of this last circumstance was the lack of prisons for the criminals, and it was recalled by protagonists as different from one another as the restless Communist Elsa Oliva and the solid Christian Democrat Ermanno Gorrieri as a decisive fact proving the impracticability of a middle way between killing the prisoners, if they were held guilty of crimes, and letting them free.97 This line of argument was used to criticise the commander of the 3rd Garibaldi Liguria division, the Catholic Bisagno, who was ‘reluctant about executions’, when he should be convinced instead that the prisoners have immediately either to be sentenced by the tribunal and shot, or released.98 ‘Absolution or death’ would be the conclusion reached even by the partisans of the Garibaldi division Pinan Cichero.99
In the final decree of 19 April 1945 regarding the surrender of the Nazi-Fascist formations, a distinction was made between simple soldiers in compulsory service, redrafted or conscripted, who, once they had been disarmed, were to be set free, and their officers and NCOs, who should instead be interned, on a par with all the members of the Black Brigades, the Muti, the GNR, the Decima Mas, the police corps, the paracadutisti, and so on.100
In the twenty months of struggle, the treatment actually given to the prisoners was not only not completely in line with the directives just recorded, but revealed a remarkable variety of profound attitudes and motivations. ‘The treatment that the partisan bands are to give captured Fascists … has been discussed. There are those who are asking for the “Yugoslav” system to be introduced, but the majority are against this’, Revelli noted very early on.101 More closely argued doubts appear in another diary, concerning a prisoner who is nonetheless defined as ‘a vile being’:
I am troubled by the idea that he might be killed. How pleased I am that I didn’t capture him! Thinking of the possible end that awaited him, I would have let him escape. One can kill in battle, but not in cold blood. Perhaps it is no fault of his that he is who he is, because life is a terrible mystery: who destroys a mystery without having got to know it?
Before being shot, this prisoner, the diary page goes on to say, ‘addressed a fellow villager, asking him to say good-bye to his wife for him, and the latter replied: “You must be crazy if you think I’m going to do a scoundrel like you a favour.” This is what war turns men into; the ancients were right when they said that civil wars are far crueller than external ones.’102
A Garibaldino political commissar, acting in close contact with ‘Yugoslav-type systems’, has since written:
I don’t know whether all my comrades felt as I did, but every time someone was to be judged, I always asked myself how on earth I could judge another, who had given me the right, who had authorised me to sentence another to death, to take the life of a human being who had not done me any direct harm.
The answer the commissar gives himself ‘after painful torment’ – though he recognises how ‘the profession of killing is a horrible profession’ – appeals to the impelling value of experience: ‘Ve
ry often we were too generous and this later cost the lives of many comrades, because after letting go individuals who with their tears had convinced us of their innocence, we were then attacked by Germans guided by these very same men’.103
‘We had no other means of defending ourselves; there weren’t any prisons, we couldn’t hold him’, a woman partisan recounts; and adds:
So it was a real problem putting together the firing squad. I remember that later I came across one of the lads from the squad, who was a very dear friend of mine. He was looking at his hands and saying to me: ‘But Trottolina [Tersilla Fenoglio Oppedisano], would you still marry a man who has killed another one? I’ve fired with these hands, and I’ve killed a man!’
Trotollina’s reply combines the criteria of obedience and justice: ‘Take it easy, I’d marry him all the same, because you carried out an order which at this moment is highly moral’.104 The difficulty of finding people to carry out the sentences was very widespread: ‘The lads shuffled off as if to say: “But I haven’t come into the mountains to do this sort of thing”.’105
There was, then, a clash between appeals to force of circumstance and the goodness of the cause, but at the same time perplexity about the acts to be performed considered in themselves.106 Other doubts appear about the methods of execution; but in matters of that sort methods and forms often redound back to the substance. Writing about roundups in Val d’Ossola, a partisan chief says: ‘If I’d had my way, I’d have eliminated the prisoners, but that was impossible by now since it would have been extremely dangerous to shoot, thereby announcing our presence. Besides, none of us felt capable of killing with our bare hands some thirty prisoners like chicken, without causing wailing and moaning.’107 Or again: ‘Could you bring yourself to cut the throats of nine men with a knife?’108
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