A Civil War (15 page)

Beyond remaining loyal to or abjuring both old oaths and institutions and new commitments, treason came to acquire meanings that no longer, or not only, regarded the power system, however conceived, but also and above all in reference to the system of human solidarity, of people's deepest affections and convictions. On the local scale, ‘a whole dense web of ties' had formerly united the partisans not just to one another but also to their Fascist enemies, and all of a sudden ‘each, reciprocally, had become a traitor in the other's eyes'.
⁷⁵
‘Traitor' was, in short, becoming a label to pin on those who, like the Fascists, refused to collaborate in the reconstruction of a profound system of human solidarity, and indeed were doing their level best to nip it in the bud.

But within the Resistance groups themselves, suspicions of betrayal could reappear, contrasting with the idealised compactness of the group itself, reiterated possibly in the very act of oath-taking – suspicions both of those who seemed to deny that compactness and of other groups. As we shall see, this process appeared most evident in the relations between the Communists and the groups to their left, and found classic expression in Pietro Secchia's article ‘Il sinistrismo maschera della Gestapo'.
⁷⁶
But the Third Internationalists were not the only ones to ‘paint their adversaries as traitors'.
⁷⁷
The temptation to do so could nest within the same fraternal bond uniting the
resistenti
as such. Terror may indeed bud from fraternity, and ‘the magic power of the taboo of betrayal' spread ‘to those who break it'.
⁷⁸
This helps account for the great fear of betraying, particularly under torture, felt by many
resistenti
. To save himself from this danger, Luciano Bolis cut his throat in prison, thereby succeeding in severing his vocal cords.
⁷⁹
To this day a Mauthausen deportee recalls: ‘In a certain sense I felt freer because at least I no longer had this anxiety' – namely of betraying.
⁸⁰
It should be added that the Italian Resistance was less afflicted by such degenerative processes than other Resistance movements, such as the Yugoslav, the Greek and the French. In Italy, affinity between certain basic ethical and existential attitudes and unity as a main political line probably managed better to help each other out on this score.

The
resistenti
frequently felt rage against ‘those who have betrayed us'. ‘Che Dio maledica chi ci ha tradito/portandoci sul Don e poi è fuggito' (‘God curse those who betrayed us/leading us to the Don and then escaping'), ran
Pietà l'è morta
, one of the most intense partisan songs. This was one of the ways in which the revolt of a generation was expressed against the regime brought up under and against the ruling class that had dragged them into war. The accusation feeding this revolt cannot be seen exclusively in terms of betrayal; but betrayal does help explain the label ‘traitor' when it is attributed not only to the Fascists, but also, as we have seen, to the king, Badoglio and the Germans themselves.

‘Betrayal', ‘loyalty', ‘honour' and the like frequently figure in the propaganda and journalism of the Social Republic, but also in the letters of the fallen Fascists. For many of them, too, the point of departure seems to be the ‘apocalyptic
devastation of 8 September',
⁸¹
the reaction to the fact that men ‘have flung their consciences in the mud and become mere wrecks'.
⁸²
But 8 September, as we have seen, remained in the minds of the Fascists as a nightmare,
⁸³
a baffling offence. The letter of a sixteen-year-old member of the Republican National Guard, written to his mother, expresses this sense of a catastrophe from which one is trying to emerge, only to become more and more ensnared; and it is worth quoting a passage from it at length, where the memory of 8 September serves to reconfirm the boy's reasons for his choice in response to the emotion provoked by the wounded Italian enemy:

But who and what, for the Fascist combatants, should not have been betrayed? One might answer, with a pat formula: above all a past with which they could identify only in terms of mechanical continuity. It was a past partly lived at first hand, partly imagined, as seems to be the case with the very young joining up for the first time, often invoking loyalty to their father, ‘Italian and Fascist',
⁸⁵
and to an Italy ‘which you older combatants have entrusted to us, to maintain her prestige and her honour'.
⁸⁶
Loyalty to the oath itself gained force above all in this context; and there is a whole category of Fascists whose oath to the Duce as an institution was unquestionably influenced by the charismatic figure of the Duce, even when, as things now stood, he came across as the object of at least momentary but always affectionate pity: ‘Poor Duce, what a change
has come upon him!' wrote a soldier who had had the honour of sitting at table with him, and who immediately continues: ‘The Man he was, robust, authoritarian, is no longer recognisable; what he has suffered in these months must have been indescribable for Him who loved Italy so much and had given everything for her. Now, however, he has gathered … new energy and with his will, which is made of iron, is reconstructing our Italy anew.'
⁸⁷

A paratrooper of the Folgore Division sent his mother his medallion of the Duce so that she would always wear it on her breast as a reminder of him.
⁸⁸
We shall be returning to the myth of Mussolini betrayed. Suffice it to record for the time being that Mussolini really did appear, paradoxically and somewhat grotesquely, as the most betrayed of all Italians. ‘Pisenti, we've been betrayed by the Germans and by the Italians', was how the Duce summed it up to his minister of justice, on returning from his visit to the archbishop's palace, when the final catastrophe was well and truly under way.
⁸⁹

Among the republican Fascists there were also those intent on demonstrating the illegality of the Badoglio government, as a basis for their conduct,
⁹⁰
and those, by contrast, who wished to vindicate ‘the act of will of which all the soldiers of the Italian Social Republic are justly proud'. These words conclude a passage dedicated to admirals Mascherpa and Campioni, who were shot by the Fascists because they had obeyed orders to oppose the Germans: the two admirals ‘could have rebelled but there is no juridical thesis that can demonstrate that they were obliged to do so'.
⁹¹

The right to rebel against the order to betray was invoked by Major Mario Rizzatti to justify his own conduct: ‘The regulation of discipline establishes that all orders are to be obeyed save one: which is, if one's superior commands one to betray one's country. Often, speaking to the whole assembled battalion, I would illustrate, with imaginary examples, this duty of non-obedience, hinting that sooner or later it would have to be applied.'
⁹²

According to the Fascists, those who above all were not to be betrayed were the Germans, ‘to whom we are tied by a pact, a war fought together. And this out of loyalty and a sense of honour, independently of any sentimentalism and practical interest.'
⁹³
We are united to the Germans, another letter reads, by ‘sworn
faith, friendship cemented by blood in a hundred engagements'.
⁹⁴
More dryly, another Fascist wrote: ‘I started with an enemy, I must finish against the same enemy.'
⁹⁵

A Fascist (later a member of the Movimento Sociale Italiano) gave this dignified testimony:

An interpreter in the employ of the Germans replied to the internees who complained about the treatment being meted out to them, that it was ‘good and what you deserve, given that we had betrayed them'.
⁹⁷

As the Fascists saw it, the war dead were not to be betrayed.
⁹⁸
Here mechanical continuity with the past is particularly evident, especially if compared with the effect that insistence on the same need had on so many other fighting men who joined the Resistance. In the Fascists, this need sometimes assumed the guise of a desire for physical and close-range revenge. ‘I cannot follow those who have killed a brother whom I must avenge at all costs',
⁹⁹
one letter reads; and another: ‘For what reason did I join up? Because I have a brother asking to be avenged, who was killed by our enemies, by our dear “Liberators”.'
¹⁰⁰
At times, Fascist fidelity to the war even transcends fidelity to the dead. It might be a question of a ‘perennial and metaphysical war', or a war which is ‘like a disease'.
¹⁰¹
In these ‘combatants of all wars', human solidarity appears to have stiffened into virile camaraderie.

At other times the Fascists seem to be banging their heads against the wall, dismayed and furious at what appeared to be a ‘war fought in vain … a war of few, betrayed by many [and which all the same] is my whole life'.
¹⁰²
Indeed, rife among the Fascist combatants too was the sensation of being victims of a profound and obscure swindle, of which the wicked 8 September was but a partial manifestation. They saw the traitor not in Fascism but in those who had betrayed Fascism, all the worse if the latter were Fascists and, as such, unpardonable: ‘Betrayed ideas cannot welcome back the traitors with open arms.'
¹⁰³

These Fascists thought that the Social Republic was the last opportunity to rediscover the purity that had been sullied by the Fascism of the
ventennio
. A man who had asked to enlist in the republican army wrote from Germany that he wanted to fight ‘for the
patria
and the idea', and that he was certain he would find ‘real men', who were not ‘used only to cheering, flag-waving, uniforms of every ilk, as before, and to which the men of the past regime had accustomed us, but men who said little, but who were ready to take up arms to wash away the dishonour with which we have been stained by the traitors who have sold themselves to the enemy'.
¹⁰⁴
‘We are few but healthy', says another letter explaining the reasons for joining the republican Fascist party;
¹⁰⁵
and a naval lieutenant declared that ‘all in all the party has gained' by ridding itself ‘of the dead wood of opportunists'.
¹⁰⁶

Carlo Emanuele Basile, the Genoese provincial chief, boasted to the SS Command that ‘the shame of betrayal can only be washed out in the blood of a well-trained minority who show that not all Italians are servile in spirit'.
¹⁰⁷
In a private letter, a republican National Guard militiaman rejoiced at the idea of
taking revenge on the traitors with fire and the sword.
¹⁰⁸
Major Mario Carità refused to allow a condemned man to be shot in the breast rather than the back: ‘No, you are a traitor, you have fought against your country in the ranks of the red militias, and must die as traitors die.'
¹⁰⁹
On the same occasion, the brother, also a Fascist officer, of Lieutenant Colonel Gobbi, for whose killing there was a reprisal, abused the victims thus: ‘Cowards, let them thank God they died in daylight; my brother was killed last night treacherously, at the street corner on his way home after doing his duty.'
¹¹⁰
Here things seem to come full circle: traitors can only strike ‘treacherously'.

Even those who almost boast about pitching Italy – warring Italy – against Fascism seem to be convinced of the need to take revenge on traitors: ‘I am a twenty-one-year-old son of Italy. I belong neither to Graziani nor to Badoglio but I am Italian: and I am following the path that will save the honour of Italy.'
¹¹¹

But among the republican Fascists there were those who felt the need to reject the accusation that it was they who were the traitors. A republican National Guard militiaman wrote to his children that their father ‘has been neither a coward nor a traitor but one of the few who have kept an oath that they swore, without ever having had anything in compensation'.
¹¹²
And even a ‘Muti' was to implore: ‘Look at me, mamma, I'm your son, your Dante: I haven't sold myself, I'm not a turncoat, I'm not a traitor. I'm your son.'
¹¹³

But since this book has referred constantly, though at times only implicitly, to the war waged from 10 June 1940 to 8 September 1943, we would do well, at this point, to take a direct look at that period.