A Civil War (12 page)

Even if the Nazi–Fascist defeat was a rationally and authoritatively justified prediction, with the Italian
resistenti
it acquired the force of a self-fulfilling prophecy. This faith in victory was ‘the linchpin of the new, as yet poor, symbolic system that was coming about, largely through interpersonal communication and clandestine public opinion'.
¹¹¹

On the other hand, chancing one's luck only on the duration of the struggle, even if in the first few months it was reckoned that it would be shorter than it turned out to be, did not mean that you were not putting your life at risk. On the contrary, to die without savouring the fruit of a now imminent victory could be still more heartbreaking. Thus, predicting his fate, Artom wrote: ‘It seems to me bitter indeed to have certain victory in sight, but to seem unable to seize it and enjoy it because death makes off with us and takes us far away.'
¹¹²

Many
resistenti
felt the sense of a recovery that was still possible for themselves and for Italy. Foa wrote: ‘From a profound and long-term point of view
the German occupation is a great boon for Italy … In fact, it has befallen Italy to have the sad privilege not, like the other European peoples, to have lived the full destructive experience of the war.'
¹¹³
And the Action Party newspaper: ‘We no longer need to sneak out at night and stealthily write: “Long live the heroic Danes”: we too are like them, like the French, the Belgians, the Dutch, like the Yugoslavs and the Greeks, like the Czechs and the Poles.'
¹¹⁴
The Garibaldino commander Ferdinando Mautino says much the same when he recalls that he and those like him made their choice in the spirit of the PCI Italian Communist Party (PCI) call-to-arms – ‘Only with a gun in our hands against the enemy do we feel that we are still men and that we are reaffirming our humanity and dignity' – but independently of that appeal, ‘which we would know only by taking action'.
¹¹⁵

Dante Livio Bianco recognised in himself ‘the great joy of having finally been able to pass from a theoretical position to a practical position'.
¹¹⁶
It was the same joy, Bianco recalls, that the founder of Giustiza e Libertà, Carlo Rosselli, had manifested on arriving in Spain. In the veteran anti-Fascists, the redemption was from humiliations such as had been suffered by the socialist Filippo Turati, old and exiled, when the public prosecutor for the Seine had asked him: ‘Mais, expliquez-moi, monsieur le député, comment donc se fait-il que l'Italie ne se révolte pas?'
¹¹⁷
In 1943 the moment seemed well and truly to have come ‘to start over again from scratch', as Claudio Treves, another great exile, had said to the young Giorgio Amendola.
¹¹⁸

The very fact of being the last to get there, with so heavy a burden on one's shoulders, made the Italian
resistenti
particularly sensitive to the problems of a future that was not to limit itself to defeating the Germans. ‘Gagner la guerre et gagner la paix' was the formula used by the newspaper founded in France by Silvio Trentin to sum up the problem.
¹¹⁹
In that newspaper, there were contemptuous
attacks against ‘new fair-weather patriots' against ‘last-minute workers', against all those who ‘follow the chariot of victory, regardless of the driver, whether Hitler, Churchill, Roosevelt or Stalin'. When he subsequently took part in the Italian Resistance, Trentin certainly did not consider himself to be part of this ‘surging and roaring tide that lifts the mounted trophy of Victory'. He probably felt that the short time remaining to Italy to prove herself demanded a still greater commitment, before the star of victory cast its light also on the eleventh-hour apprentices.

The problem of political morality that the Italians had to face most immediately was that of betrayal. All the parties involved bandied around accusations of betrayal. In fact, ‘no one wants to appear as a traitor' but all ‘are firmly convinced that traitors exist and that they must be punished in the most severe way possible: preferably with death'.
¹

In the situation in Italy following 8 September 1943, the accusations of betrayal from opposing sides bounced back and forth, interwove and contaminated one another in various ways, because all of them, or almost all, contained some fragments of truth. On the other hand, everyone seemed to be possessed by a ‘need of great treasons' against which to salve themselves.
²
The result of this was that the semantic field of the word was greatly extended. If from the point of view of Italian positive law treason was only a military offence,
³
the events overwhelming Italy and Europe went well beyond the terrain of soldiers and their rules of conduct. The balance in the dialectic of freedom and bonds had dissolved – if indeed it had ever existed – as ‘unavoidable dependence' was ‘transferred more and more to the periphery, to the externals of life'.
⁴
Bonds, which the totalitarian regimes and the war had wished to be all-inclusive, either plummeted or became still more exclusive; and, on the other hand, in order to get a hearing, the freedom to appeal only to one's own conscience had to take the form of absolute intransigence. The accusations of treason became both drastic and multivalent; but at the same time ‘the good use of treason' once again came to exert its fascination.

Polybius, going over to the Romans, had written that ‘those who decide freely to come to terms with kings or dynasties and to cooperate with them' are not traitors, nor is anyone who organises an overturning of alliances. Polybius had difficulty, however, answering the question of ‘who should really be considered a traitor'. In the struggle between resistance fighters and collaborationists things, on the contrary, became clear-cut: a group of French Jewish resistance fighters, supporters of Irgun, reopened the trial against Flavius Josephus, and condemned him to death as a collaborationist with the Romans and a traitor.
⁵
A popular poet from Terni inveighed against ‘those who are always traitors! (the bosses, the Fascists, the powerful);
⁶
a Fascist we have already come across, possibly recalling the song of the Piave' – ‘ma in a notte triste si parlò di tradimento' (‘but one sad night we spoke of betrayal') – now wrote: ‘In this war everything is betrayal, nothing but betrayal.'
⁷

The people about whom opinions converged most generally, albeit for different motives, in branding them as traitors were the king and Badoglio. They appeared so to the Germans, the Fascists, the majority of the
resistenti
, and a sizable number of the internees in Germany, wary though the latter were, for understandable reasons, of voicing this opinion openly. To the Allies they appeared at the very least as useful weathervanes, who seemed to be reviving the age-old habit the Savoys had of never concluding a war on the same side they had begun it on – unless, as was also said, they had changed front twice. In its 6 May 1944 Rome edition,
Avanti!
wrote: ‘The Savoys can't possibly overturn the alliances as they did in the eighteenth century.' As for the Germans, it was obvious that they should regard the king and Badoglio as traitors. Above all, there had been that rash sentence inserted in the proclamation Badoglio launched immediately after 25 July: ‘Italy will keep faith with the word it has given, a jealous custodian of its millenary traditions!' If the intention behind the second part of this sentence had been to hint at a sibylline and almost comic mental reservation, now it appeared only as exacerbating the
volte-face
.

‘This is breaking your word', said Rudolf von Rahn, who was in charge of German affairs in Rome, to Foreign Minister Raffaele Guariglia, who, at 7 p.m. on 8 September, came to announce the Armistice to him.
⁸
‘The more deceived the German troops and leadership were, the harsher the reaction was', General Alfred Jodl later said.
⁹
On 10 September Josef Goebbels wrote in his diary
that the German people, ‘abler and more clairvoyant than its government', had always distrusted the Italians.
¹⁰
In his verdict of betrayal, Goebbels thus engulfed the whole Italian people; and he then laid it on thick: ‘The Italians, through their infidelity and treachery, have lost any right to be a modern national state. They must be punished with the utmost severity, as the laws of history impose.'
¹¹

It has been rightly observed that the German reaction stemmed from the fact that they expected absolute ‘vassalic loyalty' on the part of their Italian ally,
¹²
who had therefore made themselves guilty of treason (‘maresciallo fellone' was indeed one of the phrases used most widely to describe Badoglio). As the war had gradually taken a turn for the worse, Italian protests of ‘fidelity' to Germany
¹³
had been reiterated, without the Germans feeling the slightest need to offer corresponding reassurances. But the arrogance of the master left his vassal no other ‘freedom' except to betray him by going over to the enemy. The Germans' reluctance (at least until Kuby's recent book)
¹⁴
to consider themselves, essentially, as traitors to the Italians probably lies in this idea: a vassal can betray his master; but that the master can betray the vassal, is, for the master, a nonsensical proposition.

But, in any case, whatever the underlying convictions might have been, the distinction between the treacherous leaders and the Italian people who were themselves the victims of betrayal was too pragmatically useful not to be resorted to by the Germans. And in fact the Germans lost no time in inviting the Italians to disassociate themselves from the traitors; but they did this with a crudity that magnified the contradictions of that invitation and made the chances still scarcer of its finding mass acceptance.

‘It is evident what path you must follow', was how one of the first German appeals, broadcast widely by radio, rounded off: ‘Leave the traitors, and come along with your German comrades.'
¹⁵
It is curious how little aware the Germans
seemed to be that, if there was one word at that moment that repelled the great majority of Italians, and particularly the officers and soldiers to whom the appeal was primarily addressed, it was ‘camarata' (‘comrade'); and even if this might have been a hasty translation of a word with less extensive Fascist connotations in German, the fact remains that they ought nonetheless to have realised how it sounded to the ears of the Italians they were addressing. Probably the writers and inspirers of that proclamation were capable only of showing that they seriously believed the thesis whereby the Italians were all honest comrades, whom only betrayal had snatched away from their German allies. Besides, it was true to German tradition to interpret defeats and setbacks as acts of betrayal by many or few. Contempt for the Italians is, in any case, revealed in the passage in the appeal where it was promised that ‘like the German soldiers you too will be well fed, paid and treated'.

The Germans themselves and, obviously, the Fascists of the Social Republic were not the only ones to brand the king and Badoglio as traitors of the Germans. Anti-Fascists like Gaetano Salvemini had no doubts on this score: ‘The king has committed an act of perfidy and betrayal, even if it has been committed against a bandit like Hitler: a rascal does not become a gentleman when he betrays another rascal.'
¹⁶
Even
La Voce Repubblicana
didn't mince words in calling the king's conduct towards Germany betrayal – the last link in a chain begun by Charles Albert when, in 1821, he had betrayed the Carbonari.
¹⁷
Then again, more than a year later, in a letter to Piero Calamandrei, Salvemini gave his view of things in political terms that were widely shared by the Resistance:

It is notable that the ghost of the changing of sides of 1915 – the ‘giro di valzer' (‘deviation from foreign policy') – which certainly fluttered around the ex-revolutionary interventionist Benito Mussolini in spring 1940, returned to the mind of the ex–democratic interventionist Gaetano Salvemini in 1943–44.

Incapable even of ‘betraying well' was Silvio Trentin's verdict on the Savoy family and the ‘re gaglioffo' (‘good-for-nothing king'): ‘Now, always, invariably, throughout history, the Savoys have excelled not in the vile shamelessness of their oath-breaking, but rather in their shameful and perfidious cowardice.' Trentin levelled at the monarchy an accusation that bore the clear mark of the Resistance: that of having prevented 8 September from ‘being transformed into a triumphal and redemptive day of resurrection'.
¹⁹
In the same spirit, the draft of an article for an underground paper accused Badoglio of having given ‘that abandonment of Germany the character of a calculated act of treachery when it could have expressed the revolt of an entire people against an alliance that they had never wanted'.
²⁰
This sense of a golden opportunity degraded to base intrigue may help us understand attitudes such as that of a Venetian gentleman who relates how he ‘went up to a German and shook his hand, without saying a word, in a fit of disgust at what he saw going on'.
²¹