Authors: Claudio Pavone
On the part of the law that imposes it, the execution must be clamorous, it must be observed by everyone, rather as its triumph. The very excess of the violence exercised is one of the elements of its glory â¦Â Hence, without doubt, those tortures that go on after death: corpses burned, ashes thrown to the wind, bodies dragged on trellises, and exhibited on the roadsides.
127
In another key, Thompson speaks of the public executions as a theatre aimed at generating the âterror of the example'; and, comparing the sophisticated resources available, for this purpose, to the contemporary state and those of the eighteenth-century state, adds that the latter had to resort âto forms of increasing the terror against transgressors' by insulting the corpses in ways that âdeliberately struck at popular taboos'.
128
The republican Fascist state found itself compelled by its weakness to regress to these ancient forms of ostentation of their capacity to punish.
âAny cyclist or pedestrian caught circulating in the territory in the possession of firearms without the authorisation of the competent authorities will be shot on the spot', ran a proclamation by Armando Rocchi, head of the province of Perugia.
129
The words âsul posto' (âon the spot') indicated both the immediacy and the visibility of the punishment. As we shall see better presently, this formula and this practice were to become widely used and would be adopted by the partisans too when they wanted to demonstrate that they knew how to punish those among them who stepped seriously out of line. Thus the âprovisions in the case of occupations of villages and towns issued by a command' establish: âthe death penalty will be inflicted by means of shooting in the back on all Garibaldini caught in the act and guilty of private violence, theft, vandalism. The execution is to take place in public in the same place where the offence is committed.'
130
Or again: âThe corpse of the executed man has been left with a card on his breast bearing the following words: “Executed by the partisans because unworthy of belonging to their ranks. Reason: rape and robbery”.'
131
The Fascists, though holders of so much vaunted power, had a paroxysmal fear of not being taken seriously, and this fear drove them to imitate and outdo the Germans in the practice of reprisals. The
podestÃ
and political secretary of Saluzzo insisted on the Germans shooting six hostages, and the secretary said that he wanted the town to have a âChristmas of blood'.
132
âAll the soldiers stationed in Florence were to be made to see with our own eyes that one was not joking', recounts one of them who was forced to witness the
shooting of five draft-dodgers.
133
âThis will be your end', said the Fascists to a captured partisan, pointing to his comrades who were hanging from the gallows.
134
And we have already recalled Farinacci's comment on the Ferrara massacres.
When presently we come to examine the theme of reprisals, we shall return to the real significance of the exemplary effect of these bloody spectacles. What needs registering here are the disturbing effects they had on the minds of those who were compelled to witness or even collaborate in them. In the Florence episode recalled above, the conscripts who had been pressed into the firing squad and had fired at the victims, if only minimally, so that it had become necessary for the orderly officer to use his revolver,
sometimes regarded themselves as voluntary perpetrators of that massacre, sometimes as victims of the officers' high-handedness. They yelled, wept and often woke up suddenly in the night crying âno, no' or repeating the same cries as the executed. They would appeal to their mothers, say that they did not want to die, let out yells of terror and invocations of help.
135
A prisoner aware that his end was nigh said to one of his comrades: âHanging leaves an ugly memory for those who remain.'
136
The specific and, intentionally, infamous horror of hanging lies in the fact that rifles and machine-guns are weapons, while the gallows is not. Hanging cannot therefore even simulate the final act of a combat engagement. It is telling that the hanging of two of the leading and most detested local
gerarchi
in Turin, immediately after the Liberation, had to be authorised by the governing regional council ânotwithstanding the provisions in force'.
137
Hanging, moreover, lay utterly outside that personal relationship that a weapon creates in combatants. This relationship was felt particularly intensely by the Fascists, being part of their culture, but it can also be found in the partisans:
Ma la mitragliatrice non la lascio
Gridò ferito il legionario al passo
Grondava sangue al conteso sasso
Il costato che a Cristo somigliò
Ma la mitragliatrice non la lascio
E l'arma bella a un tratto lo lasciò.
[The machine-gun I will not abandon
Cried the wounded legionnaire at the pass
As his blood poured on the contested stone
The machine-gun I will not abandon
but the beautiful weapon he did leave behind.]
â ran a verse of the legionary's song.
138
After 8 September this value attributed to one's weapon became still more exclusive in the Fascists:
We had witnessed the collapse of an army, we had seen weapons rejected, dispersed, become useless overnight, faint-hearted, worthless. They had acquired a mythical value in our imaginations â¦Â The more patent the unreality of that war became, and little by little the more confused the aims, the motivations of that life, the more we clung to our weapons as the only thing in which we could recognise ourselves â¦Â It became a kind of fetishism.
139
In the partisans a wider and less clear-cut range of attitudes can be observed, running from shame and trembling at handling an instrument of death for the first time, to attractions of an ambiguous kind: from satisfaction at finally being able to fight as equals, to pride at having done so thanks to the weapons captured from the enemy. The many controversies about the Allied airdrops and the distribution of weapons raining down from the sky may be explained in these terms as well.
A Garibaldini commander distributed the much longed-for submachine Stens to his men, and noted in his diary: âI don't know quite how to put it, but in their eyes I can see a light that I shall never forget again'.
140
And Ada Gobetti: âThey were a bit riled at the order to hand over their weapons to me (the almost amorous jealousy these boys have for the weapons is curious).'
141
The Gappist Franco Calamandrei, describing the attack on the Flora hotel in Rome, occupied by the Germans, recalled: âHaving torn off the paper in which my rifle was wrapped I put it on the window-sill there in front of me. It was again a pleasant, reassuring sensation placing that metallic solidity on the solid surface of the marble.'
142
It was at the moment of the final surrender of weapons that these feelings were to prove particularly powerful, in the form of disappointment, but mixed with hope in those weapons that had, instead, been hidden. A Terni partisan recounts: âThat clause about surrendering weapons was immediately applied, but arrogantly. I remember how painful some partisans found it to part with their weapons'.
143
In Belluno, the scene of the disarmament is described in the following way:
Disarmament at the barracks took place with great pomp, great eulogies and declarations of gratitude that were never to be forgotten. The partisan was laying down his machine-gun, his Sten, his rifle, and with his weapon he was prostrating his soul. For months his weapon had been his faithful daytime and nighttime companion, in her he had placed all his trust for twenty months. In that weapon which now he had to give up and in whose hands he already knew where it would end up, for twenty years he had seen the key to his freedom. The moral shock was very violent and found expression in forms of distrust of democracy, of disorientation and often of useless rebellion.
144
Mirroring this love for one's weapons was the frequent manifestation of reluctance or even repugnance about using them. Here I do not mean those who had chosen not to participate, but those who had openly taken sides. This was particularly true with the women, for whom the age-old affirmation of difference seemed, in that emergency situation, to be summed up in the choice between shooting and not shooting. The problem is present even among the Fascist women auxiliaries, who were not allowed by regulations to use cosmetics, smoke or bear arms, for the use of which they were to train only for legitimate defence: a conjunction of prohibitions which nicely symbolises Fascism's contradictory attitude to the objective of militarising the âexemplary wives and mothers'.
145
A female auxiliary, shortly before being shot in Turin on 30 April 1945, wrote in her last letter, which still bore the Fascist-era date: âI know that I have not shed blood: this comforts me in these last moments.'
146
But another, on the eve of the final catastrophe, had written to her mother: âAll I do is wash piles of plates, bed linen, sew, tidy the rooms we sleep in and deal with all the office work, telephone left, right and centre, decipher coded messages'; and had added
with satisfaction that âthe boys' called her âtheir little sister' and the commander âwho is very nice and is pleased with us' had promised to take them in turns up to the front line. When, however, she puts on the camouflaged uniform, this woman feels like âa real clown', though she does then pick up: âI finally feel in my element.'
147
A Red Cross nurse, after expressing the hope that âthose cursed rebels all croak', wrote:
You know, when they go out on the roundups I always try to sneak in too. The other day I went with papa [who had asked to enlist in the SS] â I was so happy, you know. The soldiers are always saying I shouldn't because I bring bad luck (Red Cross nurses must stay at home) but I, you know â¦Â when I can I go.
148
The reactions of the anti-Fascist men and women to the appearance of the bush-jacketed Fascist women-soldiers ranged from vulgar jibes depicting the auxiliaries as ugly and unfitted for the kinds of combat that best suited their sex to the more thoughtful ones which started from the observation that they enlisted even though they were not obliged to do so, and concluded that âthe women of the Republic are demonstrating this today: that a certain female energy exists, only it hasn't been guided and directed'.
149
Even the partisans were not so easily convinced that women could and indeed had to shoot. A very impassioned letter written by an imprisoned Communist (âand then I will take revenge because an idea is an idea') reads: âThere is no legitimate pretext for a lack of weapons; there are weapons for everyone, children, men and old men', but says nothing about women.
150
They had rather discarded me, insofar as we're women, the usual problem. So I escaped, reached the hillock where they were. I remember I was wearing a light blue sweater and they all shouted âdown' at me, because with a light blue sweater, in full daylight â¦Â I didn't even know that there were any arms at my home. Then â in those days, the world was very different, and in the period I was with them, I saw
how they cleaned them, I had my own little revolver which I didn't give to anyone â¦Â I tried it out, it worked well. There were wounded, dead, but whether I was the artificer, I can't say.
151
In this account by a Terni woman partisan shooting at the enemy is seen, despite the distancing that comes at the end, a challenge won (including the pale blue sweater) not least over one's own comrades. The climate of partisan life â âgo, shoot and escape, right?' â is directly expressed by this other testimony:
The commander was very wary; he said that women were most useful at home. At first I was worried because I was afraid of not being up to it. In short, it seemed to me to be more a man's job than a woman's, but, finding myself having to and then seeing that there was no way out â¦Â Yes, I was proud â¦Â At first, I wasn't.
152
âI should have been born a man' is how one woman sums up her regret at not having participated actively in the Resistance.
153
A case in some respects extreme, but in others exemplary, is that of Elsa Oliva. A rebellious girl, she escaped from home at the age of fourteen. In Ortisei, during the war, she quarrelled with the inhabitants of Upper Adige to defend the good name of the Italian soldier. After 8 September in Bolzano she witnessed the first acts of violence against the Italians and âfrom that moment I understood that all I could do was kill them, the Germans. The choice came immediately.' She was convinced that âthe liberation struggle was a complete non-experience, a complete invention'. She blew up with a bomb the automobile containing the fiancée of a friend of hers at whom, to obtain permission to enter the barracks, she had âmade eyes'.
154
When, in Maderno, she saw the âmugs' of âall those Fascists', she said to herself: âThere are not only the Germans to bump off, there are the Fascists too.' She made her way to the partisans of the Valtoce division, commanded by the anti-Communist Catholic, regular lieutenant Alfredo Di Dio â a curious choice, dictated no doubt by the fact that they were
autonomi
, a name that must have made them appear more in line with her expectations. But she was then compelled to recognise that, if it had not been for the reaction of her men, the
clero
(clergy) would have had her removed from the command of
the unit assigned to her. Indeed, if they had had their way, the Valtoce leaders would have made her only a dispatch-rider and nurse. But she âwanted to shoot, take part in the engagements', and replied: