In Axis countries the people’s war was fought in darkness behind the doors of the torture chamber.
By Donny Gluckstein
British Historian
Edinburgh College
Germany
Conservatives and Antifa
Three million Germans became political prisoners during Hitler’s reign, and many tens of thousands died. As one writer puts it, ‘These numbers reveal the potential for popular resistance in German society – and what happened to it.’1
Some establishment figures, who shared a common class and political position to Allied governments, took the road of resistance, but the sort of problems they faced were revealed during the Czechoslovak crisis of 1938. Fearing the Führer would start an unwinnable global war, influential conservative conspirators including the Army’s Commander-in-Chief plotted to arrest him. They were confident there could be ‘no possibility of a hitch’ to their plan just so long as Britain and France were willing to stand up to Hitler.2 These two countries were duly informed of the conspiracy.
Alas, neither was in a mood to have the German Chancellor deposed. Sir Neville Henderson, Britain’s ambassador in Berlin, wrote that Hitler had ‘achieved gigantic progress in the military, industrial, and moral reorganisation of Germany’.3 He regarded Czech objections to Hitler’s aggression as being on ‘uncertain moral ground’4 because the Nazis were merely ‘consummating at long last the unity of Greater Germany’.5 Above all, Henderson wanted a strong Germany to hold back communism: ‘Moscow’s chief aim was to embroil Germany and the Western Powers in a common ruin and to emerge as the tertius gaudens [the third one wins] of the conflict between them.’6 So the pleas of the plotters were ignored and Czechoslovakia was sacrificed.
Once the war began, the Allies adopted the opposite policy: ‘unconditional surrender’. This was equally fatal to the conservative resistance. Any attempt by them to encourage German peace feelers would, in Churchill’s words, be met with ‘absolute silence’.7 This stance paralysed the conservative opposition because, without a prior agreement with the West, toppling Hitler might result in a Soviet takeover, something they abhorred even more than Nazism.
Allied tactics undermined opposition amongst ordinary Germans too. Instead of engaging with the German people in a joint struggle against Nazism, Britain and the USA gave them firestorms accompanied with leaflets saying: ‘Our bombs fall on your homes and on you … You can’t stop us, and you know it. You have no hope.’8 The Red Army reinforced that message. Russian soldiers fighting the ‘Great Patriotic War’ were encouraged into intense hatred of enemy civilians. Reports reached Stalin that ‘all German women in East Prussia who stayed behind were raped by Red Army soldiers’.9 The bitter choice for German women was expressed in this joke:
‘Better a Russki on the belly, than a Yank [bombing you] on the head!’10
In sum, Allied methods produced sullen co-operation with Hitler’s regime. He thus avoided the revolution that befell the Kaiser in 1918. Nevertheless Nazism was resisted – through both imperialist and people’s war forms.
The German Resistance
Most histories give pride of place to Conservatives. Gördeler, Mayor of Leipzig and Reich Price Commissioner, led an elite grouping which hoped to replace Hitler with himself as Chancellor. Gördeler’s supporters had the best opportunity to assassinate the Führer because they mixed with top Nazis. Stauffenberg’s bomb of 20 July 1944 came within inches of success. Tragically, Hitler survived, Operation Valkyrie failed, and the plotters paid with their lives.
Their rejection of Nazism was not based on opposition to German imperialism, but a disagreement over how best to maintain it. Like Ambassador Henderson, Hassell (Gördeler’s ‘shadow’ Foreign Minister), argued for ‘a healthy, vigorous Germany as an indispensable factor … in face of Bolshevist Russia’.11 Gördeler himself intended to retain Austria and part of Czechoslovakia for Germany after the war.12
Allied capitulation at Munich may have stymied their 1938 plot, but the Conservatives were galvanised into a new conspiracy by the Hitler–Stalin Pact which, they feared, gave too much influence to Moscow.13 But once the Second World War began, action against it was again delayed, because the Wehrmacht looked like succeeding. They acted in the summer of 1944 because, as Mommsen puts it, ‘the generals of the Opposition, with but few exceptions, only made up their minds to unconditional action when the Bolshevist danger threatened to become a military reality’.14
On the domestic front the conservative resistance preferred authoritarian rule or a monarchy to democracy.15 They judged it expedient to ‘carry over, for permanent retention in the reconstructed state, an appreciable amount of what had been achieved by National Socialism’.16 Indeed, Mommsen believes ‘leading generals in the military opposition were also deeply involved in the war crimes of the Third Reich’.17 Gördeler rejected ‘uncontrolled overdemocratic parliamentarianism’,18 concluding an elected chamber should have only advisory functions, and no independent legislative rights.
Only the tiny Kreisau circle, whose members included aristocrats, trade union leaders and socialists, went beyond such reactionary politics; but it was a discussion group. When it was caught up in the repression of the July 1944 bomb plot, its key figure, von Moltke, protested that:
‘We only thought … We are on the outside of each practical action; we get hanged because we have thought together.’19
If the conservative resistance was galvanised by fear of defeat and a concern to salvage German imperialism from the disaster Hitler was leading it to, workers’ opposition was rooted in fundamental opposition to Nazi dictatorship, war and racism. The communist youth wing warned that young workers were ‘being trained to be cannon fodder’ and to avert war it was necessary to ‘bring fascism to ruin’.20 The Party called for ‘solidarity through sympathy and help for our Jewish comrades’,21 while the socialists demanded the ‘overthrow [of] all supporters of despotism and all violent organisations that oppose freedom …’.22
Whereas many of the conservative opposition had been Nazis but broke away over the best policy for German capitalism, the working class resisted the pull of Hitler from the start. This was shown by the Nazi Party’s social composition. Labour was under-represented in membership (relative to the overall population) by almost half; the lower middle class was over-represented by one-third; while there was a fourfold over-representation of the elite.23
Before Hitler’s accession as Chancellor, the Communist Party (KPD) fought Nazis valiantly on the streets. In Prussia alone, during June/July 1932, 82 died in political clashes, the majority being Nazis (38) or communists (30).24 Alas, Moscow’s insistence that the German socialists (SPD) were ‘social fascists’ and worse than Nazis, produced disastrous divisions in the working class.25 These were compounded by the SPD’s equally false belief that Hitler would be constrained by the democratic constitution of Weimar Germany – ‘Our foes will perish through our legality’.26 These follies fatally undermined the left and made it possible for the German elite, centred on President Hindenburg, to appoint Hitler as Chancellor.
Even after Hitler’s accession to power, and wave upon wave of murderous repression, working-class opposition continued. Although Göbbels’ government-controlled media could successfully peddle lies concerning issues of which the population had no direct knowledge, the Nazis fared badly in 1934’s government sponsored shop stewards’ elections, because the candidates were known personally to voters. The one-party state barred alternative platforms, but ‘no’ votes and abstentions combined comprised three quarters of the final result.27 No further elections were held.
Workers tried various methods to withstand the Nazi onslaught. Lacking direct access to Hitler’s circle, workers’ resistance could not easily mount assassination plots, though heroic individuals attempted this. The SPD hoped to ride out the storm by remaining passive. Although extremely reckless, to its credit the KPD called for ‘an unbroken chain of mass resistance and mass struggle …’.28 In June 1935 the Berlin KPD alone distributed 62,000 copies of its literature. The SPD’s illegal newspaper had a national circulation of 250,000.29 Sometimes more could be done. Despite the dangers, occasional strikes and acts of sabotage of military production also occurred.30 Even in concentration camps the left mounted struggles for physical and moral survival. At Berlin’s Sachsenhausen camp a group of communists, socialists and non-party prisoners, organised equitable distribution of food and clothes, political education, morale-building cultural work, and even a demonstration of defiance.31
But by 1939 mass popular resistance had been smashed. This did not mean working class acceptance of Hitlerism. A report smuggled out and published by the Socialists estimated that:
‘Ninety percent of the workers beyond all doubt are convinced anti-Nazis [but there is] no active attitude against the ruling conditions.’32
Small groups composed of activists from a variety of backgrounds, such as the Red Orchestra (a network spying for Russia), the White Rose (students), and Edelweiss Pirates (youth) continued to splutter into life only to be snuffed out. The ‘other war’ had been reduced to an occasional skirmish. Nevertheless, as Peukert has argued:
Given the twofold trauma of 1933 – defeat without struggle, and the terror-induced split between the activists and the politically passive proletarian community – the sheer quantity of political opposition, the commitment and self-sacrifice of those involved, and the stubborn determination with which they persisted in secret operations, despite setbacks at the hands of the Gestapo, are certainly remarkable accomplishments. They constitute an immense and historic achievement, quite irrespective of the total impact of the working-class resistance on the Third Reich.33
A comparison in size of the conservative and communist resistance is instructive. The former numbered around 200 activists (though in the repression following the July 1944 plot the regime executed some 5,000 opponents).34 By the end of the Second World War, of the KPD alone, 300,000 members had been incarcerated, and at least 20,000 killed.35
As Peukert suggests above, it cannot be said mass resistance was decisive, but it was significant. The war which ultimately destroyed Nazism partly came about because it ‘sought to resolve its social antagonisms through dynamic territorial expansion. So Germany was inevitably drawn into a conflict with other Great Powers’.36 Equally, as Aly has shown, fearing a repeat of the revolution that ended the First World War the Nazis avoided antagonising German workers through lower living standards, and this significantly reduced the Nazi war machine’s effectiveness.37 Churchill and Roosevelt demanded levels of self-sacrifice from their populations that Hitler dared not request.
After the War
Victory in Europe day was 8 May 1945 and the fatal blow was delivered by Allied imperialism. But the motive was not to free the German population. A US spokesperson explained: ‘Our aim in occupying Germany is not to liberate it, but to treat it as a defeated enemy state.’38 Russia agreed and carried out the violent ‘ethnic cleansing’ of eleven million Germans from Eastern Europe.39 Furthermore, Stalin saw no reason to object ‘if a soldier who has crossed thousands of kilometres through blood and fire and death has fun with a women or takes some trifle’.40 Though notorious for mass rape, the Red Army was not the only occupying army to do this.41
Rather than the welfare of the German population, many of whom were victims of Nazism, the victors were interested in who would gain the greatest share of the spoils. Morgenthau, US Treasury Secretary, wanted to de-industrialise Germany and break it into several small states,42 but the State Department, mindful of the way the First World War ended in a wave of European revolutions, regarded this as ‘a plan of blind vengeance’ that would open the door to communism, and close it to American plans for economic reconstruction.43
Churchill agreed that ‘inflicting severities upon Germany [might allow] the Russians in a very short time to advance, if they chose, to the waters of the North Sea and the Atlantic’.44 For this reason Admiral Dönitz, Hitler’s designated successor, was allowed to continue running government and to issue orders. Churchill even retained Luftwaffe planes and a force of some 700,000 soldiers as insurance against ‘Russian armies should they decide to advance farther than is agreed’.45 It was only the bizarre alliance of Russian and Daily Mail protests that put a stop to this outrage, Dönitz finally being arrested two weeks after VE Day.46
Imperialist considerations also shaped the treatment of Hitler’s henchmen. In West Germany the USA wanted Nazis to be brought to justice without destroying Germany’s social structure, lest Russia take advantage of the disarray.47 This was not easy because, contrary to conventional wisdom, Nazism was not some alien contagion, the result of a charismatic leader or collective madness. Although the Nazi Party started as a collection of counter-revolutionary cranks outside the mainstream, almost from the very beginning it garnered support from significant figures, such as the First World War commander Ludendorff. When the standing of the conventional middle class parties was destroyed first by the hyper-inflation of 1923 and then the 1929 Wall Street Crash millions voted for the Nazis. Now, with the economy spiralling downwards, the establishment realised that however unsavoury rabble-rousing individuals like Hitler might appear, the alternative to Nazism was social breakdown and civil war. So they backed his appointment as Chancellor in 1933. Hitler showed his appreciation a year later in the ‘Night of the Long Knives’, during which he massacred those of his own supporters gullible enough to believe that Nazism was some radical alternative to capitalism.
By the Second World War the leading Nazis were thoroughly integrated into the social structure and its elite. This posed a problem for the Western Allies. Cutting away much of the summit of society in their sector might release radical forces from below and weaken authority. In East Germany the Russians had no such qualms and took a different approach. They would expunge Nazism, not in order to hand control to ordinary Germans, but to Moscow.
Despite their different approaches, the Allied military authorities in both sectors were therefore hostile to the spontaneous mass movement of anti-fascist committees (Antifas) that emerged as the Third Reich disintegrated. These committees represented the long repressed people’s war against fascism. One of their first aims was to forestall Hitler’s ‘Nero Order’, the suicidal self-destruction of Germany’s infrastructure. In Leipzig Antifa leaflets urged soldiers to desert, while in Stuttgart pro-war officers were challenged. Such actions were still dangerous. In Dachau the SS repulsed the committee when it stormed the Town Hall. The same thing happened in an assault on Dusseldorf’s police HQ. But in places such as Mulheim and Solingen Antifas were in control when Allied soldiers arrived, so they marched in unopposed.48
The scale of the movement was impressive, with over 120 committees established nationwide. The Leipzig Antifa claimed 150,000 adherents.49 Many of these organisations broke through entrenched social barriers to include foreign slave labourers and establish working class unity across political parties and trade unions. Their functions ranged from creating local democracy, to restoring basic services like food supply.50 An official US report shows the Allies had a clear understanding of what the Antifas stood for:
Denunciation of Nazis, efforts to prevent an illegal Nazi underground movement, denazification of civil authorities and private industry, improvement of housing and food supply provision – these are the central questions which preoccupy the newly created organizations … .’51
The fact that so many committees adopted similar names and policies poses the question of whether there was a centralised organisation at work.52
Communists were prominent in nearly every Antifa53 despite the opposition of Moscow.54 Walter Ulbricht, the KPD leader, criticised the ‘spontaneous creation of KPD bureaus, people’s committees, and Free Germany committees’,55 but he could do little as the KPD central apparatus had no communication link with the rank and file.56 Once communications were restored he could report:
‘We have shut these [Antifas] down and told the comrades that all activities must be channelled through the state apparatus.’57
The Western Allies were equally disconcerted by the Antifas self-proclaimed ‘ruthless struggle against all remnants of Hitler’s party in the state apparatus, the local authorities and public life’.58 The US authorities expelled the Leipzig committee from its offices, ordered the removal of all leaflets and posters from the streets, and then banned it. Any further use of the name ‘Free Germany National Committee’ would be punished severely.59 The military government stopped Solingen’s workplace councils purging Nazi activists and then abolished them.60 Brunswick’s Nazis had been arrested by the Antifa, but were liberated by Allied command.61 When Frankfurt Antifa housed people made homeless by bombing in apartments abandoned by fleeing Nazis, the authorities evicted them.62 A GI described his experience of the parallel wars in Germany:
The crime of it all is that we would take a little town, arrest the mayor and the other big shots, and put the anti-fascist in charge of the town. We’d double back to that town three days later, the Americans had freed all the officials and put ‘em back in power. And they threw this other guy aside. Invariably it happened.63
It is important to realise that the Allied Military Government did not oppose the Antifas out of tenderness towards Nazism. But there was a greater enemy, as this German industrialist explained:
‘Frankly, we are expecting a revolution … Not without reason has the Military Government imposed curfews and banned assemblies. It has prevented a growing threat coming from that direction’.64
Hitler’s supporters were to be punished as rival imperialists, rather than for their role in German society. There could be no people’s war against Nazism in conquered Germany.
So denazification would be on imperialist terms, and not shaped by the people. In Soviet-controlled East Germany half a million cases (or 3 percent of the population) were investigated.65 Moscow was keen to replace the former German establishment with its own placemen, and therefore the process was thorough. During the 1945–65 period over 16,000 people were tried, almost 13,000 found guilty, and 118 sentenced to death.66
In the Western zone there were also mass arrests, with 100,000 Nazis interned in the US sector alone.67 However, when the Cold War began, Britain, France and the USA focused on the new enemy and forgave the old one. Suddenly the brakes were applied to denazification. That meant:
almost every case of even major offenders [was] downgraded to the category of followership, which in turn, rendered the offender eligible for amnesty. This meant that even a majority of those who had belonged to groups defined as criminal organizations (SS, Gestapo, and others) by the Nuernberg Tribunal were exonerated … .68
The impact of this at local level was illustrated when Sinti witnesses (Gypsies known by their German name of ‘Zigeuner’) described the crimes of a brutal Nazi guard called Himmelheber to a German court. Despite hundreds of thousands of Sinti and Roma perishing during the Holocaust, Himmelheber was acquitted on appeal because it was ‘commonly known that accounts of “Zigeuner” are not reliable’. Racist attitudes continued and in 1951 a senior policemen still described Sinti and Roma as ‘genetically criminals and anti-social persons’.69
In the British zone 90 percent of Nazi internees were cleared.70 In West Germany, with a population three times that of the East, just 12,500 were tried, 5,000 convicted and 9 faced death.71 Such leniency contrasted with Nazi military courts which had executed 26,000; but no judge or prosecutor from that time was even tried.72 As one historian has put it:
The tribunals soon came to be likened to laundries: one entered wearing a brown shirt and left with a clean starched white shirt instead. Denazification had finally become, not the cleansing of Germany’s economy, administration and society of Nazis, but rather the cleansing and rehabilitation of individuals.73
Conforming to the political needs of the imperialist powers, the ‘small fry’ were punished while the chief culprits, who belonged to the capitalist establishment, escaped.74 Thus in West Germany giant businesses such as IG Farben (producers of the gas used at Auschwitz) and the big banks emerged virtually unscathed from decartelisation proceedings, which were scaled down in 1947.75
Before and during the Second World War ordinary Germans suffered the vicious repression of Nazism. Then the Allies imposed collective punishment in the form of area bombing and condoning of mass rape. When the opportunity finally came to distinguish between those who had been part of the Third Reich, and those who had been its victims, the Allies showed no interest. Gestapo repression had given little space for the development of people’s war. As a consequence, when 1945 saw a welcome end to the abomination of Nazism, on both sides of a divided Germany the popular resistance that finally emerged in the form of an Antifa movement stood little chance against the combined weight of the Allied conquerors.
Austra: Resistance and Ruling-Class Capitulation
Even before Spain, Austria witnessed the first skirmishes of the people’s war when in 1934 the working class in Vienna rebelled against fascist dictatorship. The background to this event was the collapse of the Austrian Empire after the First World War and the Wall Street crash. The ruling class was bitterly divided over how to cope. One wing favoured Anschluss – caving into Hitler’s demands for a merger. Another believed independence could still be viable if it leaned on Mussolini’s Italy as a counter-weight to German influence.1 The latter faction, the Austrofascists, adopted Italian methods, suspended Parliament and outlawed strikes.
So sharp was the conflict between the two wings that pro-Nazis murdered the Austrofascist Chancellor, Dolfuss, and attempted to seize power. Though they failed, Dolfuss’ successor, Schuschnigg, was in a precarious position. Despite their differences, however, both sides agreed that the weakness of Austrian capitalism required an intensified exploitation of labour through dictatorship.
Resistance began on 12 February 1934, when Vienna’s workers took to the barricades. Their slogan was:
‘Strike fascism down, before it crushes you …Workers, arm yourselves.’2
Four days of fighting followed during which the army bombed council housing estates and eventually quelled the opposition. A participant drew up the balance sheet: ‘Despite its defeat, the February struggle had great historical significance well beyond the borders of Austria. The German working class had capitulated to Hitler without a struggle. Now, for the first time, workers were mounting resistance to fascism weapons in hand. They lit a beacon!’3
And in spite of the repression it burned on. For example, the August–September 1937 edition of the illegal union paper Gewerkschaft (Union) reported strikes at Austro-Fiat, a wagon works, a steel plant, glass factory, textile mill and 12 other establishments.4
Austrofascism was fatally undermined when Italy joined the Rome–Berlin Axis and gave Hitler carte blanche to take over. In 1938 Hitler made his move. He summoned Schuschnigg to his mountain retreat in Berchtesgaden and demanded annexation. The stakes were high. As a conservative historian has suggested, even ‘24 hours of resistance, the launching of a general strike, and spontaneous mass demonstrations could have generated a common defensive struggle …’.5 Workers’ representatives were calling for exactly that. Ten days before the Anschluss they took a considerable risk and emerged from the underground to beg Schuschnigg to mobilise popular resistance to Nazism.6 All they asked was that left-wing political prisoners be freed and anti-union laws lifted. Schuschnigg, however, recalled a fateful point Hitler made at their meeting in Berchtesgaden. Referring to the Spanish revolution, the Führer asked him: ‘Do you want to make another Spain of Austria?’7 Schuschnigg did not, and refused to co-operate with the workers’ leaders, saying this would be equivalent to ‘conspiring with Bolsheviks’.8 This left his regime isolated and unable to defend itself.
On 12 March 1938 Hitler’s forces flooded across the border. One left activist saw workers with ‘weapons in hand’ ready to fight ‘to the death’ for Austrian independence. They were met by police who taunted them: ‘Why are you still demonstrating? Schuschnigg has already abdicated.’9 This finally destroyed any hope of a united resistance. The depth of capitulation was illustrated by the fact that unlike every other country occupied by Germany, Austria had no government in exile.10 Even Karl Renner, the Socialist Party leader, advocated a ‘yes’ vote in the referendum Hitler held on annexation, to the disgust of many of his comrades.
A ‘people’s war’ against Nazism developed nonetheless, though it was conducted by a small minority for the benefit of the masses, rather than by the people themselves. Following Renner’s treachery the once solid and influential Socialist Party split.11 The breakaway Revolutionary Socialists grouped around the veteran Otto Bauer attracted some members, but most went to the Austrian Communist Party (KPÖ). Indeed six out of seven communist resisters were former socialists and they constituted 75 percent of those tried for political opposition.12 As one historian puts it: ‘on the basis of a large sample of active members of all types of underground resistance groups … almost every Austrian actively resisting the Nazis was affiliated to the KPÖ.’13 What was left of the remaining opposition was generally Catholic orientated.14 Indeed, the only large demonstration against Nazism after Anschluss was in October 1938 under the slogan ‘Our Führer is Christ’ (rather than Hitler).15
In spite of great heroism, Austrian resistance remained splintered and weak. An example of this was the O5 organisation which made contact with the Allies towards the end of the war. Like the conservative opposition in Germany, its track record was not promising. There were many Austrofascists and monarchists in its ranks who outmanoeuvred those members who were on the left. Only partisans in Carinthia Province (who consisted mainly of Slovenians aided by Tito’s forces in Yugoslavia), and the working class resistance, gave the Nazis any real problems.
The opponents of Nazism had to deal with the additional handicap of Allied policy. In 1943 the Foreign Ministers of the USA, Russia and Britain issued this joint declaration: ‘Austria was the first free land to fall victim to Hitler’s aggression.’16 Perhaps they hoped to encourage an Austrian breakaway from Germany, but their position had dire long-term consequences. As one commentator has put it:
‘You gave us a historical out, and we grabbed it.’17
Granting all Austrians victim status meant, when the war ended, that former Austrofascists or Nazis were accorded equal status to anti-fascist resisters, in a situation where the former greatly outnumbered the latter. Post-war denazification investigators calculated that there were 100,000 Nazi members in Austria before the Anschluss, and 700,000 by 1945.18 Over the same period 5,000 Austrian resistance fighters had been killed and 100,000 arrested.19
Even before 1949, when ex-Nazi Party members were permitted to vote and became an important electoral factor, prominent politicians were using the Allies’ ‘victim theory’ to whitewash fascist crimes. In 1945 the country’s Foreign Minister exonerated local Nazis by insisting: ‘The persecution [of Jews] was ordered by the German Reich authorities and carried out by them.’20 Renner, now elevated to Chancellor by the Russians, described Austrian anti-semitism as ‘never very aggressive’.21 Those who, in 1938, had been forced to clean Vienna’s pavements with toothbrushes under a hail of abuse from passers-by might have disagreed; but the 70,000 Austrian Jews who perished in gas chambers could not object. With such politicians in charge, it was small wonder that in 1946 an opinion poll recorded 46 percent of Austrians opposed to the return of the tiny remnant of the Jewish population that had survived.22 There was a certain cold logic to this. Many pro-Nazi Austrians had profited from ‘Aryanisation’ of Jewish homes and property.
The disbanding of the Wehrmacht saw many thousands of Hitler’s soldiers being welcomed home to Austria as tragic victims, while resisters received little recognition, and often found it extremely difficult even to return. An oral history of Austrian resisters records numerous examples of the US, for example, delaying travel home (because they were so frequently communists).23 Once back they had pariah status. A telling example of this was during the dedication of a ‘monument to the fallen’, an event addressed by the highest officer in the Army. He refused to allow the memory of resistance fighters to be associated with the ceremony, because ‘such people died as oath breakers and do not belong at this monument’.24
Denazification was less than thorough in Austria. In the amnesty of 1948 90 percent of those under investigation escaped punishment.25 Post-war Austria never underwent the re-education process that occurred in Germany, and the outcome has been shocking. In 1983 a man implicated in the killing of some 10,000 civilians in the Ukraine was only blocked from becoming President of the Parliament by a petition campaign. Worse still, Kurt Waldheim, known to have been charged of war crimes by the Yugoslavs, and on the US list of suspected war criminals, was elected President in 1986.26
Testimonies by two Austrian resisters show how anti-fascists viewed the ‘victory’ of the Second World War. The first is from Josef Hindels, a prominent trade union leader who found exile in Sweden:
Despite the great, great joy I felt at the defeat of Hitler and liberation, I had many grounds to be depressed … I had hoped to return home immediately. But right through 1945 I failed, despite great efforts to get the necessary permission to return the Austria. It was only in 1946, and even then required the strenuous intervention of Kreisky [a future Chancellor] to obtain permission for me. That was the first disappointment. The second was that a provisional government was created in Austria with Karl Renner at its head. I had considered that utterly impossible … To me Renner was the man who, in 1938, had welcomed the annexation of Austria by Hitler’s Germany. Ever since then I had considered him to be politically dead.27
The second comes from Bruno Furch who was released from a concentration camp in 1945:
A damned, truly vile game began to be played by the two main parties in Austria [the Socialist and People’s Parties]. I say it quite bluntly. They used the legacy of Nazi rule and fascism in their heads and their hearts for the purposes of fighting the Cold War in the West. The game was to use the fundamental legacy of anti-Communism and anti-Sovietism for their own anti-Communist ends, by keeping it alive, if not in power. It was not merely to court the votes of 600,000 Nazi Party members – because that only happened in 1949 during the next election. No, it had already begun in 1945. So it was not only about votes but about harnessing this force from the very beginning.
In one of the housing estates we had a young Jewish comrade who in 1946 returned from exile in England to his home. But he committed suicide. What happened was he had fallen in love with the daughter of a high up socialist official… Her parents were against the relationship and against any marriage because he was Jewish. The young man simply could not cope with the idea that after the victory over Hitler, that anti-Semitism of this sort could still exist in the higher ranks of the re-born Socialist Party.28
It is difficult to imagine a wider gulf between the goals of imperialism and of anti-fascism. The readiness of the Allies to collaborate with both the pre-Anschluss Austrofascists, and former Nazis in the Cold War era, would poison post-war Austrian politics for decades.
Italy: The Working Class and the Two Wars
A feature distinguishing people’s war from conventional war was the way it combined social aspirations for equality and emancipation with political goals, such as national independence and democracy. These former aspects were marked in Italy where overt working class struggle was more prominent than elsewhere.1 One reason was that fascism originated here, so rather than resistance developing in sharp reaction to foreign invasion, it matured over decades under a hated social system that was closely associated with capitalism from its inception in 1922.2 Business and finance supplied 74 percent of fascist party funding3 and in return Mussolini smashed the unions, and imposed draconian wage cuts in 1927, 1930 and 1934.4
His regime was less repressive than Hitler’s, but it still condemned 17,000 political opponents to internal exile, 60,000 to special surveillance and control, and imposed 28,000 years of penal servitude between 1926 and 1943.5 Workers made up 85 percent of those convicted.6 The Socialist leader Matteotti was murdered, while Gramsci, the founder of the Italian Communist Party (PCI), languished in jail, only being released to die. It has been argued that an ‘indefatigable subversiveness’ survived within popular culture, but before the Second World War this did not translate into active resistance.7
The war changed everything. Italy’s entry was not smooth. Spriano tells us that Mussolini’s doubts about the ability of his country to withstand a major conflict were pushed aside by the establishment. After witnessing the success of Blitzkrieg it was anxious to ‘arrive in time to seize an easy and crushing victory’.8 War brought the ruling class tangible benefits. By 1942 engineers hours had risen to 60 per week9 and Fiat’s share price had soared by 62 percent. Its director revelled in ‘the formidable Japanese conquests in the Pacific and the absorption of the rich territories of Russia into the European Axis economy’, as they promised ‘expanded production and vaster markets’.10 Italy’s rapacious plans were ultimately frustrated by the Allies, as was the case with Germany and Japan. However, it took till 1945 and required overwhelming force to obliterate the latter. Mussolini’s rule crumbled two years earlier. Why was it so fragile?
It was partly due to Italy’s GNP which was a third of Germany’s. This made the army more vulnerable to defeat in an inter-imperialist conflict. Even more significant was the fact that the regime was destroyed from within by people’s war. Between 1938 and 1945 the cost of living increased 20 times over. With grossly inadequate rationing on the one side, and astronomical black market prices11 on the other, it was no surprise that many of Turin’s 150,000 thousand strong labour force lost 10 to15 kilograms in weight.12 Gradually the gulf between the repression-hardened minority of politically-motivated resisters and the masses began narrowing.13
This became clear when strikes swept across the northern industrial belt in the spring of 1943. Their epicentre was Turin where flourishing war production in vast factories generated a sense of collective power. At the same time Allied bombing had flattened 25,000 homes but the state provided no air-raid shelters.14 Confidence combined with desperation to generate strike action even though this was a perilous step to take under fascism, especially during wartime.15 A leaflet of January 1943 illustrates the mood:
For food and liberty!
Down with the 12-hour day and the damned war!
We demand that Mussolini be chased from power!
We are struggling for peace and our country’s independence!
For a pay rise that is actually paid out!
Action, strike, struggle – these are the only weapons we have to save ourselves
Strike, strike, strike!16
Such appeals fell on fertile ground. During winter 1942/3 stoppages increased from two to five per month.17 Then, on 5 March, 21,000 workers at Fiat Mirafiori responded to the call of the 80-strong communist cell and struck, despite the signal for action – the factory siren – being silenced by management.18 Walkouts spread through Turin and beyond. By 15 March the movement encompassed 100,000 women and men19 and at the end of the month every factory in Piedmont had shut.20
Mussolini was shocked that ‘the population was so hostile and averse to fascism’ and offered major concessions.21 He realised that: ‘This decidedly nasty and extremely deplorable episode has suddenly thrown us back 20 years.’22 Hitler, who just a month before had lost the key battle of Stalingrad, understood the implications too. He found it ‘unthinkable that so many people can strike, and no-one dares intervene … I am convinced that in the circumstances anyone who shows the minimum weakness is doomed.’23 His words were prophetic.
The Turin strike was the first successful mass walkout in two decades, and arguably the most important of the global war. The shock it administered fascism was supplemented by an Anglo-American landing in Sicily (on 10 July 1943). Then the establishment panicked. It had wallowed in the benefits of fascism for 20 years, but now that association was a liability provoking revolution and/or the wrath of the advancing Allies. To gain some room for manoeuvre Italy’s government asked the Germans to accept its withdrawal from war in return for ceding its Balkan conquests, but they refused.24 Grasping for another way out the government decided to publicly ditch Mussolini and secretly conclude an armistice with the Allies. The Fascist Grand Council itself voted 19 to 7 to depose and arrest the Duce.
The ruling class hoped the change would be no more than cosmetic. Pirelli, the industrial magnate, began discussions with the Allies25 on the basis that ‘the monarchy, the crown, the church, the army and the leaders of the economy’ would remain at the helm.26 There was a slight presentational difficulty. It was this very monarch King Vittorio Emanuele III who made Mussolini dictator in 1922. The Duce had touted the myth that he came to power in a daring seizure of power during which 3,000 martyrs had died – the March on Rome.27 But the claim was fake. As one writer put it: ‘Only when all was over did there begin the spectacle which has been called the March on Rome.’28 Some advisors had begged the King to invoke state power to counter Mussolini’s antics but he openly boasted about his refusal: ‘I desire that all Italians know that I signed no decree for a state of siege.’29 This decision paid off. With Mussolini as his PM, Vittorio Emanuele would add Emperor of Ethiopia and King of Albania to his list of titles. So now, even after Mussolini was formally deposed, the King insisted that ‘fascism cannot be dismantled in one go. It needs to be gradually modified in order to remove those aspects which are shown to be harmful to the country’.30 His new PM was Marshal Badoglio. His anti-fascist credentials were no better. He too had energetically supported Mussolini and earned promotion and the title of Duke of Addis Ababa in the process.
If the Second World War had been an unambiguous battle against fascism, then this supposed metamorphosis of the Italian government would have been recognised for the fraud it was. However, the Allied powers embraced the King and Badoglio with open arms. They had no qualms because, as one writer puts it, ‘there was no ideological prejudice against personalities of the Fascist regime’.31 The Anglo-Americans shared the Italian establishment’s fear of revolution and willingly forgave past misdemeanours, just so long as Italy quit the rival imperialist coalition. Indeed, the US had made overtures to the King before and after Italy’s entry into the Second World War.32 Churchill’s admiration of the Duce dated from 1927 and was undimmed when, in 1943, he contemptuously dismissed ‘the usual arguments against having anything to do with those who had worked with or helped Mussolini’.33 The King had other surprising friends. When the US expressed doubts about his ability to keep control, Russia granted him full diplomatic recognition. It was the first Allied power to do so.34
Demonstrators who ecstatically welcomed the Duce’s downfall on 25 July 1943 were unaware of these sordid games. Tearing down the symbols of dictatorship they celebrated the end of fascism and war. Their joy was premature. The government ordered newspapers to ‘avoid criticising the men and events of the previous regime [or] the war. Exercise maximum care towards our German ally. Do not call for the freeing of political prisoners … .’35 Badoglio, as military governor of Italy, declared:
‘it is necessary to act with maximum energy to prevent the current excitement degenerating into a Communist or subversive movement.’36
Using language reminiscent of Athens, the army and police were instructed to confront the jubilant crowds ‘in combat formation, opening fire from a distance, but also using mortars and artillery as though proceeding against enemy troops’.37 In Reggio Emilia, 11 were machine-gunned at a demonstration for peace and the expulsion of the Wehrmacht. In Bari there were 19 victims.38 Italy’s ruling class was still equivocating over which imperialist camp would best suit its purposes, but it had no doubt who the real enemy was
In March 1943 Hitler had berated the Italian government for weakness. Five months later Churchill applauded the murderous actions of a supposedly post-fascist regime:
In Turin and Milan there were Communist demonstrations which had to be put down by armed force. Twenty years of Fascism has obliterated the middle class. There is nothing between the King, with the Patriots who have rallied round him, who have complete control, and rampant Bolshevism.39
The Allied media could not help noticing the hypocrisy of such talk. The BBC scorned the Italian government’s ‘failure’ to remove fascism40 and America’s Life magazine warned that:
The clear tendency within the fascist regime is to free itself from Mussolini and the Germanophiles, but to preserve the system. This is the idea of the big industrialists today … In other words, a change from pro-German fascism to pro-Ally fascism. The fascist hierarchy are very impressed by the successful volte faceof Darlan … .41
Government repression was met with strikes demanding peace, pay rises, the removal of fascists, and release of political prisoners.42 Some soldiers mutinied and refused to shoot. Nazi Germany watched the unfolding situation with alarm, and the eight Wehrmacht divisions stationed in the North got ready to take charge. The PCI understood the danger and in August 1943 called on Italians to: ‘Prepare to repel any German intervention with force [and] organise the armed collaboration of the people and army … .’43 This ran directly counter to the government’s aim of salvaging what remained of fascism.44
Badoglio could only have repulsed the German threat by rousing the populace, but instead treated them ‘as though proceeding against enemy troops’. Denying a people’s war meant Badoglio could only tack ineffectually between the imperialist blocs, hoping one would cancel out the other. Even as he concluded a secret peace treaty with the Anglo-Americans advancing from the South he sought continued German backing in the North, telling Ribbentrop: ‘If this government collapses, it will be replaced by one of Bolshevik hue.’ The Nazi foreign minister also feared that ‘power would go to those with left radical ideas’.45
Without a peace deal, and caught in a pincer movement between imperialist armies, the suffering of the Italian people continued. Allied bombs rained down on them, with 220,000 Milanese losing their homes in just five days during August 1943. Meanwhile, the Germans were left free to entrench their positions.46 The government’s double-dealing eventually ran out of time. On 8 September General Eisenhower, weary of Badoglio’s procrastination, broadcast news of the armistice the Italian government had negotiated with the Allies.47 Amazingly, even now Badoglio still tried to sit on the fence. ‘We will fight whoever attacks us’, he said, without specifying who that might be.48 Another military order was clearer: ‘In no case are you to take the initiative in hostilities against German troops.’49
Such hesitancy left Italy’s armed forces totally unprepared for the Nazi backlash. The German army attacked, while the King, Badoglio, and all three armed services ministers fled south to safety in the arms of the Allies. Left with no instructions except not to fight50 the Italian army of one million was eliminated overnight: 615,000 soldiers were deported to concentration camps and 30,000 died.51 Although the King had finally thrown his lot in with the Allies, his prior actions symbolised the treachery of an entire governing class, and sealed the post-war fate of the monarchy.52
Northern Italy was now subject to the full force of German wartime economic policy which consisted of shifting ‘responsibility for funding the Nazi war machine to the citizens of conquered lands’.53 From Italy the Nazis extracted 84 billion lira, out of an annual national income of 130 billion lira.54 They used Mussolini as an alibi in this enterprise. He was freed in a daring commando raid and installed as head of a puppet regime – the Republic of Salò. Henceforth resisters applied a single term to the enemy: Nazi-Fascist.
After looting the country, the Nazis required: a) its factory production; b) no distractions from the fight against Allied advance in the South; c) manpower for the German war machine. The resistance of the northern workers and peasants deprived them of all three.
The difference between this people’s war and imperialist war was eloquently described by Ginzburg of the Action Party, a radical republic grouping:
The formal declaration of hostilities against Germany by the King and Badoglio was a meaningless gesture which did nothing to change the real situation of the time.
The real war against Nazi Germany was declared on 9 September, after the soldiers were officially ordered to abandon their guns. The Italian people seized hold of them and boldly confronted the armour of the German tanks. Thousands of soldiers and civilians headed into the mountains rather than serve the Germans, and equipped themselves for guerrilla struggle following the heroic example of the Russian and Balkan partisans … The Italian war against Nazi Germany was the war of a people who aspired to full political and social liberty … This war was not declared in an exchange of diplomatic notes but written in the blood of heroes who sacrificed themselves each day, who had an impact on the future, who weighed in the balance of history … .55
A female partisan witnessed the birth of people’s war in Turin. At the very moment that the King and Badoglio were scuttling for cover, ‘the youth launched an assault on the barracks … and we held a grand demonstration in front of the Chamber of Labour where the workers demanded arms and waved placards saying “Turn Turin into Stalingrad” … This was the real army of the working class on the move.’56
Fighting both Salò and the Wehrmacht gave mass struggle a dual character. It was a battle for national liberation, and ‘a true civil war’57 for ‘class emancipation’.58 Italian conditions favoured such a development. In France the Nazis had collapsed so suddenly at the end that there was no need for the resistance to consolidate its hold before the Allies arrived. By contrast, it took Anglo-American forces from September 1943 to April 1945 to reach Italy’s northern frontier. As one British diplomat wrote ruefully:
‘The pace of Allied advance has undoubtedly contributed to the birth of an independent government in the North.’59
Italy’s people’s war, which fused workers’ action in industry with armed operations, was far more audacious than anything witnessed in Germany or Austria. Valiani, of the Action Party, explains why:
If the movement took the Germans by surprise they gave in and made concessions … But if the movement did not spread and remained isolated in a single city the Gestapo could focus its attack, raiding and deporting people to Germany. This included members of the improvised committees with whom they had previously negotiated, as well as political suspects. Paradoxically the degree of daring, the spreading of strikes to the largest number of localities, represented a precautionary approach.60
Milan became the headquarters of the Committee for National Liberation (CLN), and emulated Turin by staging a classic strike, this time under a German regime. The demand was for a dramatic pay rise, doubling of rations, provision of oil and sugar, no to sackings, an end to curfew, and exclusion of Nazis from workplaces.61 The stoppage began on 10 December 1943 and within days the Lombard capital ground to a halt.
While employers like Pirelli conceded 30 percent pay rises, others proclaimed their willingness to meet demands only if the German commander, General Zimmermann, approved.62 He ordered a return to work. With the workers unbending the SS began rounding them up. So a new demand was added to the list – freedom for those arrested! Now General Zimmermann promised vague concessions, but the strikers were unimpressed:
‘On to complete victory. Your threats do not frighten us. Just give us what we demand and we will return to work!’63
Events at the Breda Funk works show the local dimension. After the boss assembled the 6,000-strong workforce to report he would meet their demands in full, and have those arrested released, he asked: ‘Will you return tomorrow?’ The resounding response was still ‘No!’ Perplexed the management suggested the workforce might like to elect representatives to meet General Zimmermann. No-one responded.64 Eventually a delegation did step forward, but on condition that it would only talk to the management, not the Nazis. This was not honoured. When the delegation arrived at the Breda plant the bosses melted away, the Germans appeared, barred the exits and attempted to begin negotiations.
Eventually, to try and end the strike city-wide, the Nazis offered pay rises of 40–50 percent, along with improved rations. Still the workers held out! Armoured cars toured Milan’s factories, and soldiers attempted to compel people to return – to little avail.65 The strike ended after a week, but those involved made it plain they did this because they chose to, not because of Nazi pressure.
Workplace resistance was but one form of the people’s war. Communist-led Patriotic Action Groups (GAP) and Patriotic Action Squads (SAP) operated in the urban setting.66 In the countryside there were partisan squads. These were headed by seasoned anti-fascists (many of them veterans of the Spanish Civil War), or occasionally soldiers who had reached the mountains under arms before the Germans could capture them.67 As with the French maquis, mass recruitment was stimulated by Nazi-Fascist round-ups and the death penalty for draft dodgers. One young man’s diary described the dilemma facing many:
‘What am I to do? Present myself? Never! … So here I am, 22, on the run and wondering – will I be shot? Or should I take refuge in the woods?’
Despite his mother being taken hostage he chose a life of ‘seizing arms, munitions, anything that serves the struggle … .’68 In Pavia alone 50 percent of those summoned failed to appear.69
The effectiveness of the partisans is attested to by numerous sources. The Allied commander, General Alexander, estimated that six of the Wehrmacht’s 25 divisions were diverted to dealing with them.70 From the opposing side, Kesselring, Germany’s plenipotentiary for Italy, complained that once ‘unlimited guerrilla warfare’ commenced in June 1944 the 200,000 to 300,00071 partisans ‘constituted a real menace to Germany’s armed forces and played a vital role in the campaign. Eliminating this threat was of decisive importance to us.’ He judged that ‘the battle against the regular enemy forces and against the partisan bands had equal importance [so] the very best troops had to be used …’.72 The guerrillas’ claimed 5,449 surprise actions, 218 pitched battles, 458 locomotives destroyed, 356 bridges blown up and 5,573 operations to sabotage power lines and communications, as well as tens of thousands of enemy soldiers killed.73
The guerrilla method of the people’s war was quite different from imperialist combat. When Giovanni Pesce, a partisan, went to collect weapons from the royal army, an officer demanded to know his grade. Pesce was scandalised: ‘Neither the utter collapse of 8 September, nor the partisan insurrection, had shaken this man’s rigid view that there must be a fixed and immutable hierarchy.’ Another partisan resented the ‘social disparity between officers and troops’ that he found and contrasted that with ‘our formations that are based on absolute democracy’. Guerrillas found ‘the institution of the officers’ mess incomprehensible. An officer in the Garibaldini [the communist-led grouping] shares bread, board and heating with the other soldiers.’74 Incomprehension was mutual. General Cadorna, sent north to command the partisans in the name of the King, was shocked by their political engagement and the ‘election of officers by consensus of the base’ that occurred in some units.75
Money was another bone of contention. To the GAP leader, Cichetti, the very idea of receiving a salary was offensive: ‘I detested the idea of being paid to be a partisan. I had not seen a lira for six months, but had always been able to make do, without turning to the laws of the market to survive.’76 Higher pay for partisan commanders was usually rejected because ‘we are in a people’s war which is fought by volunteers motivated by high patriotic spirit’.77
Unlike professional or conscript armies, where political debate is frowned upon, the partisans were simultaneously a prototype alternative state and militia. In August 1944 a typical agreement between various partisan groups declared:
Far from being a miniature replica of the old military structure, the partisan army is the symbol of an independent movement that owes its being to the will of the people, which is in itself an unequivocal political affirmation. The war against the Nazi-Fascists is only the preliminary step on the road towards our ultimate objective; the radical reconstruction of the political, moral and social life of our country… we are fighting for democracy, freedom in the fullest sense of the word, justice, and the dignity and respect that are due to man.78
These principles could be put into practice when Axis forces were expelled from entire districts. Fifteen partisan republics appeared,79 in places like Carnia (150,000 inhabitants), Montefiorino (50,000) and Ossola (70,000).80 Their administrations were quite unlike those of Salò, or Badoglio’s for that matter.81 In Varzi, for example, mass assemblies elected a local government purged of fascists using direct democracy. Observers saw ‘people of every race … coming and going on the steps of the town hall. There were peasants who wanted permits, who came to collect their share of requisitioned goods, or to protest against an abuse – bourgeois, partisans working class women, many new faces.’82 Requisitions were paid for in kind, or with partisan ‘money’, that could be redeemed after the country was liberated.83
This financial arrangement also operated in the Republic of the Val d’Ossola84 where crime was eliminated, a ‘Popular University’ frequented by all classes was established, Italy’s first female Minister appointed, and trade unions restored.85 It has been claimed that this area ‘was the only substantial part of Hitler’s occupied Europe to achieve independence, and obtain recognition from Switzerland’.86 The partisans expected the republic to receive substantial outside aid because its ‘capital’, Domodossola, was close to Milan and would be a useful launching pad for any Anglo-American offensive there. But the Allied representative on hand was dismissive: ‘You must not pretend to be in charge of military operations, like Alexander and Eisenhower … .’87 Another explained that the republic’s continued existence made it ‘not only a rival to the Italian government in Rome, but also a rival to the Italian Army …’.88 A partisan leader lamented that ‘the indifference shown by the Allies in regard to the efforts at Domodossola, provoked a wave of bitterness’.89 Without assistance the republic was finally crushed in six days of savage fighting.
Further evidence of tension between the parallel wars emerged in debate over attentism. Opponents stood for an immediate people’s war of liberation, supporters wanted to wait for salvation by imperialist armies. Battaglia has paraphrased the arguments. The attentists said:
‘It is useless for us to attack the Germans; there aren’t enough of us to do any good, and what’s more, any attempt we make will simply provoke reprisals: apart from ourselves, the civil population will suffer, and suffer hideously.’
He then lays out the flaws in this logic:
‘How could the Resistance increase in strength or extend its scope if it remained completely passive, completely static? Furthermore, what the Attentistes had signally failed to recognize was that, for local, national, sentimental and strictly common-sense reasons, it had become absolutely necessary to fight the Germans.’90
A factor impelling independent action was that the Allies denied Italy all rights because it had been an Axis power. Thus Churchill’s Foreign Minister was outraged when the Italians replaced Marshal Badoglio: ‘A nation which has unconditionally surrendered has no right to present the Allies with a Government chosen by themselves.’91 Britain was simply not there to free Italy, as Radio London admitted: ‘The liberation of the peninsula is not, and cannot be, the ultimate aim of the Allies. It is just a means of defeating Germany … .’92
This attitude led some commentators to quip that Italy was now under two occupations. In the South were the Allies supported by a fascist King; in the North were the Germans supported by Mussolini’s Salò Republic.93 Put like this, attentism amounted to either accepting Nazi-Fascism or Allied imperialist domination through the AMGOT (Allied Military Government of Occupied Territory).
The only alternative was a liberation struggle. One form this took was further mass strikes. In the spring of 1944 half a million downed tools in the largest stoppage of the World War. It was directed almost as much at convincing the Allies that heavy aerial bombing was unnecessary.94
Another related issue was ‘terrorism’. Should partisans target individual Nazis behind the lines, even if it provoked the Germans to murder hostages or civilians, or wait for the Anglo-Americans? A notorious example of the risks involved in terror actions followed the killing of 32 SS guards in Rome. In revenge the Nazis executed 335 Italian hostages at the Ardeatine caves.95 For the attentists this horrific collective punishment proved the need to hold back, and some peasants did indeed turn against the partisans for fear their actions could attract reprisals.96
The guerrillas were acutely aware of the problem, but had a solution. Valiani, whose Action Party was linked to the Justice and Liberty partisans, explains that urban terrorism aimed to avoid collective punishment and to inspire youth to join the struggle.97 Whereas Axis troops were under attack at the front, in cities ‘terrorism was not directly against enemy soldiers, but against the machinery of police, repression and reprisal. It was adopted, despite the risks, as a method of self-defence.’98 Successful actions showed the enemy was not invincible. Pavone offers an illustration: when fascist police began an anti-guerrilla operation in one area, the GAP killed 17 of them. As a result 100 out of the remaining 150 deserted their posts, some even joining the partisans.99
Demonstrative action was effective as long as it did not substitute for, or become an alternative to, mass actions such as strikes. Partisans dared not become cut off from the wider population on whom they depended for shelter, food, and general support. Awareness of these reciprocal relations helped avoid the pitfalls of terror operations that might have demobilised the masses and left them as passive bystanders. An example of how the link-up could work was given by Our Struggle in February 1944. The Germans wished to ship labour and machinery from Italy to assist its war efforts, but the resistance responded: ‘Not a machine, not a worker must go to Germany! To achieve this the actions of the mass of workers [will be backed by] armed defence squads (GAP) and partisan formations, [and] will systematically interrupt and destroy communication links with Germany.’100
Perhaps the most powerful argument was given by a hostage of the Nazis:
‘Don’t give up the struggle. Don’t let my situation hold you back. If I survive, I survive, but if I must die I will be fulfilling my fate. The important thing is that you never give in!’101
Whatever doubt there might be about using terrorism as a weapon in the people’s war arsenal, this pales against the barbarity of indiscriminate bombing so beloved of the Allies.
Regardless of the merits of the debate, attentism suited the Allied imperialist cause. On 10 November 1944 General Alexander, Commander of Allied Forces in Italy, announced that his forces would not advance that winter and that the partisans should stand down, cease offensive operations, return to their homes and await further orders.102 This declaration had a devastating impact on morale. The guerrillas were battling in deteriorating weather conditions against enormous Nazi-fascist armies who now had carte blanche to attack. Longo, the most prominent communist in the resistance, saw Alexander’s move ‘as an attempt on the part of the Allied command to eliminate the Italian liberation movement’.103 In the General’s favour it has been argued that the Germans’ Gothic Line defences were impregnable and that Allied commanders had ‘no political considerations in their minds; they thought solely of the interests of the partisans’.104 However, Behan finds it strange that Alexander’s statement ‘was not broadcast in code, as was the norm. Even worse, Resistance leaders were not consulted or informed beforehand…’105
To suggest, in a North Italy infested with German and fascist troops, that the partisans cease operations, showed no appreciation of the on-going deportations of labour to Germany, the daily acts of repression against the population, etc. The guerrillas’ reply was that ‘the partisan war is not, on the part of the Italian people and the patriots who have taken up arms, a mere whim, an idle caprice to be refrained from at will. It arose from the vital necessity of defending our material, moral and social heritage; this is the supreme cause for which we have been fighting and must continue to fight day after day … The war must go on.’106 Whether Alexander was motivated by the politicians’ distaste for Italian self-liberation or military considerations alone,107 this episode is a graphic example of the two wars in practice.
Although workers played such a prominent role in Italy, even here the people’s war was never a pure class phenomenon. Thus the more astute northern employers realised that bitter disputes with labour invited Nazi intervention, which could lead to their workers (and factories) being shipped to Germany.108 To forestall this they made concessions and protected ‘their’ employees.109 Behan describes the ‘ducking and weaving’ of Fiat. Even as it produced tanks and V2 rocket parts for Germany it maintained links with US intelligence services, and provided massive funds to the CLN. The resistance leader at Fiat Mirafiori understood how his employers ‘had no scruples about facing in several directions at the same time to safeguard their primary interest: profit’.110
Similarly, in the interests of national unity, the Italian resistance brought together a multitude of parties representing a constellation of class forces. Thus the day after the 8 September 1943 armistice the five main political parties – Communists, Socialists, Action Party, Christian Democrats and Liberals – formed the Comitato di Liberazione Nazionale Alta Italia (North Italy National Liberation Committee – CLNAI). Local committees spread quickly. In turn a centralised military structure – the CVL (Corpo Volontari della Libertà (Volunteers for Liberty Corps) – was set up to oversee partisan activity.
The relationship between the summit and the base of this people’s war was complex, and the most important and interesting interaction took place within the PCI’s sphere of influence. Although the statistics differ, it is clear the PCI was the dominant force. Spriano suggests that between 80 and 90 percent of political detainees were communist in the early stages.111 When the mass anti-fascist movement took off, PCI influence persisted. By October 1944 perhaps five-eighths of the partisans were in the communist-controlled Garibaldi Brigades,112 and 60 percent of partisans who died were linked to communist formations.113 Even political rivals admitted to communist numerical preponderance, with Valiani of the Action Party, the second most important grouping, estimating 41 percent of partisans were in the Garibaldini as opposed to 29 percent in his Justice and Liberty bands.114 The pre-war PCI membership of 6,000 had become 1.8 million by its end.115
Working class politics therefore set the tone even for political or ideological rivals. Thus Olivelli, leader of the Catholic Green Flame partisans, took it for granted that:
the age of capitalism that has produced astronomical wealth and led to unspeakable misery, is in its death throes. A soulless regime encouraged the spread of a poverty that was beyond belief, sabotaged the productive efforts of the people, and deliberately provoked man’s inhumanity to man; it exalted the cult of might and violence, manifested itself in tyranny and oppression, and burnt itself out in the flames of war. From the final convulsions of this age a new era is being born, the era of the working classes, infinitely more just, more fraternal, more Christian.116
The PCI’s working-class base encouraged it to reflect the need of the people’s war, but its leadership felt other pressures. Since 1926 fascist repression had driven this group into exile (in France and Russia). It was so cut off from its membership that, according to one scholar: ‘In most of the towns and villages none of [the rank and file] had any contact with the party apparatus for years… .’117 The top leadership, headed by Palmiro Togliatti, was shaped instead by Stalinism. Togliatti sought to control and channel the spontaneous aspects of struggle into ever more centralised structures – the CLNs, the CLNAI and the CVL. Such a development was partly driven by the exigencies of war, which required increasing co-ordination as the scale of the fighting grew. It also reflected the PCI leadership’s programme. The democratic base and the centralist needs of armed struggle were not inherently antagonistic. Each could strengthen the other. However, the people’s war did come into conflict with centralism, because that was driven by Togliatti’s pursuit of Russian foreign policy aims.
The most dramatic expression of this occurred in March 1944 when Togliatti joined Badoglio’s cabinet. This so-called ‘Salerno turn’ was totally unexpected. Two months before, a PCI conference in Bari had strongly criticised Badoglio,118 and the PCI newspaper, Unità, ridiculed the idea that the southern regime could fight Nazism: ‘How could this government that is terrified of the people, lead a people’s war.’119 During fascism the PCI had suffered terribly from the likes of Badoglio and the King, yet now Togliatti wrote: ‘The working class must abandon the position of opposition and criticism which it occupied in the past … .’120 Not without reason has Broué suggested that the Salerno turn represented ‘a Stalinist apparatus brought into Italy from outside, struggling to impose itself from above upon the real party, the true party … .’121
Togliatti’s policy conformed to the decisions made at the Yalta conference of February 1945122 when Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt divided Europe into spheres of influence. Since Italy fell into the Anglo-American sphere, the resistance must be sacrificed to honour a deal giving Russia dominance in Eastern Europe. The Salerno turn transformed the PCI’s role in the resistance. Class struggle was now to be replaced by ‘national unity’ with the bosses, the monarchy, ex-fascists, and anyone not overtly in the Nazi camp. The May 1944 edition of the PCI’s guerrilla newspaper, Il Combattente, insisted that ‘every disagreement about the regime we want in our country, every legitimate reform, if it is not urgent, must take second place, be set aside, be delayed until after the victory’123 What a contrast to its words six months before: ‘The struggle of peasants and workers for their immediate demands is sacrosanct, unavoidable [and] must be linked to the armed struggle without which both would sooner or later suffocate.’124
Some rank and file activists saw Togliatti’s move as ‘an act of betrayal’.125 It ‘caused perplexity, especially among those who were in jail for years’.126 Even prominent individuals such as Amendola admitted:
‘as the Central Committee carried out its political activity along the lines of national unity, nearly all the groups with which it was in contact … tended not to understand or approve.’127
Scoccimarro, found Togliatti’s views ‘absolutely inopportunune, and it is to be hoped they are not repeated’.128
The staunchly republican Action Party, which had been more middle class, white collar, and moderate than the PCI,129 was now to its left. Valiani initially thought news reports of the Salerno turn were a forgery, and noted the glee with which Mussolini’s Republic of Salò described the PCI as selling out to royalty.130 The Action Party warned Togliatti that he threatened to split the anti-fascist movement.
One consequence of the Salerno turn was the growth of revolutionary movements outside the PCI advocating ‘the class struggle transposed on to an international plane’.131 By June 1944 the Stella Rossa (Red Star) group, which accused the PCI of betraying the working class and joining the bourgeoisie, had as many members as the PCI in the key industrial city of Turin.132 Bandiera Rossa (Red Flag) had more fighters in Rome than the PCI. This movement thought the PCI had forfeited its right to call itself communist.133
However, Togliatti held a trump card: his association with the USSR and its Red Army, which at that very moment was hurling back the Nazis on the Eastern Front. As Russian forces approached Flossenburg concentration camp a captured Garibaldini inmate described how he ‘heard a roar … Those cannons were the voice of Stalin’.134 Another prisoner, though an Action Party member, expressed disappointment at being liberated by US soldiers rather than the Red Army. Togliatti’s Salerno turn drew legitimacy from the myth that Russia represented ‘actually existing socialism’, or as street graffiti expressed it, the USSR ‘truly relied on the poor, the humble, the proletarians and workers …’.135 Before Togliatti’s somersault ‘the bosses’ were described as ‘vampires who feed on labour, these profiteers from war and German occupation …’.136 Now, wielding Soviet authority, the PCI leadership demanded its Italian followers unite with ‘industrialists, intellectuals, priests, ex-fascists … no-one is excluded’.137 Therefore, those who raised clenched fists or wore symbols like the hammer and sickle must be dealt with ‘severely and made to tow the party line’.138
In return for financial support the resistance also accepted the ‘Rome Protocols’ which stated:
‘As the enemy withdraws, all components [of the partisans] will come under direct command of the [Allied] Commander-in-Chief … and will obey any order issued by him or by Allied Military Government on his behalf, including such orders to disband and surrender their arms, when required to do so.’139
There were limits to how far the PCI leadership could move rightwards, because it still had to placate its membership, compete with rival political groupings, and retain bargaining strength in the post-war era. Card-carrying Communist Party members were a minority and partisans were not automatons. Lines of communication and command were tenuous; and formal hierarchical structures rarely corresponded to the anarchic conditions of combat on the ground. So the PCI did not entirely abandon radical language. Squaring the circle, Togliatti still called for an ‘insurrection’, but it would not be ‘socialist or communist but for national liberation to destroy fascism’.140 Equally, the PCI rejected attentism and Allied efforts to marginalise the partisans’. It encouraged the establishment of CLNs in every village, district and factory.141 This institutionalisation of the movement was simultaneously a means of defying the AMGOT and royal government, a means of exerting control from above, and a method of organising a more efficient struggle from below. Nevertheless, a tense relationship between people’s war and the imperialist war currents within the resistance movement persisted.
By April 1945 the Allied offensive seemed poised to finally break into the North. At that moment the CLNAI issued Directive No. 16, its call to ‘national insurrection’. Sounding a note of realism it cautioned that ‘the Allies may decide, for one reason or another, to withhold their support, instead of making the contribution for which we have asked’. Nevertheless, ‘Partisan formations will attack and eliminate Nazi-Fascist headquarters and effect the liberation of cities, towns and villages … [We] will proclaim a general strike … the culmination of the people’s long campaign for freedom and the expression of their unshakable determination.’142
During the month that the final liberation of Italy took to complete, the two types of war complemented each other, with the Allied armies attacking at the front while partisans struck from the rear. Immense general strikes shook the northern industrial cities and thwarted German plans for a ‘scorched earth’ policy of destroying the North’s infrastructure. Yet the distinction between the parallel wars did not disappear. A good example was the liberation of Genoa, whose story has been told by Basil Davidson, a British Liaison Officer working with the partisans.
Genoa was a port city that, along with Milan and Turin, formed the ‘industrial triangle’ powering Italian economic development. In April 1945 there were over 15,000 strongly armed Germans in occupation.143 In a move similar to von Choltitz’s in Paris, General Meinhold offered to declare Genoa an open city if the partisans allowed the Wehrmacht to retreat unhindered. On 23 April the CLN decided to prevent Meinhold’s forces fighting elsewhere, by making an immediate stand. At this time the partisans numbered some 6,000. Lacking adequate supplies from the Allies, most were minimally armed.144 Nevertheless they fought the Nazis to a standstill and on 25 April 9,000 Germans surrendered uncondition-ally. Two days later, a 7,000-strong section tried to break out, but eventually surrendered to a force of just 300 SAP fighters.145
The CLN had liberated Genoa. At that very moment the US Army appeared in the shape of General Almond. Not speaking Italian he could only address the CLN leadership via the intermediary of Davidson:
‘Tell them,’ General Almond said, ‘that my troops have liberated their city, and they are free men.
’A silence followed: which continued.
The general looked at me with some surprise: couldn’t I speak the language?146
Davidson, who had fought alongside the partisans and knew what they had achieved, dared not translate Almond’s words. He continues:
Then Providence intervened … There came, from outside that room, the sudden din of shouts and uproar. We rushed through the floor-to-ceiling windows to a balcony giving on that street of arcades.
Looking down, we saw far up that street the dense fore-ranks of a crowd of advancing men, and then we saw it was a column, a column of German prisoners a dozen or more abreast, hundreds of them, thousands of them, marching down that street unarmed but with armed partisans on either side. Then we went back into the salon and General Almond gave me a measuring glance and said, ‘All right’.147
The example of Genoa was repeated in various ways across the whole of northern Italy. Despite General Alexander’s unfortunate statement and the withholding of substantial supplies of weapons to all but the attentists, the resistance had played a significant part in the liberation.
The irony was that it would be disarmed, not by the Germans, but from within. The working class had often been the spearhead of the movement, but the party to which it was loyal accepted a return to capitalist normality. General Almond had no option but to acknowledge the work of the CLN on the day Genoa was freed, but immediately afterwards Davidson received new words to translate from a British brigadier: ‘Tell them, will you please, that the committee, this committee, is dissolved as from tomorrow. All their functions cease. All their responsibilities are assumed by AMGOT.’148 But the Anglo-Americans lacked the ability to enforce their demands, as Davidson explains:
Those severe Ligurians listened in silence. … they had reckoned with its coming. That was one large reason why they had launched an insurrection and carried it through. And they were right. What the CLN had foreseen, this CLN as well as other CLNs held good. AMGOT officers might have all the force of the Allied armies at their call, but it proved beyond all practical powers of AMGOT to remove the democratic nominees now placed in positions of responsibility.149
The Anglo-Americans could not do it, but as Davidson explains, the political leaders could. They had made commitments and these ‘had to be carried through. The democratic nominees were not eliminated; but they had to assist in the elimination of their movement. The CLNs were set aside and left to vanish in futility.’150 If imperialism robbed Italy’s resistance of the opportunity to transform the fundamental structure of society, its achievement was still undeniable, and utterly different to the work of both Axis and Allied rulers. Despite the efforts of the AMGOT, the Italian capitalists, and the ex-fascists, the people’s war left an indelible mark on subsequent Italian politics, even if this was mainly reflected through the strengthened position of the PCI that had betrayed it.
See endnotes and bibliography at source.
Chapter 9-10 (127-159) from A People’s History of the Second World War, by Donny Gluckstein (Pluto Press, 06.14.2012), published by OAPEN under the terms of an Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license.