The Body of Il Duce (12 page)

From 1947 on, after the broad wartime political front of the Committee of National Liberation split apart, the Christian Democrats stepped into the breach occupied by the
qualunquisti
to represent the political and antipolitical moods of the center-south on a national level. But in 1945 the disagreement over how to interpret Piazzale Loreto was still taking place at the local level, inside the Milan office of the Turin publishing house Einaudi, for example. In the summer of 1945 the Sicilian Communist writer Elio Vittorini sent out an outline of
Il Politecnico,
a forthcoming weekly, to other consultants at Einaudi. Vittorini's letter included the draft of an editorial evoking “Piazzale Loreto, with the figures of writers hanging upside down.” His memo asked, “Who should be hanging in Piazzale Loreto?… Who are the monsters of the contemporary literary scene?”
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Keen as Vittorini was on this question, it seems to have appealed little to his colleagues, for there was no mention of the events of April 29, 1945, in the first edition of
Il Politecnico
. That does not mean, though, that the magazine did not reflect the radical impulses then widespread in the intellectual left.

In his celebrated inaugural editorial Vittorini did in fact provide a list of literary monsters. Benedetto Croce was the only Italian mentioned, flanked by Thomas Mann, André Gide, Johan Huizinga, John Dewey, and other foreign intellectuals. According to Vittorini, their culture—moralistic rather than socialist, consolatory rather than radical, defenseless rather than armed—had not halted the horrors of Fascism, including the supreme horror of the extermination of children in concentration camps.
Il Politecnico
's art director, Albe Steiner, who invented the review's extraordinary graphic style, accompanied Vittorini's article not with a photo of bodies hung up by their heels but with a picture of a nameless dead partisan—an image of the “good” Italian rather than the evil one, but nevertheless an image depicting death.

Good and evil are also sharply distinguished in Vittorini's Resistance novel,
Men and Not Men
. Here, the corpses of anti-Fascists are human bodies, and they transmit their dignity to whoever happens to look at them. The corpses of Fascists are not human and thus elicit no mercy from the Resistance fighters. “Dogs,” says one worker. “Carrion by now,” another character replies. Not that the distinction between corpses and carrion was made only by the Communist Vittorini in his Resistance novel. In liberated Italy Fascists and anti-Fascists continued the battle over decent burial begun in the civil war. But now the power of burial was in the hands of veterans of the Resistance and it was the survivors of Salò who had to struggle to give their companions proper graves.

During the German occupation of Rome, workers at the Verano city cemetery carried out a courageous act of civil disobedience. Opening the caskets of Italians shot by the Nazis and condemned to burial in unmarked graves, they noted the features, the clothes, the wounds, and anything else that would help identify the bodies. After the Liberation, whole villages took part in the work to identify fallen partisans, digging up mass graves where they had been thrown and transporting the bodies to proper cemeteries. In Castelnuovo al Volturno, in Molise, the farmers, women, and children of the town turned out as undertakers for a renowned Resistance fighter, the anti-Fascist intellectual Giaime Pintor. The bodies of veterans of the Republic of Salò did not receive the same kind of spontaneous mercy, in part because the authorities tended to apply different standards to the Resistance and the Social Republic dead. Because of postwar logistical problems—mainly a shortage of railway transportation—it was forbidden to transfer bodies from military cemeteries to their places of origin. In practice, with the help of Resistance-aligned town councils, partisan organizations, and even the prefectures themselves, many families were able to bring home their fallen Resistance fighters. But the authorities were not disposed to bend the rules for supporters of the Social Republic. According to the caustic comment of one observer, there was more interest in “the national cadaver industry” in democratic Italy than there was respect for the dead.
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In the case of the Social Republic dead, there was often no one to exhume the bodies, particularly those of the numerous Fascists and collaborators who were killed in the “triangle of death,” part of Emilia-Romagna. At the beginning of 1946, for example, mass graves of Fascists were discovered in the towns of Casina, Campagnola, and Poviglio, in the province of Reggio Emilia. But according to the prefect, the exhumation order was met with resistance by the local population, which included many partisans. Nor were people willing to work as grave diggers, despite the high level of unemployment in the area. The local authorities themselves refused to cooperate with the Carabinieri and the prefecture in the search for other suspected mass graves nearby. Not until 1947, when the local partisan resistance softened, were officials able to exhume the bodies and proceed with burial.

In the letters they were allowed to write before being killed, some partisans expressed concern that their bodies would be put on display after their death. Writing to their families for the last time, some of the condemned of the Social Republic also imagined in detail the unpleasant fate awaiting their corpses. Eighteen-year-old Giulio Bianchini of the Second Light Infantry Regiment of Salò, shot in Piedmont on May 6, 1945, an only son, wrote a letter to his parents four days before he died that illustrates how the civil war tragically continued into the postwar period:

Don't come to search for my body, for not everyone in the world is like our people, and seeing you here there would be those who would laugh at you. They would be the ones who wanted me dead, who condemned me, killed me, perhaps even the mothers of those here who have died. I know you would not behave like this, Mother, but the people here would, for they don't understand the meaning of forgiveness. But you will be capable of pardon, my dear parents, won't you? I am sure you will. You will do it for me, and so that your feelings don't sink to the level of a vendetta.
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A letter like this reminds us that Mussolini was not the only Fascist denied a proper burial, nor was his the only case in which personal grief and collective mourning came together. Postwar Italy conducted a no-holds-barred battle over the bodies of Resistance fighters and Salò veterans, a battle to have a monopoly over memory and the civil war.

A tragicomic chapter of this battle took place in Barlassina, near Milan, in November 1946. During the German occupation the five bells of the local church had been confiscated and melted down. When the war was over, the townspeople took up a collection so that the priest could cast five new bells. The smallest of these, weighing a respectable six hundred kilos, was dedicated “To the dead of 1915–18 and 1940–45.” The cost of casting this bronze bell, seventy thousand lire, was paid in its entirety by a local notable, Mario Roncoroni, who was able to get the priest to agree to inscribe the bell with the name of his eighteen-year-old son, who had died fighting for the Social Republic. The bishop came to consecrate the new bells and then they were ready to be hung in the bell tower, which had been restored for the occasion. At this point some Socialist and Communist ex-partisans, scandalized by the inscription of the name of a Fascist soldier, threatened to destroy the bell, and teams of young Catholics organized a night watch to protect it. The mayor of Barlassina, a Christian Democrat, sided with the priest and the donor. The Socialists and Communists seized the occasion to accuse him of trading in war goods abandoned by the Germans. The controversy was finally resolved when the Carabinieri intervened and the partisans decided to desist. The bell with its inscription to the dead Fascist soldier was finally hung in the tower with the others.
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This was one of many clashes over inscriptions, if not on church bells then on monuments to the war dead. Socialist and Communist militants wanted only partisans to be honored, while Catholics insisted on commemorating all “the fallen in all the wars.” While the left sought to impose a religion of republicanism, the Church in the early postwar period put itself forward as the nation's chaplain, encouraging a blanket pardon for sins that tended to conflate individual responsibility with collective guilt. Millions of Italians—many of whom had been committed Fascists from World War I—were profoundly eager to see the distinction between Fascism and anti-Fascism disappear, while some non-Catholic moderates were inclined toward a conciliatory approach like that of the Christian Democrats. One of them was Indro Montanelli, a journalist known to Italian readers first as a Mussolini apologist, then as a war correspondent, and finally as an opponent of the Republic of Salò.

In the fall of 1945 Montanelli published a slim volume,
Here They Do Not Rest,
dedicated to “all the Italians who died in this war,” whether in prison, in the trenches, in the mountains, or in their cellars.
13
The book was composed of three ostensibly autobiographical texts that Montanelli pretended had been left him by an elderly priest as the spiritual last testaments of three victims of the civil war. All invented, one of the victims was an anti-Fascist, one a critical Fascist (much like Montanelli himself), and one a complete agnostic regarding the Fascist /anti-Fascist divide. Montanelli's purpose was to present a case for what he thought of as the “gray zone,” those Italians who took no obvious side.
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He was writing for all the people too polite to be involved in politics, to convince them to “remain bystanders” and not be swayed by the “professional anti-Fascists.”
15
Guglielmo Giannini, publisher of
Uomo qualunque
, was not mistaken when he praised the book as the gospel of the
qualunquista
. In the early postwar years, Montanelli was a key figure in persuading Italians that the conflict over Fascism and anti-Fascism should end with the death of Mussolini.

Here They Do Not Rest
: what better formulation of the troubled postmortem destiny of certain victims of the civil war? After the Liberation of Milan, the bodies of Blackshirts who had been executed were dumped by the wall of the Musocco cemetery, and there, under the hostile gaze of the partisan guards, mothers, wives, and girlfriends searched for familiar signs in the heap—the color of an item of clothing, the shape of a shoe—in order to identify their men. As for Mussolini, Claretta Petacci, and company, their bodies were buried in great haste and secrecy in section 16 of the cemetery in unmarked graves. In February 1946, when a false rumor began to circulate that Mussolini's and Petacci's bodies had been dug up by the British and taken to England, not even the Carabinieri were able to get cemetery officials to tell them which bodies were buried exactly where.

*   *   *

ON APRIL 11,
1946, the prefect of Milan received an anonymous letter on the letterhead of the Partito Fascista Democratico, or Democratic Fascist Party, proposing that the prefect himself, a stern man of the Resistance, agree to a political accord as well as to an ultimatum. The anonymous writer invited the “Communist democracy” of postwar Milan, as he called it, to “walk the path between Fascism and anti-Fascism” that the Fascist Party was ready to lay down. But this accord, said the letter, depended on the prefect's willingness to release the Fascist prisoners being held in the San Vittore prison and allow a mass to be held in a church in Milan to honor the Blackshirt victims of April 1945. The prefect had a week to make up his mind and issue a press release; failing that, the Democratic Fascist Party would begin a battle, to be fought with “terrible means and methods” in the name of the Fascist martyrs.
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The prefect, Ettore Troilo, gave no indication that he was overly worried; he limited himself to forwarding the anonymous letter to the minister of the interior, the Socialist Giuseppe Romita. Just the previous month, Troilo, in a monthly report, had denied that there was any risk that Fascism could be revived in the Lombardy region and suggested that Fascists—legally forced to operate in secret and living on the margins—were more likely to become common criminals. The prefect had not changed his opinion, not even when copies of
Lotta fascista
, the Democratic Fascist Party's newspaper, were circulated at a political meeting at the end of March. Yet
Lotta fascista
was a violent publication, full of virulent appeals to punish the “cannibals” of Piazzale Loreto and strike the preachers of the “vile word of the Jew of Trier” (Karl Marx), as well as demands that Mussolini's remains be reinterred at the Altar of the Nation in Rome's Piazza Venezia.
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But in Rome, Minister of the Interior Romita expressed some alarm about the appearance of the Fascist paper and sent a “very urgent” message to Troilo urging him to find the activists responsible as quickly as possible.

Thus, political and law enforcement officials had trouble evaluating whether clandestine neo-Fascism represented a real danger. Were the Democratic Fascist Party's threats merely words or did they reflect actual plans of action? In Rome, Romita was taking no chances: with just fifty days until the June 2 referendum on whether to abolish the monarchy in favor of a republic, he wanted to rule out any neo-Fascist attacks or blackmail. And, despite Troilo's lack of concern, there were many in Milan who were worried, especially about an ongoing conflict between police regulars, who served under the crown, and auxiliary police forces, made up of ex-partisans who had refused to work under the regulars' command. After the Liberation, the police had spent more time pursuing ex-Resistance fighters than veterans of the Republic of Salò, according to an April 11, 1946, report given to the Ministry of the Interior. This state of affairs had allowed the “rebirth of neo-Fascism.”
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But it was a small rebirth, if we are to judge by the numbers of clandestine neo-Fascists operating in the region between 1945 and 1946. The Mussolini Action Squads, which specialized in bombing the Committee of National Liberation's headquarters and distributing portraits of Mussolini, counted fewer than 300 members in all of northern Italy, while the Democratic Fascist Party had no more than 250.