Evening Post. TUESDAY, JANUARY 11, 1944. GANG REPRISALS IN ITALY

Evening Post, Volume CXXXVII, Issue 8, 11 January 1944, Page 4

Evening Post. TUESDAY, JANUARY 11, 1944. GANG REPRISALS IN ITALY

No unity splits. so badly as a terrorist unity splits, once the terror fails! Apart from the binding force of its ruthless power, a terror possesses no cement whatever, .and when it falls asunder its fall is great indeed. Consider, for instance, the fate that has overtaken Mussolini and Italian Fascism, and which is on the trail of Hitler and German Nazism. Only yesterday, Mussolini and Fascism commanded generals, admirals, and kings. The Royal House of Savoy became an appendage of the Fascist Grand Council, whose minions included generals of Right tendency as well as generals of the Left; all strings led to the Fascist Grand Council, and were centralised, above /the Council, in Mussolini himself. A most imposing unity, efficient, ruthless, apparently unconquerable. Yet at the sound of the Allied trumpet in Sicily and in Italy this unity splinters. Nothing remains intact. The Fascist Grand Council splits and deposes the Duce. Not; only does Mussolini's official household fall asunder; his own family divides against itself. In "the "showdown"- in the Grand Council the most advertised member of Mussolini's private household —his son-in-law Count Ciano, husband of the favourite Mussolini daughter, Edda—is exhibited as one of those who pull down the immaculate Founder of Fascism. If Brutus and Cassius had been sons or sons-in-law of Julius Caesar, Shakepeare would have added new scenes to his immortal play. And it would need a Shakespeare to deal adequately with the unmoral pinnacle to which Mussolini and' Fascism climbed, and from which they have tumbled headlong, with every kind of material, moral, and domestic degradation.

When Ciano and others of the Fascist Grand Council—including, it seems, Mussolini's "Abyssinian campaign leader, Marshal de Bono —pulled down the idol of Fascism, the affair did not stop at that melodramatic piece of iconoclasm. Into the next scene entered the German bayonet. The generals and admirals of Italy had to do some quick thinking, as a result of which some went to the Allies and thus became useful to the opposing camp on land or at sea; but at least one high ranker, de Bono, seems to have failed to get ay/ay. The position of all those Fascist Grand Councillors and other Italian heads who had gone against Mussolini became desperate when the German •bayonet picked up Mussolini and reinstated him, not indeed as the despot he used to be, but as a modern HumptyDumpty who, thanks to plastic surgery, can survive a great fall, and can be replaced somewhat insecurely on the nearest convenient wall. If .anyqne asks what use the Germans can make of a Mussolini Humpty-Dumpty Government salvaged from the ruins of Fascism, one answer seems to be that such an Administration can be used to exact Nazi-Fascist revenge on former Fascists who headed the breakaway. Just as the fall of France led to the Riom trials, which seem to have been protracted and abortive, so the temporary resurrection of Mussolini i has led to Verona trials, which seem to have been precipitate and probably fatal to all the accused within German reach. Riom reflected French judiciallegal delay; Verona reflects German ,speedy and ruthless punishment. But probably the Germans are using the pitiful Mussolini Administration to

give the death sentences an air of legality, and in the hope of washing bloodstains from Nazi hands.

If, as we assume, this "speciallyappointed extraordinary tribunal" at Verona derives its titular authority from the Mussolini rump Government, then its death sentences will spring technically from one gentleman of Verona (the former Duce, father-in-law of Ciano), but actually from two, the other being Hitler. Hitler, indeed, is the person primarily interested. He cannot afford to allow any of the persons who pushed a fellow-dictator off his perch to escape death, if death can.be inflicted by-the power of the German bayonet—the same bayonet that salvaged Mussolini from the political dump. However much the shadowy authority of an Italian Administration may be used to punish the destroyers of dictators, it is German power alone that enables that Administration itself to function, and the pending executions will be German executions just as much as were those that accompanied the purge of Roehm and others in Germany in 1934. Roehm was killed to reinsure Hitler, and the "specially-appointed extraordinary tribunal" at Verona proposes to kill these Italians primarily in the interest of the Fuhrer and for the purpose of warning discontented persons in Germany. At the Verona trial the voice may be the voice of Mussolini, but the hand is the hand of Hitler. In splitting the Mussolini family to its core Hitler symbolises what has happened to the Fascist Grand Council and to Fascism, also what will happen to the Hitler gang and to Nazism. So the gang reprisals in Italy not only reflect what has happened there, but are prophetic in -respect of German events to come.