Swiss Purgatory during the Italian Social Republic (RSI): Three Different Transitions to the Post Fascist Italy of the BlackShirt Elite

The events of the summer of 1943 – the fall of Fascism and its survival within a smaller pseudo-State named Repubblica Sociale Italiana (RSI) subject to Nazi occupation in northern Italy – gave the “historical” antifascists the status of “founding fathers” of democratic Italy. A much more thorny and ambiguous situation, was faced by those who had decided, or had been forced, to break with Mussolini after the Ordine Grandi reversals (25 July 1943) and the Armistice (8 September 1943). This was especially complex for the “blackshirt” elite, composed by men who had pursued careers up to the top of the regime’s hierarchy at the totalitarian turning point of late 1930s (pro-Hitler, racist, anti-Semitic, imperialist, belligerent), contributing to legitimate those “irrevocable decisions” on authoritarian censorship, social eugenics, war and persecution. Having fallen in a matter of weeks, for various reasons, from top positions in the Axis system to the status of “traitorous enemies” of the RSI, these seriously compromised figures were turned into a composite diaspora of “humanitarian refugees” – as they had often been sentenced to death in absentia – who staged daring escapes from the only intact and neutral institutions at the country’s legal borders: the Vatican and, primarily, Switzerland. A considerable amount of ink has been shed on the reasons that led Switzerland (who run the perilous risk of barricaded neutrality in the midst of Stated controlled by Nazifascism) to act as a refuge for dissidents from the Axis, while maintaining close economic ties with the two dictatorships. Moreover, many studies have assessed the anthropological and political path of Italian fuoriuscitismo, grafted onto the “democratic laboratory” that liberal Swiss hospitality offered European post-war destinies. Nevertheless, the ambiguous and tormented relationship of this particular group of last minute “renegades” – moved by opportunism, necessity or voluntary rehabilitation – with the “Second Risorgimento” (as two prestigious anti-fascist refugees, Ettore Janni and Luigi Einaudi, defined the fight for the democratic rebirth of the Italian nation), has remained substantially overshadowed by the dazzling profiles of the more coherent and topical Resistance figures. Yet, this may not only throw light on Bern’s actual stance about the Axis’ southern front, namely the RSI (through the management of the Alpine border), but also articulate and restore its problematic complexity to the form taken by the Italian Republic’s new institutional and moral course in the Cold War context, between authoritarian legacies and pluralistic modernity. This exile and political reconfiguration process – from which some of the greatest figures of democratic Italy were to emerge – being intersected with the remnants of the small “Swiss Fascism” adventure, the reactionary demands of “Helvetian spiritualism”, the embryonic drives of the Western anti-communist, the revival of liberal and Christian democratic ideologies from the ashes of “black” corporatism, the “justificatory” minimizations and psychological rationalizations used to excuse a personal involvement within the Steel Pact, the desperate necessity to save a national spirit from the slaughterhouse of Mussolinian chauvinism. Three of the many Swiss experiences can shed considerable light on the fundamental attributes of the Italian elite’s belated and controversial transition beyond Fascism: those of Amintore Fanfani, Giuseppe Bastianini and Dino Alfieri.