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The overthrow of Mussolini, far from bringing a cessation of bloodshed and freeing Italy to embrace the Allies, exposed the land to devastation at the hands of both warring armies. On 13 October, the new government declared war on Germany. The view of many Italians about their nation’s change of allegiance, and about the Germans, was expressed in a letter one man wrote two days later: ‘I won’t fight on their side – nor, since we have been guilty of betrayal, against them, although I think them disgusting.’ Origo noted, ‘The great mass of Italians “tira a campare” – just rub along.’ Emanuele Artom, a member of a Torinese Jewish intellectual resistance group, wrote: ‘Half Italy is German, half is English and there is no longer an Italian Italy. There are those who have taken off their uniforms to flee the Germans; there are those who are worried about how they will support themselves; and finally there are those who announce that now is the moment of choice, to go to war against a new enemy.’ Artom himself was captured, tortured and executed in the following year.

Nazi repression and fear of being deported to Germany for forced labour provoked a dramatic growth of partisan activity, especially in the north of Italy. Young men took to the mountains and pursued lives of semi-banditry: by the war’s end, almost 150,000 Italians were under arms as guerrillas. Political divisions caused additional factional warfare in many areas, notably between royalists and communists. Some fascists continued to fight alongside the Germans, while the Allies raised their own Italian units to reinforce the overstretched Anglo-American armies. Few such recruits proved enthusiastic: when an Italian artillery battery fighting with the Allies was inspected by the king’s son, Crown Prince Umberto, gunner Eugenio Corti found himself pitying the royal visitor, ‘leader of a people skilled in discovering scapegoats for their own cowardice’, united only in a desperate desire for all the belligerents to quit their shores.

In June 1944, amid the euphoria of the advance on Rome, Alexander made a gravely ill-judged broadcast appeal to Italy’s partisans, calling on them to rise against the Germans. Many communities consequently suffered savage repression when the Allied breakthrough proved inconclusive. After the war, Italians compared Anglo-American incitement to a partisan revolt, followed by their subsequent abandonment of the population to retribution, with the Russians’ failure to succour Warsaw during its equally disastrous rising in the autumn of 1944. The lesson was indeed the same: Allied commanders who promoted guerrilla warfare behind the Axis lines bore a heavy moral responsibility for the horrors that followed, in exchange for marginal military advantage.

The Germans, having previously regarded their Italian allies as mere poltroons, now viewed them as traitors. ‘We are poor wretches, poor beings left to the mercy of events, without homeland, without law or sense of honour,’ wrote Lt. Pedro Ferreira among the Italian forces in Yugoslavia, where many of his comrades were shot by the Germans after the armistice. ‘Italians, after this shame, can never again lift up their heads and speak of honour. Are we betrayed or betrayers? What fate will be in store for us when we have changed our flag three times in two days?’ Kesselring ruled Italy with a ruthlessness vividly documented in his order of 17 June 1944: ‘The fight against the partisans must be conducted with all means at our disposal and with utmost severity. I will protect any commander who exceeds our usual restraint in the choice and severity of the methods he adopts against partisans. In this connection the principle holds good that a mistake in the choice of methods in executing one’s orders is better than failure or neglect to act.’ He added on 1 July: ‘Wherever there is evidence of considerable numbers of partisan groups a proportion of the male population will be shot.’

The most notorious massacre of innocents was carried out