Italian Liberation Day

Angela

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April 25th is Italian Liberation Day, celebrating the end of the Civil War, Fascist rule and the Nazi occupation. I only hope people remain grateful and don't forget what it all cost.

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Benito_Mussolini
The death of Benito Mussolini, the Italian fascist dictator, occurred on 28 April 1945, in the final days of World War II in Europe, when he was summarily executed by anti-fascist partisans in the small village of Giulino di Mezzegra in northern Italy. The "official"[1] version of events is that Mussolini was shot by Walter Audisio, a communist partisan who used the nom de guerre of "Colonel Valerio". However, since the end of the war, the circumstances of Mussolini's death, and the identity of his killer, have been subjects of continuing confusion, dispute and controversy in Italy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Audisio
Walter Audisio (June 28, 1909, Alessandria – October 11, 1973, Rome) was an Italian partisan and communist politician. According to the official version, he was responsible for the death of Benito Mussolini, the Italian dictator.

The interesting part in this story is that Walter Audisio nom de guerre "Comandante Valerio", in November 1957 donated this weapon to Albanian communists leaders.
The weapon was kept hidden until 1980, after this year, the weapon was exhibited at the National History Museum in Tirana.
And this is the weapon: a machine gun, French manufacturing, model Mas i 1938-s, caliber 7,65L– F.20830.
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Beside it, a sign informs: "With this weapon, on April 28, 1945, a unit of Italian Partisans shot the fascist leader Benito Mussolini."
 
Many of them were communists or anarchists, but not all. There were also socialists, members of Christian political action groups, returning soldiers, and just young boys and men who were trying to hide from the German patrols rounding up young, able bodied men and sending them to Germany for slave labor. My great uncle hollowed out half of the terraces planted with vines and built secret rooms not only for stores, but to hide young men until they could make it into the mountains to join the partisans. You also had a good number of escaped (or freed by local Italians) Allied prisoners of war, augmented in some cases by British and American officers who were parachuted into the mountains.

The latter was the case in Zeri, near Pontremoli in the Lunigiana, where a British major established an International Brigade. Like most of the groups dominated by soldiers, Allied and Italian, they were, in my opinion, more disciplined. There is still controversy as to whether some of the actions engaged in by the Communist groups actually accomplished enough to justify the massacres that were visited upon the villages in the area.

We even had a German soldier who joined the partisans out of disgust at the massacres that were taking place: Rudolph Jacobs
See:
http://www.labiennale.org/en/cinema...f-sel/controcampo-italiano/rudolf-jacobs.html

All of the pictures I'm posting in this thread are of partisans from my own areas...Emilia (Parma and Reggio Emilia), La Spezia,the Lunigiana and Massa/Carrara.


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Nilde Lotti:
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A documentary has been made of the International Brigade led by Major Gordon Lett and based in Zeri near Pontremoli.

For those who can understand Italian, this is his son, Brian Lett, at the presentation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EEkcllSOdwE

This is the documentary:
Rastrellamento nello zerasco del 20 gennaio 1945

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wdmiNyrOo60

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7V47UodDF_0

Not all the women and children were as lucky as the ones at Zeri. At Sant'Anna di Stazzema 560 old men, women, and children were killed with bayonets, machine guns, and grenades.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sant'Anna_di_Stazzema_massacre

I have tremendous respect for the grandson of an SS sergeant who participated in this massacre: he went there in 2015 to meet the residents, including a man who was a child at the time and somehow managed to survive. He speaks in English and then his words are interpreted into Italian.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s3KuCfASS8c
 
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it is nice that you kept all these pictures

tell me about these massacres
where they massacres commited by the German nazis in revenge for sabotage by the partizans?
 
it is nice that you kept all these pictures

tell me about these massacres
where they massacres commited by the German nazis in revenge for sabotage by the partizans?

The worst of the massacres were conducted by SS troops, many of them men who had been tasked with liquidating Jews on the eastern front, but Hitler had ordered that generally for every German soldier killed there would be reprisals on the order of 10 to 1 from among the civilian population. Local commanders in some areas capped it at 50 civilians. German regular army units also participated in these round-ups and executions, and even in some of the massacres, as on Monte Sole in Emilia, for example. This went up to the highest levels of the German military. On June 17, 1944, General Kesselring promulgated the following order: "The fight against the partisans must be carried out with all means at our disposal and with the utmost severity. I will protect any commander who exceeds our usual restraint in the choice and severity of the means he adopts whilst fighting partisans." He was also directly implicated in the Ardeatine Massacre. As far as I'm concerned he should have been executed as a war criminal, and would have been had many people not perjured themselves on his behalf and created enough ambiguity that the court couldn't decide on his guilt.

To turn to specifics, indeed sometimes the massacre would be in reprisal for a specific act of the Partisans. That's what happened in Rome at the Ardeatine Caves because a group of Communist partisans detonated a bomb as an SS regiment passed by. I don't weep any tears for SS men, but it was a reckless act, partly undertaken because the landing at Anzio gave the partisans the impression that the Allies would soon arrive. As it happens, they didn't, and I think it was a highly questionable decision. They should have waited to coordinate with the Allies. On the other hand, the people brought to that cave had nothing to do with any of it; they were innocent.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ardeatine_massacre

Harboring Jews also resulted in the people, and families of those people, either being sent to the camps or just being summarily executed. In some cases the killing extended to all the villagers, or at least the village was burned down. There were also mass round-ups in the factories to hunt out socialists who might have been agitating for work slow downs because they were producing war materiel; one of my distant cousins in Torino was sent to an extermination camp for that kind of activity.

In my own area, as I alluded to, some groups of young Communists and Anarchists started to organize, and set up camps in the mountain areas, but they were joined by returning soldiers, Allied prisoners of war, and just young men trying to escape slave labor. Sometimes those young men came from nearby villages, and their family members would bring food to them, or blankets etc. Other times it was commandeered. There is no group whose members all adhere to the highest moral standards. The resistance groups also shared what they got from the Allies, and not just food. One of my great-aunts got married in a dress made from parachute silk.

In the case of Sant'Anna di Stazzema, that is basically the situation. The Germans knew that there was a large band of partisans in those mountains and came looking for them. When they got there, guided by some collaborators, the partisan groups had already left the area. The people who were left were local peasants and lots of refugees from the city, including a man who later became a famous rabbi. Almost all of them were slaughtered, including over a hundred children. As I said, in this case these were SS troops, men who had served on the eastern front, but that wasn't always the case.

This is a video with English subtitles of what went on there.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tc8OaVkWjfI

Another very famous massacre took place in Emilia. An excellent book has been written about it called "Silence on Monte Sole". It's been out for a long time, so it can now be purchased for about two dollars.
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2545657.Silence_on_Monte_Sole

Closer to my own home the brutality was on a smaller scale, but very widespread. This is a map of the events that took place there. In my own village a group of young men was hiding up the mountain in the woods. They broke into a German ammunition depot and stole some rifles. Two days later the Germans arrived, randomly picked five men from the village and hung them from a tree in front of the church. My mother, then a small child, saw them swinging there when she went to church on Sunday. That was the same church where she married my father. Her uncle's farm, where they were seeking shelter after fleeing the city, had been repeatedly searched by German soldiers. For the rest of her life she would get nervous when she heard people shouting in German.
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This isn't to say that these German soldiers were all horrible, because they weren't. Some of the doctors treated Italians as well as the German troops, some soldiers tried to help with food on occasion, and yes, some dated our girls, although the girls paid for it after the war was over. Well, in all but one case. One very young regular army soldier, who did give out food and medicine, and fell in love with a local girl, didn't retreat with the other Germans. He stayed behind, hidden by her family until the chaos died down, and still lived in the area when I was a young girl. He always spoke a very fractured Italian, with a very strong German accent, which, being an impudent child, I used to imitate. He was very good-natured about it. :)

Anyway, I've always been amazed by how little non-Italians know about our War of Liberation. There are scores of books in English about the French Resistance, which was infinitesimally small in comparison, but very few about Italy. One book which tries to correct the balance is "Forgotten Battles: Italy's War of Liberation, 1943-1945", by Charles T. O'Reilly, which is available on google books.

There, more than you wanted to know perhaps, but these are stories central to my identity and that of my family. These are the stories I heard over and over again growing up, and that are still repeated at all the memorial services year after year, and collected and codified by the myriad groups dedicated to that task. Even generally, Italian post war political history can't be understood without understanding this period and these people.

Ed. I posted the wrong video upthread about the German man who came to meet the descendants of the people of Stazzema. Here it is:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s3KuCfASS8c
 
it is nice that you kept all these pictures

tell me about these massacres
where they massacres commited by the German nazis in revenge for sabotage by the partizans?

The Marzabotto massacre was a World War II war crime consisting in a mass murder of at least 770 civilians by Nazis, which took place in the territory around the small village of Marzabotto, in the mountainous area south of Bologna, Emilia-Romagna. It was the worst massacre of civilians committed by the Waffen SS in Western Europe during the war.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marzabotto_massacre

The Sant'Anna di Stazzema massacre was a Nazi German war crime committed in the hill village of Sant'Anna di Stazzema in Tuscany, Italy, in the course of an operation against the Italian resistance movement during the Italian Campaign of World War II. On 12 August 1944, about 560 (130 children) local villagers and refugees were murdered and their bodies burnt in a scorched earth policy action by the German occupation forces of the Waffen-SS. These crimes have been defined as voluntary and organized acts of terrorism by the Military Tribunal of La Spezia and the highest Italian court of appeal.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sant'Anna_di_Stazzema_massacre


The Ardeatine massacre, or Fosse Ardeatine massacre (Italian: Eccidio delle Fosse Ardeatine) was a mass killing carried out in Rome, Lazio, on 24 March 1944 by German occupation troops during the Second World War as a reprisal for a partisan attack conducted on the previous day in central Rome against the SS Police Regiment Bozen. The massacre was perpetrated without prior public notice in a little-frequented rural suburb of the city, inside the tunnels of the disused quarries of pozzolana, near the Via Ardeatina. By mistake, a total of 335 Italian prisoners were taken, five in excess of the 330 called for.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ardeatine_massacre


The Boves massacre was a World War II war crime that took place on 8 September 1943 in the comune of Boves, Piedmont, Italy. Up to 195 Italian civilians were killed and 350 houses were destroyed by artillery fire of the Waffen-SS under the command of SS-Sturmbannführer Joachim Peiper. Two German NCOs had been captured and were held by Italian partisans in the vicinity of the town. After obtaining their release, Peiper ordered the destruction of the town under disputed circumstances.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boves_massacre

This list is incomplete.

29 September – 5 October 1944, Marzabotto massacre (Marzabotto, Emilia-Romagna; between 770 and 1,830 civilians killed)
12 August 1944, Sant'Anna di Stazzema massacre (Sant'Anna di Stazzema, Tuscany; 560 people, including children)
29 June 1944, Civitella-Cornia-San Pancrazio massacre (Abruzzo; 203 people, including children)
Ardeatine massacre (Rome, Lazio; 335 prisoners executed)
Boves massacre (Cuneo, Piedmont; 189 civilians and partisans killed in two separate massacres)
Padule Fucecchio massacre (Fucecchio, Tuscany; 176 civilians killed on 23 August 1944)
Cavriglia-Castelnuovo dei Sabbioni massacre (Tuscany; 173 civilians killed on 4 July 1944)
Vinca massacre (Fivizzano, Tuscany; between 160 and 178 civilians executed on 24 August 1944)
Fosse del Frigido massacre (Massa, Tuscany; 146-149 prisoners murdered on 10 September 1944)
Pietransieri massacre (Roccaraso, Abruzzo; 128 civilians killed on 21 November 1943)
Stia massacre (Stia, Tuscany; 122 civilians killed between 12 and 15 April 1944)
San Terenzo Monti massacre (Fivizzano, Tuscany; 110 civilians and 52 political prisoners killed on 21 August 1944)
Valla massacre (Fivizzano, Tuscany; 103 civilians killed on 19 August 1944)
Serra di Ronchidoso massacre (Gaggio Montano, Emilia-Romagna; over 100 civilians killed on 28-29 September 1944)
Verghereto massacre (Verghereto, Emilia-Romagna; 96 civilians killed between 22 and 25 July 1944)
Massacre of Monchio, Susano and Costrignano (Palagano, Emilia-Romagna; between 79 and 136 civilians killed on 18 March 1944)
Leonessa and Cumulata massacre (Leonessa, Lazio; 51 civilians killed between 2 and 7 April 1944)
Cumiana massacre (Cumiana, Piedmont; 51 civilians killed on 3 April 1944)
Tavolicci massacre (Verghereto, Emilia-Romagna; 64 civilians killed on 22 July 1944)
Forno massacre (Massa, Tuscany; 72 civilians killed on 13 June 1944)
Gubbio mssacre (Gubbio, Umbria; 40 civilians executed on 22 June 1944)
Valdine massacre (Fivizzano, Tuscany; 52 hostages executed in August 1944)
Casaglia massacre (Marzabotto, Emilia-Romagna; 42 civilians killed on 29 September 1944)
Bergiola Foscalina (it) massacre in Carrara (Carrara, Tuscany; 72 civilians killed on 16 September 1944)
Madonna dell'Albero massacre (Ravenna, Emilia-Romagna; 56 civilians killed on 27 November 1944)
"La Romagna" massacre (Molina di Quosa, San Giuliano Terme, Tuscany; 75 civilians killed on 11 August 1944)
San Polo di Arezzo massacre (Arezzo, Tuscany; 65 civilians killed on 14 July 1944)
Certosa di Farneta massacre (Lucca, Tuscany; 60 civilians killed between 2 and 10 September 1944)
Guardistallo massacre (Guardistallo, Tuscany; 46 civilians killed on 29 June 1944)
Massaciuccoli-Massarosa massacre (Massaciuccoli, Massarosa, Tuscany; 41 civilians killed between 2 and 5 September 1944)
Fossoli-Carpi massacre (Carpi, Emilia-Romagna; 67 civilians killed on 12 July 1944)
Turchino Pass massacre (Fontanafredda, Liguria; 59 civilians executed on 19 May 1944)
Pedescala massacre (Valdastico, Veneto; 82 civilians killed between 30 April and 2 May 1945)
 
both, thanks for sharing
I must admit, for me it is a bit to much info to grasp
but I understand that for you, this history which happened just 2 generations ago is - and should be - very important to you
 
both, thanks for sharing
I must admit, for me it is a bit to much info to grasp
but I understand that for you, this history which happened just 2 generations ago is - and should be - very important to you

Bicicleur, consider that many survivors, especially those who were kids in those days and they lost their parents and all the relatives executed by German troops, are still alive. I personally know one of them. The memory of these episodes in some areas of Emilia-Romagna and Tuscany is still very vivid, in Rome and Abruzzo as well.

Trying to be objective, there were also episodes of violence committed by the Allied powers, one is narrated in a famous De Sica's film, La Ciociara. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marocchinate Others happened during the allied invasion of Sicily, like the Biscari massacre. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biscari_massacre

Bicicleur, you're right, it happened 2 generations ago only. Also consider that the liberation was the end of a cruent civil war, Italians against Italians. In a country already divided and split into factions like Italy, it's still an open wound that divides the country further even today.
 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monte_Cassino
Monte Cassino (sometimes written Montecassino) is a rocky hill about 130 kilometres (81 mi) southeast of Rome, Italy, 2 kilometres (1.2 mi) to the west of the town of Cassino and 520 m (1,706.04 ft) altitude. Site of the Roman town of Casinum, it is best known for its historic abbey. St. Benedict of Nursia established his first monastery, the source of the Benedictine Order, here around 529.
The hilltop sanctuary was the site of the Battle of Monte Cassino in 1944, where the building was destroyed by Allied bombing and rebuilt after the war.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Monte_Cassino
The Battle of Monte Cassino (also known as the Battle for Rome and the Battle for Cassino) was a costly series of four assaults by the Allies against the Winter Line in Italy held by Axis forces during the Italian Campaign of World War II. The intention was a breakthrough to Rome.

[h=1]The Hidden Truth of WW II - Monte Cassino[/h]

Monte_Cassino_Opactwo_1.JPG

The rebuilt Abbey of Monte Cassino
 
There are lots and lots of people still alive who were around ten or twelve when all of these events took place. There are also people who were in their late teens and early twenties and were resistance fighters or messengers or gathered information for them, at least in my area. I don't know, maybe we have more than our share of long lived people. One of my great aunts lived to be 94. She died only a few years ago. She still had all her wits about her, and those days were crystal clear in her memory. I think suffering will do that. Poor thing, the memories were still so clear of the starvation of that time that even at the pattona festival (a crepe made of chestnut flour) she refused to eat any; she said they went months with nothing much else to eat but chestnuts, and she promised herself she'd never eat chestnuts again.

As to war crimes, there's absolutely no moral equivalency between the two invading armies, and I say that as someone whose native city was flattened by the Allies and who has relatives, Italian sailors, wounded by shrapnel from Allied bombs.

On the Allied side you're talking about one set of Moroccan troops and one isolated occurrence with POWs. On the other side you have the systematic slaughter of thousands and thousands of old men, women, children, even babies torn out of their mother's wombs. Then add in the thousands of Italian soldiers disarmed and then executed by their former "allies".

I'm very aware that to some extent most Italians "drank the Kool Aid" before the war. Some of the things Mussolini said were correct. He did some things right. Then, most people are not all that political, and just want to keep their heads down and get on with their lives. If you wanted a good job, especially a civil service job, or preferment in industry, you had to join the Party. I have family members who did just that. Yes, it was a totalitarian state, people were being indoctrinated by propaganda, they killed Matteotti, some people were sent into exile, others were handled roughly, given castor oil to drink etc., as happened to other relatives, but it wasn't Nazi Germany. I hold no rancor for people who accommodated to the situation or who felt it was a better alternative than Soviet style Communism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giacomo_Matteotti

That all changed when Italy pulled out of the war in that reckless way, betrayed, as always, by her leaders, most horribly by her idiot Savoyard king. As I said, thousands of Italian boys were butchered by their erstwhile "allies". Suddenly, trains started leaving for the death camps, and they were filled not only with Jews, but with socialist "sympathizers" of all sorts, and eventually by anyone who dared to protest the rape of the country. Italy was systematically starved, and her food sent to Germany. More thousands of young men were rounded up and sent to be worked to death in camps in Germany. Eventually, when the Americans started moving north, the Germans, desperate, and encountering resistance groups, groups that increased by the day in response to German actions, treated the Italians in the vicinity just as they had treated the Jews in eastern Europe.

Any Italian fascists who cooperated with them willingly at this point had all that blood on their hands, and as far as I'm concerned whatever "rough justice" was meted out to them was more than deserved. Too bad more of them didn't pay and instead so many were allowed to scurry back under the rocks where they belonged.
 
As to war crimes, there's absolutely no moral equivalency between the two invading armies, and I say that as someone whose native city was flattened by the Allies and who has relatives, Italian sailors, wounded by shrapnel from Allied bombs.

On the Allied side you're talking about one set of Moroccan troops and one isolated occurrence with POWs. On the other side you have the systematic slaughter of thousands and thousands of old men, women, children, even babies torn out of their mother's wombs. Then add in the thousands of Italian soldiers disarmed and then executed by their former "allies"

I do agree with you. There's absolutely no moral equivalency between the two invading armies.
 
I let April 25th pass without note this year. I redress it here.


The liberation of La Spezia:

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Making sure these people are never forgotten: Sant'Anna down the coast.

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Both sides thought in their mind that they were part of the right side of history, and both loved the Country. (Nonno said that.)
The Fascists of Italy were not the same as the Nazis of Germany.
By adding the Monarchici, it gets even more confusing.
History is complicated.
To the victor go the spoils, as it should be.
Go Italy.
 
Both sides thought in their mind that they were part of the right side of history, and both loved the Country. (Nonno said that.)
The Fascists of Italy were not the same as the Nazis of Germany.
By adding the Monarchici, it gets even more confusing.
History is complicated.
To the victor go the spoils, as it should be.
Go Italy.

The ones who helped the Germans commit these horrors were no better than they were, and should have paid with their lives. There may not have been all that many of them, but even a few was too many. I'm glad that when it was known who they were they were executed. Good riddance. To commit these kinds of atrocities is already beyond the pale, but to do it to your own people just adds to the horror.

The horrors of the post 1943 period and even before cannot be completely laid at the feet of the Germans. To assert that is dishonest.



Anyway, belated 25 Aprile, and VIVA ITALIA!

 

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