39 See ‘Esame della corrispondenza censurata al 30 giugno 1944’, which mentions this letter sent from Gabiano, Alessandria province: ‘Too many massacres! In a village near here they shot fifty-seven villagers, all innocents, taken as hostages’ (ACS, SPD, CR, RSI, envelope 9, folder 3).
40 See Formazioni GL, p. 273.
41 H. Michel, ‘Le Maquis au-delà de la légende’, in Le Monde aujourd’hui, 30–31 December 1984, p. xi.
42 ‘Relazione sulla situazione delle brigate d’assalto Garibaldi dell’Oltrepò Pavese’, 3 September 1944, signed ‘Piero’ (Le Brigate Garibaldi, II, p. 304).
43 Letter from the commissar Tino and the commander Nanni, of the 16th Perotti Brigade, to the Command of the 1st Piedmont division, 6 August 1944 (IG, BG, 04375).
44 Letter from the delegation of the Command of the Garibaldi Brigades for North Emilia, to the delegate of the province of Reggio Emilia, 27 July 1944 (Le Brigate Garibaldi, vol. II, p. 168).
45 See, for example, the report by the commissar of the 12th Brigade, Gracco, to the ‘delegate-inspector of the North Emilia Garibaldi Brigades’, 2 August 1944 (ibid., p. 187). See also Dellavalle, Operai, p. 111, and Quazza, Un diario partigiano, pp. 157–8, 164, 177. Today, superstitious partisans are reluctant to talk about their own absence during the massacre of the civilian population by the Nazi-Fascists in Guardistallo (Pisa). My thanks to Katia Sonetti for this information.
46 This case was reported – also being seen as a consequence of the bad behaviour of some partisans – in ‘Relazione e ricognizione zona di operazione della Divisione Piave, Brigata C. Battisti’, signed by the brigade commander, 14 November 1944 (IG, BG, 06963).
47 ‘Resistere con audacia, resistere attaccando’, editorial in Voce Operaia, 15 January 1944.
48 See Dellavalle, Operai, p. 74.
49 Unpublished memoirs of G.M., c. 23.
50 ‘Rapporto della visita fatta dall’ufficiale di collegamento del CUMER alla 8a brigata Garibaldi’ (Romagna), 2–7 August 1944. The author confided, ‘however, this form of opportunism will soon enough be wiped out’ (IG, BG, 02226-29).
51 Calamandrei, La vita indivisibile, pp. 158–60 (under the dates 23, 25 and 26 March 1944). The leaflets were put out on 2 April (ibid., p. 163). On the (widely followed) pause after the Fosse Ardeatine massacre, see Katz, Morte a Roma, pp. 183ff.
52 H. Michel, paper to the XII International Congress of Historical Sciences, 1965. See ‘I problemi della storia della Resistenza nei lavori del Colloquio di Vienna’, in Il Movimento di liberazione in Italia 81 (October–December 1965), p. 40. Already in the nineteenth century, the Russian Romanenko held that terrorism ‘cost infinitely fewer victims than a mass struggle’ (Laqueur, History of Terrorism, p. 36).
53 Chiodi, Banditi, p. 139. Cocito was later hanged.
54 On 19 July 1944. See Le Brigate Garibaldi, vol. II, p. 149 and the documents cited in the notes therein.
55 Pesce, Senza tregua, p. 211.
56 Testimony of Tersilla Fenoglio Oppedisano, in Bruzzone and Farina, La Resistenza taciuta, p. 154.
57 Report by Mariano, 17 August 1944. This document clearly expresses the concerns raised by the peasants, not wanting ‘to hear any more of having to hide wanted men, even if nothing had happened. Imagine, a little, them having to hide people in case of Germans’ (Casali, Il movimento di liberazione a Ravenna, vol. II, pp. 298–9).
58 ‘Rapporto al Centro del Partito’, by Banfi, from Emilia, 16 December 1943 (IG, Archivio PCI). See also the report from Mantua (undated, but from more or less the same time) which called attentism ‘the firstborn son of the most genuine fears’ (Le Brigate Garibaldi, vol. I, p. 195).
59 ‘Relazione generale sull’attività di guerriglia svolta dal Distaccamento F. Giaconi’, written by Alessandro Favilli (ISRT, Carte Carlo Campolmi, envelope 1, folder 6, subfolder 1).
60 Report by the inspector Albero to the insurrectionary triumvirate for Lombardy, 24 February 1945 (Le Brigate Garibaldi, vol. III, p. 415).
61 ‘Notiziario e direttive’, marked ‘D’ (Duccio Galimberti), 30 June 1944 (ISRP, envelope 29, folder b).
62 On this, see Ventura, La società rurale veneta, p. 69.
63 See Tramontin, Contadini e movimento partigiano (for example, p. 294, with regard to the parish priest of Seren del Grappa).
64 See Tramontin, Il clero italiano e la Resistenza, p. 22.
65 See Ballone, Una sezione, un paese, p. 440.
66 Angrisani, La croce sul Monferrato durante la bufera, p. 16 (quoted in Rovero, Il clero piemontese nella Resistenza, p. 50).
67 Leaflet of 29 July 1944, in ISRT, Raccolta volantini, DC Firenze (clandestini 1943–44).
68 ‘Relazione di massima sul movimento patriottico nella provincia di Apuania’, 7 January 1945, lamenting the local formations’ weak obedience to the directives of the CLN (INSMLI, CLNAI, envelope 7, folder 3, subfolder c).
69 Tramontin, Il clero italiano e la Resistenza, p. 24.
70 ISRT, Carte Francesco Berti, envelope 1, folder 1, verbali del CTLN.
71 Circular from the executive secretariat of the Modena provincial committee, 1 March 1945, cited in Gorrieri, La Repubblica di Montefiorino, p. 357. Gorrieri notes that ‘the concern to reduce the threat of reprisals against the population to a minimum constantly recurs throughout Christian-Democratic documents’.
72 Mautino, Guerra di popolo, pp. 34–5.
73 A box in Fratelli d’Italia, 22 May 1944.
74 ‘Ieri, domani … e oggi’, Il Ferroviere (Milan), February 1945.
75 Voce Operaia wrote: ‘Only being present in the struggle, not leaving it to the old ruling class to lead it, can we arise above those old social relations that have led us to ruin’ (editorial, ‘Giornate decisive’, 18 October 1943). For its part, L’Unità attacked attentism as the conscious sabotage of the popular insurrection, originating from those with an interest in giving credit to Nazi-Fascist talk of socialist and communist plots and of partisans ‘coming down into the cities to liquidate the rich, and other nonsense of a similar type’. On this theme, see Chapter 6, above.
76 See the PCI’s September 1943 appeal to the Italian people, in Il comunismo italiano nella seconda guerra mondiale, p. 216
77 See the article by Vittore Querel, director of the Modena Gazzetta dell’Emilia, in its 3 May 1944 edition (quoted in Gorrieri, La Repubblica di Montefiorino, p. 199), and the letter by seventeen-year-old Folgore parachutist Ferdinando Camuncoli (LRSI, p. 125). On GNR complaints of the attentism and cowardice of the Italian people, see G. Sciola, ‘Avanzata alleata e popolazione civile nelle fonti della Repubblica sociale italiana’, in Rochat, Santarelli and Sorcinelli, Linea gotica 1944, pp. 497–523.
78 See Gobetti, Diario partigiano, pp. 90–1. Here, I would like to pay homage to the memory of Delfino Insolera, who, when the other elements of the band in which he was initially involved crossed the border from Valtellina into Switzerland, instead went back to Milan, telling his sister Melina that he wanted to stay there where the battle for freedom was being fought.
79 Letter to a British officer (‘Signor Rossi’) in Switzerland, 1 December 1944 (IG, BG, 07194).
80 The words quoted are from Meneghello, I piccoli maestri, pp. 284–5; the rest is a paraphrase of the definition of ‘free rider’ in Hirschman, Shifting Involvements, p. 92.
81 G. Balladore Pallieri, ‘La guerra’, in P. Fedozzi and S. Romano, eds, Trattato di diritto internazionale, vol. III, Padua: Cedam, 1935, pp. 380ff. See, by the same author, Diritto bellico, Padua: Cedam, 1954, pp. 357–61.
82 Article III, 19 of the convention, cited in S. Klarsfeld, Le livre des otages: la politique des otages menée par les autorités allemandes d’occupation en France de 1941 à 1943, preface by M.-C. Vaillant-Couturier, Paris: Les Éditeurs français réunis, 1979, p. 19.
83 Ibid.
84 Ibid., p. 20. The decree was provoked by the killing of a German officer as a response to the shooting of two Communists.
85 Ibid., p. 23. The numbe
r of Communists to be shot for each German soldier killed was set between fifty and one hundred. To see the attention with which the Allies followed the question of hostages, see The Axis System of Hostages, London–New York: Inter-Allied Information Committee, United Nations Information Office, 1942. This document also speaks of the hostages taken by the Italians in Greece.
86 ‘Ostaggi’, in the 7 January 1944 edition; a box in the 26 March 1944 edition entitled ‘Un comunicato ‘Stefani’ sui fatti di via Rasella’. A box in Voce Operaia, ‘Ancora sui GAP’ reproached the Vatican’s organ for having spoken of ‘those sacrificed to vendetta and the reprisal for the vendetta’ and of ‘crime against crime’. Canfora, La sentenza, p. 158, aptly comments that, according to L’Osservatore, ‘the attackers, the terrorists were, in reality, holding all the defenceless hostage’.
87 M. Barrès, L’âme française et la guerre. Le suffrage des morts, Paris: Émile-Paul Frères, 1919, pp. 281, 223–32, where the articles ‘Le Crabe’ and ‘Les représailles? C’est le blocus resserré’ are reproduced.
88 ‘Générosité … ou intérêt bien compris’, 93. Organe des héritiers de la Révolution française, July 1942. This paper wrote ‘Kollaborateurs’ with a ‘K’.
89 ‘L’ épuration [i.e. the purge, termed an ‘immense desire’] premier pas vers notre avenir’, in 14 juillet. Organe de la résistance de la sous-région de Lyon, 15 May 1944.
90 Atti CVL, p. 80; letter from Parri to Galimberti, 11 August 1944 (Formazioni GL, p. 135).
91 ‘Direzione. Verbali riunioni 1944’, IG, Archivio PCI.
92 Editorial in the 30 October 1943 Rome edition of L’Italia Libera.
93 Pesce, Senza tregua, p. 32. See. p. 237: ‘We oppose the enemy’s terror with our own terror’.
94 See Cicchetti, Il campo giusto.
95 The unsigned leaflet, 24 March, is held at ISRT, Raccolta volantini, PCI Firenze (clandestini 1943–1944).
96 Le Brigate Garibaldi, vol. II, p. 235; the notes mention the similar response by the Command of the 3rd Liguria Division, 25 August, to a Special Tribunal trial against ‘thirty-one Italians’, warning that for each shooting ordered by the tribunal, they would shoot ‘two of the hostages we have in our hands … (functionaries and agents of the Pubblica Sicurezza, GNR, officers and militiamen)’.
97 INSMLI, CLNAI, envelope 6, folder 3, subfolder 17. Already on 31 December 1943, this same CLN had announced: ‘If the Germans continue to shoot imprisoned partisans, the same will go for the German prisoners’ (ordinance no. 11, published in La Riscossa italiana, January–February 1944).
98 Bernardo, Il momento buono, p. 115.
99 Undated, available in IVSR, Archivio, S. 1, envelope 49, CLN, Stampa non periodica.
100 Letter to the inspector Riccardo, with the 3rd Aliotta Division (Oltrepò Pavese), 16 November 1944 (IG, BG, 0342).
101 L’Unità, northern edition, 9 April 1945.
102 As stipulated by the disciplinary code of the 5th Piedmont Garibaldi Division (see Dellavalle, Operai, p. 182). See also Le Brigate Garibaldi, vol. III, pp. 152–3.
103 This happened in Varzi: see ‘Relazione sull’Oltrepò pavese dell’ispettore Giorgio’, 20 March 1945, in Le Brigate Garibaldi, vol. III, p. 510.
104 ‘Appello in favore dei detenuti politici’. On 30 January 1945, the Fascists in Milan had killed nine political prisoners (INSMLI, CLNAI, envelope 3, folder 2, subfolder 3/III).
105 As ‘the comrades responsible’ wrote to the political commissar of the 5th Zone (Cuneo area), Pietro, on 28 December 1944 (Le Brigate Garibaldi, vol. III, pp. 152–3).
106 See Bianco, Guerra partigiana, p. 32.
107 See Quazza, Un diario partigiano, p. 217 (19 October 1944).
108 Dellavalle, Operai, pp. 123–4, 142, 144; Poma and Perona, La Resistenza nel Biellese, pp. 227–31, which recounts how a threatened counter-reprisal, for which authorisation was sought from the Allied Command (in August 1944) put a stop to mass reprisals for the whole of the rest of the year.
109 The letter, whose addressee is not indicated (but is probably the formations under their watch) is dated 12 October 1944 (INSMLI, CVL, envelope 93, folder 4, subfolder 2).
110 Ibid., envelope 93, folder 4, subfolder a. On the role in carrying out these reprisals attributed to the Valsesia, Ossola, Cusio and Verbano divisions-group (20 shootings), see the order sent from the Group Command to the 1st Division, 15 October 1944 (Le Brigate Garibaldi, vol. II, p. 442).
111 IG, BG, 01417 (15 September 1944).
112 Letter from Andrea, responsible for the organisational office of the Liguria Regional Command, to the Command itself, 6 October 1944 (Le Brigate Garibaldi, vol. II, p. 405).
113 ‘Contro il terrore, contro la fame, contro le deportazioni’, northern edition, 8 October 1944.
114 ISRP, envelope 28, folder b.
115 See Poma and Perona, La Resistenza nel Biellese, pp. 422–7, and Dellavalle, Operai, p. 286.
116 See Mautino, Guerra di popolo, p. 195.
117 See Dellavalle, Operai, p. 161.
118 Testimony of Remo Scala (Bravo and Jalla, La vita offesa, p. 277).
1 Testimony of R. L., in Portelli, Assolutamente niente, p. 142.
2 Il comunismo italiano nella seconda guerra mondiale, p. 216.
3 La Vérité, 25 September 1941; Prometeo, 1 February 1944.
4 Scotti, La nascita delle formazioni, p. 69.
5 See, for example, ‘Il terrorismo individuale nella situazione italiana’, Lo Stato Operaio VI (1932), pp. 326–31.
6 See the pamphlet Consigli sulla tattica, in the GL archive, available at ISRT, S. IV, folder 2, subfolder I, insert 2, document 9. My thanks to Costanzo Casucci for making me aware of its existence.
7 Parri, in conversation with the author.
8 ‘GAP’ in Enciclopedia dell’antifascismo e della Resistenza, Pietro Secchia, ed. Milan-Rome: Edizioni La Pietra, vol. II, 1971, pp. 475–9. Already in his article ‘Perché dobbiamo agire subito’ (La nostra lotta, November 1943, 3–4, pp. 20–1), Secchia had put together a clear summa of the Communists’ positions. Luciano Canfora has noted that in the German edition of this text, from 1959, that the word ‘persons’ is replaced with ‘institutions’ (La sentenza, p. 158).
9 Secchia wrote that ‘the PCI’s GAP recruited exclusively Communists’ and that the GAP were instituted upon the initiative of the General Command of the Garibaldi Brigade, towards the end of 1943 (see the encyclopaedia piece ‘GAP’, cited above). According to Ragionieri, the PCI had in fact already stipulated their creation with a circular in May 1943 (see Ragionieri, Il partito comunista, pp. 328–9).
10 Letter addressed to the Piedmont Regional Military Command, and for the information of the other Commands, 15 November 1944, to reassure them that the GAP should not mean ‘formations of patriots of any particular political orientation’ (Atti CVL, pp. 251–2). See also the subsequent confirmation letter, from 1 December (ibid., p. 264).
11 Valiani, Tutte le strade, pp. 169–72. Canfora has noted the author’s subsequent (in truth, partial) self-censorship. In the 1983 reissue (Bologna: Il Mulino, pp. 128–30) ‘militant anti-Fascism’ becomes ‘part of militant anti-Fascism’, while the words ‘all democratic parties’ become ‘and also other democratic parties’. See Canfora, La sentenza, pp. 155–7. On the Action Party’s GAP, see the above-cited ‘Relazione del commissario politico del Comando piemontese delle formazioni GL’, 31 December 1944, which, in ‘a substantially negative … assessment’ of the ‘organisation of the urban squads’, advanced a distinction between ‘activists and terrorists’ and other combatants (Formazione GL, pp. 284–5). See also the 30 January 1945 order from the Lombardy GL Command to ‘Command 734’, to proceed with the seizure of hostages who could be exchanged for Parri, himself captured by the Germans on 2 January ‘with the promise of a major individual reward (even above 10,000 lire) if this coup can be pulled off’ (ibid., p. 300).
12 See the preamble in Elio Vittorini, Conversazione in Sicilia, Milan: B
ompiani, 1942.
13 ‘La bomba Ercoli’, in the 5 April 1944 Rome edition. The 9 February order of the day, reacting to the conclusions of the Bari congress, appears in the 14 February issue.
14 The leaflet, datable to the third week of December 1944, is published in Arbizzani, Manifesti, opuscoli, fogli volanti, p. 454. Note the resemblance to Churchill’s admonishment that, in the case of an enemy invasion, every English citizen should kill, if possible, one Hun, even if with a pitchfork.
15 Bianco, Guerra partigiana, p. 32.
16 See the report (unsigned and undated – the attack was on 7 April 1944), in Le Brigate Garibaldi, vol. I, pp. 348–9.
17 See, for example, Quatre-Vingt-Treize. Organe des marraines des francs-tireurs et partisans. Détachement Victor Hugo, January 1944, and Vaincre, whose 17 May 1944 ‘Supplément’ is dedicated ‘to the military communiqués of the partisans and francs-tireurs of Gascony and the Pyrenees’.
18 Letter to the commander of the Trieste Battalion, December 1943 (Le Brigate Garibaldi, vol. I, p. 181).
19 Letter to Simon, commander of the 1st and 2nd zone Liguria divisions, 28 July 1944 (ibid., vol. II, p. 169).
20 See M. De Micheli, 7o GAP, preface by Arturo Colombi, Rome: Edizioni di Cultura Sociale, 1954, pp. 145–7.
21 ‘Terzo fronte: guerra di popolo’, Tuscany edition of Il Combattente, undated but between February and March 1944, issue 5.
22 ‘Esame della corrispondenza censurata al 30 giugno 1944’ (ACS, SPD, CR, RSI, envelope 9, folder 3).
23 Ibid.
24 Letter in appendix of Francovich, La Resistenza a Firenze, pp. 296-7.
25 For example, on 7 September 1944 the CUMER, expecting a German retreat (which did not then happen) prepared to descend on Modena and Bologna; instead, however, on 18 September the CVL General Command warned that mountain formations ‘should absolutely not let themselves to be drawn into the cities’ (see Gorrieri, La Repubblica di Montefiorino, pp. 459–60, which refers to ‘Direttive operative per la battaglia della pianura padana’, published in Atti CVL, pp. 194–6).
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