Italian resistance movement

• 1. Introduction

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  The Italian resistance movement, known simply as La Resistenza, fought German occupiers and Italian fascist collaborators between 1943 and 1945. Its fighters were known as the partigiani, or partisans. In the last days of April 1945, their rallying call was blunt: "Surrender or die!"

  Yet the movement was never a single army with a single mind. It was a loose coalition of political parties, independent fighters, former soldiers and local brigades, and its members did not always trust one another.

  How did a country's own soldiers become its guerrillas? Where did opposition begin, long before the Germans arrived? Why do historians also call this struggle a civil war? And why might the song the world sings for it not have been the partisans' own at all?

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• 2. Roots of Anti-Fascism

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  Mussolini's secret police carried a revealing official title: the Organization for Vigilance and Repression of Anti-Fascism. The regime itself used the word anti-fascist for its opponents.

  On the 3rd of August 1921, the Italian Socialist Party signed a pacification pact with Mussolini and his Fasces of Combat. Trade unions adopted a legalist, peaceful strategy. Workers who disagreed formed the Arditi del Popolo to fight the violent Blackshirts. Their own side did not back them. The Italian General Confederation of Labour and the Socialists refused to recognize the militia, and the Communist Party of Italy ordered its members to leave it. The Communists organized a few militant groups of their own, but their actions stayed minor.

  Severino Di Giovanni, an Italian anarchist, went into exile in Argentina after the 1922 March on Rome. There he organized several bombings against the Italian fascist community. Other opponents fought with words. In 1925, the liberal Benedetto Croce published his Manifesto of the Anti-Fascist Intellectuals. Piero Gobetti and Carlo Rosselli were other liberal anti-fascist voices of the period.

  The murder of the socialist deputy Giacomo Matteotti in 1924 marked a turn. Mussolini took decisive responsibility for it, and the state began tightening into totalitarian control. Opponents now risked imprisonment and confinement. Anti-fascists organized in secret, in Italy and abroad, but the network they built was rudimentary. It broke into small, uncoordinated groups that could not threaten the regime. Their writings were copious, especially among exiles, but they did not reach the masses or move public opinion.

  In 1927, expatriate Italians founded the Concentrazione Antifascista Italiana at Nérac, in France. It allied non-communist republican, socialist and nationalist forces and published a propaganda paper called La Libertà. It lasted until 1934. Giustizia e Libertà, meaning Justice and Freedom, ran from 1929 to 1945. Carlo Rosselli was a cofounder. Ferruccio Parri, later Prime Minister of Italy, and Sandro Pertini, later President, were among its leaders. Its members held varied beliefs but shared a conviction that opposition to fascism had to be active and effective, unlike the older parties. The work of Gaetano Salvemini helped tell the international community what fascism in Italy really meant.

  The Spanish Civil War drew many Italian anti-fascists, and some historians link the later Resistance to veterans of the International Brigades. They hoped armed resistance to Franco's dictatorship would set an example for the fight against Mussolini's. Their motto was "Today in Spain, tomorrow in Italy."

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• 3. Armistice Battles

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  The German invasion of Italy began on the 8th of September 1943. The occupation by the Wehrmacht and the Waffen-SS lasted until the 25th of April 1945. The Germans also created a puppet state, the Italian Social Republic, with Mussolini at its head.

  The armistice between Italy and the Allies dated from the 3rd of September 1943. Armed resistance to the Germans partly began with regular forces, namely the army and the Carabinieri military police.

  The best-known battle broke out in Rome on the day the armistice was announced. Regio Esercito units, including the Sassari Division, the Granatieri di Sardegna and the Piave Division, ringed the city and its approach roads. Outnumbered German paratroopers and Panzergrenadiere were repelled at first and took losses. Experience and a stronger Panzer force slowly turned the fight.

  Several things hurt the defenders. Allied support was cancelled at the last minute, after German paratroopers seized the drop zones of the U.S. 82nd Airborne Division. Brigadier General Maxwell D. Taylor had crossed enemy lines into Rome to supervise that operation in person. King Victor Emmanuel III and Marshal Pietro Badoglio fled with their staff to Brindisi. The generals in Rome were left without a coordinated defence plan. The Centauro II Division was also missing, with its German-made tanks. It was made up mostly of ex-Blackshirts, and nobody trusted it.

  By the 10th of September, the Germans had reached downtown Rome. The Granatieri, helped by civilians, made their last stand at Porta San Paolo. At 4 pm, General Giorgio Calvi di Bergolo signed the order of surrender. The Italian divisions were disbanded and their troops taken prisoner. The clash owed less to anti-German feeling than to a wish to hold the capital and resist disarmament. Its officers then went separate ways. Raffaele Cadorna Jr., who commanded Ariete II, and Giuseppe Cordero Lanza di Montezemolo joined the underground. The Germans later executed Montezemolo. General Gioacchino Solinas, who led the Granatieri, chose the pro-German Italian Social Republic instead.

  Piombino, a port in Tuscany, saw one of the most important armed episodes after the armistice. On the 10th of September 1943, a small German flotilla under Kapitänleutnant Karl-Wolf Albrand tried to enter the harbour, and the port authorities refused. General Cesare Maria De Vecchi, a Fascist official commanding the 215th Coastal Division, ordered them to let it in. Commander Amedeo Capuano, the harbour's naval commander, advised against it. Once ashore, the Germans acted with hostility, and their plan to occupy the town became clear.

  Residents demanded a firm reaction and threatened an insurrection. The senior commander, General Fortunato Perni, instead ordered his tanks to fire on the civilians. The tank crews refused. De Vecchi forbade any action against the Germans. Junior officers acted on their own, against orders, and handed out weapons to the population. Perni and De Vecchi even tried to dismiss them. Civilian volunteers joined the sailors and soldiers in the defence.

  The fighting began at 21:15 that night, pitting the German landing force against Italian coastal batteries, the tanks of the XIX Tank Battalion "M" and the townspeople. Italian tanks sank the German torpedo boat TA11. Artillery sank seven Marinefährprahme and six Luftwaffe service boats and heavily damaged the torpedo boat TA9. Two former Italian steamers, the Carbet and the Capitano Sauro, were hit so badly that they were scuttled. By dawn on the 11th of September, 120 Germans were dead and about 200-300 had been captured, 120 of them wounded. Italian dead numbered four: two sailors, a Guardia di Finanza brigadier and a civilian. About a dozen were wounded, and four Italian submarine chasers were sunk.

  Later that morning, De Vecchi ordered the prisoners released and their weapons returned. New protests broke out as units were disbanded and senior commanders fled. On the 12th of September, the divisional command surrendered Piombino to the Germans. Many sailors, soldiers and citizens who had fought retreated to the surrounding woods. There they formed the area's first partisan formations. President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi later awarded the town a gold medal for Military Valour.

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• 4. Garrisons and Internees

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  In the days after the armistice, Wehrmacht units cut Italian radio communications, and most servicemen were left without orders. Most were disarmed and shipped to prisoner-of-war camps in the Third Reich. A few garrisons in occupied Greece, Albania, Yugoslavia and Italy chose to fight.

  Admirals Inigo Campioni and Luigi Mascherpa tried to defend Rhodes, Kos, Leros and other Dodecanese islands against their former allies. British reinforcements from the SAS, the SBS and the army, under Generals Francis Gerrard Russell Brittorous and Robert Tilney, helped the defenders hold on for a month. The Wehrmacht then took the islands with air and sea landings by infantry and Fallschirmjäger, supported by the Luftwaffe. Campioni and Mascherpa were captured and executed at Verona for high treason.

  On the 13th of September 1943, the Acqui Division on Cefalonia chose to defend itself against a German invasion while negotiations were still under way. After a ten-day battle, the Germans executed 5,155 officers and enlisted men in retaliation. The dead included the division commander, General Antonio Gandin. On the 1st of March 2001, President Ciampi visited Cefalonia. He said the division's conscious choice "was the first act of the Resistenza, of an Italy free from fascism".

  Bastia, in Corsica, saw a naval battle on the 9th of September 1943 between Italian torpedo boats and an attacking German flotilla. It was one of the few successful Italian reactions to Operation Achse and one of the first acts of resistance by Italian forces after the armistice of Cassibile.

  Other Italian forces stayed trapped in Yugoslavia and chose to fight beside the local resistance. Elements of the Taurinense, Venezia, Aosta and Emilia divisions were gathered into the Italian Garibaldi Partisan Division, part of the Yugoslav People's Liberation Army. When the unit finally returned to Italy at the war's end, half its members had been killed or listed as missing.

  Around 650,000-700,000 Italian soldiers fell into German hands. Some 45,000 others were killed in combat, executed, or died in transit. The Germans labelled the captives Italienische Militär-Internierte, meaning Italian military internees. That label denied them prisoner-of-war status and the protections of the Geneva Convention. They faced a choice. They could keep fighting as German allies, either in the armed forces of the Italian Social Republic or in "volunteer" units inside the German forces, or they could go to detention camps in Germany. Only 10 percent agreed to enroll. Most refused, chiefly to keep their oath of loyalty to the King.

  The Nazis treated the Italians as traitors rather than prisoners. They were put to forced labour: 35.6 percent in war industries, 28.5 percent in mining, 14.3 percent in agriculture, 7.1 percent in heavy industry and 5.9 percent in construction. They were underfed, and their clothing could not stand up to the German winter. Between 40,000 and 50,000 of them later died in the camps. Their refusal was eventually recognized as unarmed resistance, on a par with the armed confrontation of other Italian servicemen. The internees' death rate of 6-7 percent was much lower than that of Soviet prisoners of war, but it was second only to theirs.

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• 5. The Partisan Coalition

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  In the last days of September 1943, the people of Naples rose against the German occupiers. The revolt, known as the Four Days of Naples, was four days of continuous open warfare and guerrilla action by locals. Naples was the first major European city to rise up against German occupation, and it succeeded. The uprising was spontaneous, with limited weapons, organization or planning. Even so, it disrupted German plans to deport Neapolitans en masse, destroy the city and keep the Allies from gaining a strategic foothold.

  Elsewhere, the movement grew out of separate groups led by previously outlawed political parties or by former officers of the Royal Italian Army. Many formations began with soldiers from disbanded units who had evaded capture during Operation Achse, led by junior officers who chose to resist. Anti-fascists later joined and reorganized them, and they grew steadily more political.

  The Comitato di Liberazione Nazionale, or CLN, took over most of the movement. The Italian Communist Party, the Italian Socialist Party, the Partito d'Azione, Democrazia Cristiana and other minor parties created it. The Partito d'Azione was a republican, liberal socialist party. The CLN acted in accordance with the ministers of King Victor Emmanuel III and the Allies. Partisans set it up behind German lines, and most groups in the region supported it.

  Three politically varied groups formed its core. The communist Brigate Garibaldi, the Giustizia e Libertà Brigades tied to the Partito d'Azione and the socialist Brigate Matteotti stood at its center. Smaller groups included Christian democrats. Outside the CLN stood monarchists such as the Brigate Fiamme Verdi, or Green Flame Brigades, and the Fronte Militare Clandestino, the Clandestine Military Front, headed by Montezemolo. Another sizeable group, strong in Piedmont, were the "autonomous" partisans. Piedmont was where the Fourth Army had disintegrated in September 1943. The autonomi were mostly former soldiers without a party alignment. One example was the 1° Gruppo Divisioni Alpine, led by Enrico Martini.

  Relations among the groups were often poor. In 1945, Garibaldi partisans under Yugoslav Partisan command attacked and killed several partisans of the Catholic and azionista Osoppo groups in the province of Udine. Tension between Catholics and Communists had already led to the founding of the Fiamme Verdi as a separate formation. Anarchists and dissident communists posed another challenge to the CLN's national unity. They included Turin's Stella Rossa movement and the Movimento Comunista d'Italia, which was Rome's largest single anti-fascist force under the occupation. They wanted a revolutionary outcome and refused to work with "bourgeois parties".

  Norway, the Netherlands and France also had partisans and collaborationist governments allied with Nazi Germany. Armed confrontation between compatriots was more intense in Italy, which made the Italian case unique. In 1965, the fascist politician and historian Giorgio Pisanò first used the phrase "civil war" in his books. The term spread after 1991, when Claudio Pavone published Una guerra civile, a title meaning A Civil War, with the subtitle Historical Essay on the Morality of the Resistance.

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• 6. Hills, Cities and Women

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  By May 1944, Rodolfo Graziani estimated that the partisans numbered 70,000-80,000. About 41 percent served in the Garibaldi Brigades, and 29 percent were Actionists of the Giustizia e Libertà Brigades. On the 15th of June 1944, the General Staff of the Esercito Nazionale Repubblicano put the figure at some 82,000, with about 25,000 of them in Piedmont. Young men dodging the Social Republic's draft and deserters from its forces swelled the ranks. By August 1944 there were 100,000 partisans, and more than 250,000 by the final insurrection in April 1945. The 8th Garibaldi Brigade, one of the strongest units, fielded 8,050 men in the Romagna area. Of those, 450 had no weapons.

  The basic unit was the squadra, or squad. Usually five squads formed a distaccamento, or detachment. Three or more detachments made a brigata, and two or more brigades made a divisione. Size depended on how well a unit could arm, clothe and feed its people, and on how much local support it had.

  The first weapons came from former soldiers: Carcano rifles, Beretta pistols and Breda machine guns from the Regio Esercito inventory. Captured German K98k rifles, MG 42 machine guns and the iconic potato-masher grenades followed. Submachine guns such as the MP 40 were scarce and usually reserved for squad leaders. In October 1943, Beretta MAB automatic weapons began appearing in larger numbers. They were spirited away en masse from the Beretta factory, which was producing them for the Wehrmacht. The Allies airdropped British PIATs, Lee-Enfield rifles, Bren light machine guns and Sten guns. The American OSS supplied Thompson submachine guns on a smaller scale. Drops also carried explosives, boots, food and money, which paid for weapons or compensated civilians.

  The worst fighting and harshest conditions were in the mountains, where supplies were scarce. Partisans turned to guerrilla warfare, with groups of 40-50 fighters ambushing and harassing the Germans and their allies. A district could not feed a large force, so brigade size followed resources. Mobility mattered most. Knowledge of the terrain let small groups slip away when nearly surrounded, and with no permanent headquarters, there was little for the Germans to destroy.

  Fighters leaned heavily on local people, bartering or simply asking for food, blankets and medicine. When they took supplies from families, they often left promissory notes that peasants could redeem for money after the war. They slept in abandoned farms and farmhouses. Paolino "Andrea" Ranieri, a political commissar at the time, described moving equipment by donkey at night. By day, the peasants used the same donkeys in the fields.

  The Germans tried to split villagers from fighters with a reprisal policy of killing 10 Italians for every German killed by partisans. Victims came from the village near an attack and sometimes from captive partisans. The policy backfired. Because most fighters were peasants, local people felt bound to provide for their own.

  On the 26th of September 1944, 250 partisans and three companies of U.S. soldiers from the 88th Infantry Division attacked Monte Battaglia, a Gothic Line mountaintop whose name means Battle Mountain. Elements of the German 290th Grenadier Regiment held it and were caught completely by surprise. The attackers held the hill for five days against reinforced German units and secured a path for the Allied advance.

  Since 1938, pasta prices had tripled and bread prices had risen fivefold, and in the cities that hardship drew ordinary people toward the resistance. Some Italians ignored the struggle, but others organized. Networks of safe houses hid weapons and wounded fighters. Only sympathizers were included, since compulsion was thought to invite betrayal. Giuseppe "Beppe" Ruffino, the resistance's youngest officer, commanded the Gruppi di Azione Patriottica, or Patriotic Action Groups. They carried out sabotage and guerrilla attacks. The Squadre di Azione Patriottica, or Patriotic Action Squads, arranged strikes and propaganda campaigns.

  About 35,000 Italian women were recognized after the war as partigiane combattenti, meaning partisan combatants. Another 20,000 were recognized as patriote, or patriots. Most were between 20 and 29. They were generally kept apart from male partisans, few were attached to brigades and fewer still to mountain brigades. Countryside volunteers were generally turned away. The women's groups drew communists such as Giovanna Barcellona, Lina Fibbi, Marisa Diena and Caterina Picolato. Socialists Laura Conti and Lina Merlin joined, along with actionists Elena Dreher and Ada Gobetti. Republican and Catholic women also took part, as did women with no earlier political commitment.

  They began in auxiliary roles but soon led work on information, propaganda, orders and ammunition. Some, called gappistas, fought with arms. Ada Gobetti was among the first to object to the word assistance in the group's name. In 1944, the organization recast its aims around women's emancipation.

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• 7. Allies, Aid and Reprisals

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  Bill Tilman, the climber and explorer, was one of many foreigners who fought alongside the partisans. Others included the reporter and historian Peter Tompkins, the former RAF pilot Count Manfred Beckett Czernin and the architect Oliver Churchill. The foreign contingent also included Yugoslavs, Russians, Ukrainians, Dutch, Spaniards, Greeks and Poles. Czech deserters from the army of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, in Italy for guard duty in 1944, joined too. So did German defectors disillusioned with Nazism, and Britons and Americans who were escaped prisoners or advisors sent by the SAS, SOE and OSS. George Dunning recorded his experience in a book called Where bleed the many.

  An estimated 80,000 Allied prisoners of war had been interned in Italy up to the 8th of September 1943. Many escaped, and the resistance helped them reach Allied lines or Switzerland along paths that smugglers once used. Fugitives hid in safe houses, usually arranged by women, who aroused less suspicion. After the war, Field Marshal Harold Alexander issued a certificate to those who had risked their lives this way.

  DELASEM aided Italian Jews through a network that stretched across occupied Italy. It included Jews and non-Jews, Roman Catholic clergy, sympathetic police officers and even some German soldiers. In Rome, it worked until the liberation under the Jewish delegates Septimius Sorani and Giuseppe Levi and the Capuchin Father Maria Benedetto. The Social Republic regime treated Jews as "enemy aliens", leaving them with little or nothing to live on. Many were deported to Nazi concentration and extermination camps, and about 7,000 died. DELASEM helped thousands with food, shelter and money. Some of its members were later named Righteous Among the Nations.

  In the summer and early fall of 1944, with Allied forces nearby, partisans led by the CLNAI attacked behind German lines. The rebellion produced provisional partisan governments across the mountain regions. Ossola was the most important, and Switzerland and the Allied consulates there recognized it. An intelligence officer told Field Marshal Albert Kesselring that German casualties in the fight against partisans that summer were 30,000 to 35,000, including 5,000 confirmed killed. Kesselring thought the number exaggerated and offered 20,000 of his own. He counted 5,000 killed, 7,000-8,000 missing or "kidnapped", including deserters, and a similar number seriously wounded. Both sources agreed that partisan losses were smaller. By the end of the year, German reinforcements and Mussolini's remaining forces had crushed the uprising.

  To suppress the resistance, German and Italian Fascist forces committed war crimes. The SS, the Gestapo and paramilitary militias such as Xª MAS and the Black Brigades carried out summary executions and systematic reprisals against civilians. Captured fighters and suspects were often tortured and raped. The Ardeatine massacre killed 335 Jewish civilians and political prisoners without trial, in reprisal for a resistance bomb attack in Rome. At Sant'Anna di Stazzema, about 560 villagers died in an anti-partisan operation in the central mountains. At Marzabotto, about 770 civilians were killed in similar circumstances. The Ossola massacre claimed 24 partisans during their retreat from Croveo to Switzerland. At Salussola, 20 partisans were murdered after torture, as a reprisal. In all, an estimated 15,000 Italian civilians were deliberately killed, including many women and children.

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• 8. Liberation and Memory

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  On the 19th of April 1945, the CLN called for an insurrection. That day partisans openly attacked the German occupiers and their few remaining Italian Fascist allies in Bologna. By the 21st, partisans, the Italian Co-Belligerent Army and the Polish II Corps under Allied command had liberated the city. Parma and Reggio Emilia were freed on the 24th. Turin and Milan were liberated on the 25th through a popular revolt and insurrection, after a general strike began two days earlier. In Genoa on the 26th and the 27th of April, General Günther Meinhold surrendered to the CLN, and over 14,000 German and Fascist troops were captured. German forces in Italy officially capitulated on the 2nd of May.

  The insurrection exposed a rift between the resistance and the Allies. In the industrial centers of Turin, Milan and Genoa, armed workers had occupied factories. The Allied commanders moved to impose control as soon as they replaced the retreating Germans. The Italian Communist Party, acting on directives from Moscow, helped the Allies disarm the partisans and discouraged revolutionary change. It stressed national unity and "progressive democracy" instead, to secure its place in postwar politics.

  Mussolini, with Marshal Graziani, went to Milan to meet Cardinal Alfredo Ildefonso Schuster, hoping to negotiate a deal. He was offered only unconditional surrender. The talks were a betrayal of the Germans. When Achille Marazza confronted him about it, Mussolini said: "They the Nazis have always treated us as slaves. I will now resume my freedom of action." With resistance fighters already holding the city, he joined a German convoy bound for the Brenner Pass, accompanied by his mistress Claretta Petacci.

  On the morning of the 27th of April 1945, Umberto Lazzaro, nicknamed "Partisan Bill", was checking a column of lorries at Dongo, in Lombardy. He served with the 52nd Garibaldi Brigade. The lorries carried retreating SS troops. Lazzaro recognized and arrested Mussolini. By the official version, the execution fell to a "Colonel Valerio", identified as Walter Audisio. The bodies of Mussolini and Petacci were brought to Milan and hung upside down in the Piazzale Loreto. Eighteen executed prominent Fascists were displayed there, including Fernando Mezzasoma, Luigi Gatti, Alessandro Pavolini and Achille Starace. The square was chosen deliberately. The year before, the bodies of 15 executed enemies of Mussolini's regime had been displayed in the same place.

  A campaign of score-settling, the resa dei conti, followed against pro-German collaborators. Thousands were rounded up. Many were quickly court-martialed and shot, or killed without trial. Interior Minister Mario Scelba later put the number of victims at 732, but other estimates were much higher. Ferruccio Parri, briefly Prime Minister in 1945, said thousands had been killed. Perpetrators of the Schio massacre were tried by an Allied Military Court. Estimates run from 12,000 to 26,000 dead. The Ministry of Interior counted some 9,000 killed in the northern provinces in April and May 1945 alone. Proportionally, that was far more than in Belgium and well above the French figure. Some historians place the end of the civil war after the official end of the war in Europe. Some propose the Togliatti amnesty of the 22nd of June 1946.

  A book published in 1955 by an Italian ministerial committee, for the tenth anniversary of the Liberation, counted 35,828 partisans killed in action or executed. It also counted 21,168 partisans mutilated or disabled, and 9,980 civilians killed in reprisals. Another 32,000 partisans had been killed abroad, mostly in the Balkans. In 2010, the Albo d'Oro office of the Italian Ministry of Defence recorded 15,197 partisans killed. It counted only those who were civilians before joining. Partisans who had been in the armed forces, more than half of those killed, were recorded under their force of origin.

  Since 1946, the 25th of April has been Liberation Day, a national holiday also called the Anniversary of the Resistance. On that day in 1945, the CLNAI proclaimed a general insurrection. Its command sat in Milan and was chaired by Alfredo Pizzoni. Luigi Longo, Emilio Sereni, Sandro Pertini and Leo Valiani were among those present. Each year, marches and parades are held in Italian cities, especially those decorated for valour in the war of liberation. The President of Italy lays a laurel wreath at the chapel of the Unknown Soldier in the Altare della Patria in Rome. Speaking in 2014, President Giorgio Napolitano called the Resistance "a people in arms, a courageous mobilization of young and very young citizens who rebelled against foreign power."

  The Constituent Assembly that wrote the Italian constitution consisted mostly of representatives of the parties of the CLN. The former fighters built the 1948 constitution on a compromise between their parties' principles of democracy and anti-fascism. The Associazione Nazionale Partigiani d'Italia, or ANPI, was founded in Rome in 1944 by veterans of the resistance. It became a charitable foundation on the 5th of April 1945. It collects personal stories, defends against historical revisionism and, since 2008, has held a national festival every two years.

  Bella ciao, a folk song whose title means "Goodbye beautiful", is often wrongly called the anthem of the resistance. Nothing shows that it mattered among the partisan brigades, or that a partisan version existed before its text was first published in 1953. It is absent from Pasolini's 1955 Canzoniere Italiano and from the 1962 Canti Politici of Editori Riuniti. Yves Montand's 1963 version became famous after the group Il Nuovo Canzoniere Italiano presented the song at the 1964 Festival dei Due Mondi at Spoleto, as both a mondine song and a partisan hymn. As a partisan hymn it was inclusive enough to hold together Catholics, Communists, Socialists and Liberals. Versions are still sung worldwide as a hymn of freedom. In 1975, it was sung at the end of the Christian Democracy congress that elected the former partisan Zaccagnini as national secretary.

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