all the weapons from the barracks and the partisan fightback continued for several days. Organization became more difficult as the fascists evacuated the city centre, so partisans moved to the outskirts where farmland made guerrilla activity unfeasible. The partisans formed the revolutionary Livorno Garibaldi Division and continued their armed struggle against fascism. When the American army arrived they demanded that the partisans disarm, which the anarchists refused to do and then ‘set about the elimination of fascist criminals and collaborationists’.38
In 1943, Mussolini established his Salo Republic and adopted a pseudo-radical programme that reverted to the political, anti-capitalist radicalism that Italian fascism had used as a tactic earlier on. According to Deakin, ‘the new regime was republican, but also socialist and revolutionary’.39 Mack Smith stated that
The Mussolini of 1944 reasserted the socialist beliefs of his youth because he now felt that he had been cheated by the world of finance and industry.… To maintain some intellectual coherence he tried to pretend that, notwithstanding appearances, he had never deserted the socialist programme he had put forward for fascism in 1919.40
Hitler was under-impressed and stated that ‘our Italian ally has embarrassed us everywhere’.41 By 1943, it was obvious that the Axis powers could not win the war, and the Italians lost faith in Mussolini who was deposed and arrested as Italy changed sides. Mussolini was rescued from his mountain retreat by a Nazi squad sent by Hitler and led by Skorzeny, a fascist who remained active long after the war. Mussolini’s much reduced empire faced opposition on several fronts: not only were the Allied forces knocking on the door, but on a local level the partisan struggle was intensifying and industrial action was increasing as Mussolini’s power waned. The partisans, often communist-led, began to use more violent terror tactics against the fascist infrastructure, whilst on an industrial level, in November 1943, Turin communists brought out 50,000 workers on strike. The German occupiers could not cope with a city of over 200,000 workers, and many of them aggrieved. A Nazi missive to the beleaguered cops read, ‘The Fuehrer further empowers you to arrest ringleaders and shoot them out of hand as communists.’42 In other cities, clandestine communist squads were active, attacking fascist officials, twenty-eight of whom were assassinated. Reprisals were frequent and brutal. When a leading fascist was assassinated in Ferrara, squads were sent in to exact revenge. Seventeen anti-fascists held in jail were executed. Anti-fascists fired upon the funeral of another fascist assassinated by the communists, to which the fascists retaliated with five thousand rounds of ammunition. To make matters worse for the Axis, deserters and draft-evaders were taking to the hills and swelling the ranks of the partisans waiting there.
In 1944, communist-led strikes in Turin, where the Fiat factories were, spread to Milan and Genoa, and a general strike in March was coordinated with resistance activities and sabotage on the railways that prevented workers from getting to the morning shift. It was a success. The German occupiers recognised the strike was political rather than economic in character and arrested hundreds of strikers. Hitler was so angered that he insisted that twenty percent of all strikers should be deported to Germany. For Deakin, the strikes were a revelation ‘of the extent of progress made by…the National Liberation Committee of the partisan movement, and of the leading part played by the communists’.43 In Turin, the militants continued to have the upper hand and organized further strikes in June. In retaliation for increasing worker and partisan militancy, fascist repercussions maintained their usual brutality: ‘in the valleys infested by the partisans, good results had been achieved by deporting the entire male population’.44 The Nazi Marshall Kesserling issued orders that included:
1. Every act of violence must be followed immediately by counter-measures.
2. If there are a large number of bands in a district, then in every single case a certain percentage of the male population of the place must be arrested, and, in cases of violence, shot.
2. If German soldiers are fired at in villages, the village must be burnt. The criminals or else the leaders must be publicly hanged.45
Killing Mussolini
From his radically diminished powerbase, Mussolini and his remaining sycophants also ordered harsh justice against anti-fascist partisans, demanding that ten should be killed for every dead fascist. As usual, a militia was gathered around the ex-Duce who continued in the remaining territory with ‘a dozen squads…operating in Milan, some of them in receipt of government funds, some composed of criminals running various kinds of protection rackets, some with their own private prisons and torture chambers’.46 Criminality, sadism, and fascism seem to be vicious and frequent fascist bedfellows. One squad, led by Koch, had its own instruments of torture and had profited from their involvement in hard drugs. They were eventually suppressed by the use of the equally psychotic Muti gang whom Mussolini made ‘a fascist legion because of its usefulness in suppressing strikes in a number of factories’.47 In Milan, fifteen people were executed in revenge by the Muti gang for a bomb attack on a fascist truck. After being told they were being deported to Germany, the anti-fascists realised that this was not the case and they attempted to escape but were shot down and left in the sun. The partisans exacted bloody revenge on forty-five Italian and German prisoners. The war was clearly not going to Mussolini’s plan despite his use of the paramilitary Black Brigades, who were ‘an auxiliary corps of Black Shirts composed of Action Squads’.48 These brigades quickly gained a reputation for brutality against political opponents as partisan activity became increasingly successful. Mussolini also encouraged reprisals against partisans and the execution of Italian women and children as well.
Bombast, hyperbole and fabrication were hardly underused by Il Duce, and near the end of 1944 he wrote to Hitler, ‘Even the anti-fascists are no longer waiting with their former enthusiasm…the partisan phenomenon is dying out.’49 It is assumed he meant the partisans that arrested and executed him shortly after. Mussolini’s entourage, and those few willing to fight for him, fled on 28th April 1945 with Il Duce disguised in the back of a truck heading for Austria. He was apprehended on the road by partisans of the (communist) 52nd Garibaldi Brigade led by a Colonel ‘ Valerio,’ who recognised and then arrested them near the amusingly named Dongo. Il Duce, along with his long-term mistress Clara Petacci, and fascist thugs like Farinacci and Starace, were executed by anti-fascists near a village called Mezzegra. Nearby, another group of fleeing fascists were also executed. The bodies of twenty-three fascists were taken back to Milan where they were strung up by the heels in the Piazza Loreto, a symbolic and violent end for a regime that prided itself on its own brutality.
Following the fall of fascism, socialists and communists became assimilated into the democratic political process, and prisoners from these organizations were freed from the islands and camps first. The anarchists were often still detained. During the partisan struggle the allies refused to arm the autonomous anarchist groups, though many anarchists fought side by side with others in groups like the socialist Matteoti Brigade and the communist-dominated Garibaldi Brigade, in addition to forming their own units named after Lucetti and Schirru. The allies also knew that the anarchists would want no part in the organization of the future government, whilst the anarchists did not trust allied command and were rightly mistrustful of the reformist socialists and especially the Stalinist communists following the debacle in Spain. During internment on the island of Ventotene in 1943, the
