and citing a ‘varicose problem’.
With that, Iader returned home to the ancient city of Ravenna, on the Adriatic coast. So many men were away that he managed to get plenty of labouring work. It was during this time that he joined the clandestine Italian Communist Party – the PCI (Partito Comunista Italiano) – a deeply illegal organisation. It was with a sense of mounting despair that he had witnessed German troops flooding into Italy that summer, and following the armistice, he was denounced by a neighbour for being ‘a Red’. On 14 September, six days after the armistice, his house was searched by German soldiers, his papers confiscated and his books and belongings destroyed.
Armed resistance was an inevitable next step for him, although initially the rebels in Ravenna had been poorly organised and largely ineffective. On 12 November, Iader and some others had started lobbing grenades into an RSI officer training school. Caught in the floodlights, Iader found himself being arrested by one of his former classmates from school and was flung into prison. Held there for forty-five days, he suffered nine days of twenty-four-hour interrogations, eight days without food, and a beating every two hours. His cell was big but had no furniture at all. Next door, a tap was kept running continually so that the floor of Iader’s cell was permanently wet and he had no means of keeping dry. Eventually he took a shutter off one of the window hinges and lay on that. ‘I was beaten even more for doing that,’ he recalls.
Eventually, Iader could stand it no longer, and so wrote a declaration that he was a member of the Communist Party and that he would never, ever adhere to the RSI. In doing so, he knew he was signing his own death warrant. ‘There was no other way out for me,’ he explains. ‘I was too ill to carry on in there. I had a very high temperature and could no longer continue with the torture.’
His family were informed that the following day he would be shot and then hanged in the main square in Ravenna as an example to others. The man charged with his execution was called Zanelli, a senior Fascist from nearby Faenza with a reputation for ruthlessness and as a torturer. Iader was taken from the prison and driven towards the town square. However, he then shocked Zanelli by reeling off a list of names of anti-fascists and draft dodgers whom he knew the Fascist had had imprisoned, tortured and even executed. ‘What happens to me will happen to you,’ Iader had told him. ‘I have plenty of friends. We know your movements and you will be killed.’
Alarmed by these threats, Zanelli began to dither, driving Iader around Ravenna. Iader continued his defiance, demanding a trial and pointing out places where Zanelli and his henchmen had murdered civilians. Eventually, Zanelli ordered the driver to slow the car, clearly hoping Iader would try and make a run for it, so that they could then shoot him as he tried to escape. ‘Of course, I wasn’t going to fall for that,’ says Iader. Zanelli had taken fright, and sensing Iader was not making idle threats eventually took him back to Ravenna prison, rather than carry out the execution.
There Iader remained another month, jailed with a number of other, mostly older, political prisoners, who looked after him and helped him regain some of his strength. Eventually, at Zanelli’s bequest, he was taken to the police station and questioned by a Fascist official and a judge. No sooner had the grilling begun than the air-raid siren rang out and bombs began to fall on the city. In great haste, the judge pronounced that he was either to join up or join the Organisation Todt. Understandably keen to hurry for cover, the judge bailed him on the understanding he report the following day to the Questura. Iader did no such thing. Instead, through the help of local Communists, he headed to the mountains of Romagna, south of Mussolini’s birthplace, and joined the partisans.
The 8th ‘Romagna’ Garibaldi Brigade, as it had become by March 1944, was led by Communists, most of whom had fought with the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War, but not all its members were Communist. Nor was Iader what he considered a ‘Soviet-style Communist’. Rather, he and his comrades dreamed of a more Utopian form of equality. ‘It was more like pure socialism, really,’ he says. ‘Also, communism was the antithesis of fascism.’
Like Iader, Gianni Rossi, the second-in-command of the Stella Rossa, also came from a background of anti-fascism. It is often forgotten that during the late 1920s and for much of the thirties both Mussolini and fascism were hugely popular in Italy. Even those who remained less convinced tended to sign up for their tessera, the Fascist Party membership card; it made life easier. Those who stuck their neck above the parapet and denounced the Fascists were comparatively few and far between. But Signor Rossi was one of the few, refusing the tessera and continually finding himself in trouble with the local Fascists. ‘If there was a Fascist dignitary due to be visiting the area,’ says Gianni, ‘my father would be picked up beforehand and put in jail for a few days.’ He had been put in prison and out of harm’s way before Hitler’s visit in 1937.
Despite this, the Rossi family lived in relative comfort in their family home in the village of Gardelletta, along the banks of the River Setta beneath the Monte Sole massif. Being self-employed was the only real option for those who refused to carry the tessera: when not in trouble with the Fascists, Gianni’s father, a decorated veteran of the First World War, managed to be a successful builder and property developer.
Gianni – or Giovanni as he had been christened – had been born in February 1923. At twelve, he had left school and had become an apprentice mechanic in Bologna. Soon after, he had moved there, living with an aunt until just before the war, when the whole family moved into a large apartment in the city. Although the family had kept the house in Gardelletta, Gianni’s father, Brazilian mother, and younger brother had continued living in Bologna throughout the war. In 1941, Gianni had been called up for military service and had joined the navy. Fortunately for him, he had been ill during the summer of 1943, and so at the time of the armistice had been at home in Bologna, convalescing. And it was during this time that he met up again with his old childhood friend, Mario Musolesi, always known to everyone as ‘Lupo’ – Wolf.
Like Gianni, Lupo came from a family that had always been firmly anti-Fascist. Several years older than Gianni, Lupo had also returned to Bologna, having successfully avoided capture following the armistice. It was during meetings with Gianni and a few others that the seeds of the Stella Rossa were sown. Lupo had in fact been approached by the local Fascist federale (party secretary) to become involved with the Repubblica Sociale Italiana. As a popular local figure who had served in North Africa, he was seen to be just the person they needed. But Lupo vehemently refused, believing that fascism was dead and that a German-controlled Italy had no future.
Two incidents, however, pushed him and Gianni towards active resistance. In October, anti-fascist posters had been put up around Vado, and Lupo was accused of being behind it. Finding out his denouncer, Lupo then beat him up and was promptly arrested. Although released soon after, he was seen as an anti-fascist agitator and was becoming a marked man.
The second incident occurred soon after while Lupo was at the Musolesi family home at Ca’ Veneziani. The house lay near a bend on the railway line that ran alongside the River Setta. Trains had to slow at the bend and Lupo and Gianni watched five POWs jump off in a bid for freedom. One was injured as he jumped; another was shot and killed, but three managed to get clear. Lupo ran to their aid and after taking them first to Ca’ Veneziani, hid them in the mountains as RSI and German patrols continued to hunt for the escaped men.
The die had effectively been cast. The POWs–aScotknown as Jock, and two South Africans, Steeve and Hermes – were kept hidden in the mountains, but along with his friend Gianni, and a few others, Lupo decided to go underground permanently. They began by raiding some of the army barracks that were still largely deserted. With arms, they could actively resist Germany and the new Fascist regime. ‘We didn’t have much of a plan,’ Gianni admits. ‘We borrowed a lorry, raided one of the barracks, and took a stash of rifles and ammunition.’ They then headed back to their homes in Gardelletta and Ca’ Veneziani and hid their cache.
The Stella Rossa was formally
