The Body of Il Duce (8 page)

The exhibition of people who had been hanged or shot was used by the Social Republic as an extreme way of controlling the population, a silent but supremely eloquent method of social control. Butcher's hooks served an important function, degrading human beings by treating them as animals. There was nothing new in this: the Fascists had tried a similar expedient on the natives in their African colonies. But it would be wrong to credit the practice of showing off the dead only to the Fascists. Since the Spanish civil war, European anti-Fascists had also been trading in corpses. For the Republicans, displaying their adversaries' dead bodies (even digging them up) was a symbolic way of denying legitimacy to the enemy's cause. In Italy's civil war, partisans could not wait for the liberation of Milan and the capture of Mussolini to exhibit Fascist corpses like hunting trophies. There were several such episodes, among them the horrendous battle between partisans and the forces of the Social Republic in the village of Poggio Bustone in March 1944, in which the Fascists were defeated. Local farmers took the losers' bodies, stuck them on pitchforks, and hung them one by one on the trees along the main street, “lined up … like so many rows of straw.”
2
A year later, in liberated Rome, a crowd descended on Donato Carretta, the director of the Regina Coeli prison under the Nazi occupation, threw him in the Tiber, drowned him, and dragged his body to the prison, where they strung it up from a window, then beat and kicked it for more than an hour. In the months following the Liberation other Fascists were lynched and their bodies put on public display.

Nevertheless, it was fairly uncommon for the partisans to show off their victims. When they did, the dead were more likely to be other partisans accused of theft or betrayal than the Fascist enemy. It was the Republic of Salò that considered this tactic one of its fundamental weapons. In northern and central Italy there were countless cases of Resistance fighters, killed by Social Republic forces, whose corpses were shown off for hours, sometimes days. For example, the bodies of three anti-Fascists from San Maurizio Canavese, near Turin, were put on view in the town square on February 11, 1944. The townspeople was made to file by the corpses, “including the schoolchildren and, horrible to say, even the nursery school children.”
3
Only much later, when it was dark, did the Fascists allow the families to take the bodies away for burial. That night, despite police surveillance, three small white crosses marked with “Peace to the innocent” appeared in the square after the dead had been removed. The next day, the crosses were taken away.

From one end of occupied Italy to the other, the battle to recover the bodies and bury them became a kind of extension of the partisan struggle. Often it was the parish priest, taking up his traditional role as community conscience, who would gather up the slain Resistance fighters. A number of men of the cloth paid with their lives for this service. At Marzabotto, in Emilia-Romagna, where the Germans carried out a vicious reprisal against the partisans, two priests were shot for trying to bury a few of the eighteen hundred civilians who were massacred. In these wars of the cemetery, the secular values of the Resistance bowed to popular religious belief, the conviction that a person sent to the grave with respect would be resurrected sooner. Keen to gain legitimacy with villagers in the countryside, the partisans frequently went to great risk to give the fallen a Christian burial. Each victim's sacrifice was understood to testify to the holiness of the Resistance struggle. But there was a negative side to this attention to proper burial, for the more the partisans insisted on it, the more the Fascists were determined to treat dead Resistance fighters with the maximum disrespect.

Thus, the tortured and condemned of the Resistance, in addition to knowing they would die, knew their bodies would be shown off in ways designed to frighten others. It was a fate some faced with materialist indifference. “Don't make a fuss about the corpse or anything else,” wrote the Roman partisan Fabrizio Vassalli, a thirty-five-year-old economist, to his parents on the eve of his execution. “Wherever they leave me, they leave me.”
4
Other partisans saw their fate with great lucidity. “They are letting me rest now until all my wounds heal,” wrote Umberto Ricci, a twenty-two-year-old accounting student from Ravenna who had endured long torture sessions. “Then they are going to present me to the public tied up with a piece of rope.”
5
Some were unable to conceal their distress: “My body is here by the school near Albegno, this side of the bridge,” wrote eighteen-year-old Renato Magi, a Tuscan bricklayer, to his parents. “You can come right away to get me.… As I write, my heart pains me, dear Mother and Father, please come right away to get me.”
6

The civil war was also this: a tragedy of and about bodies. “My thoughts to my dear wife and my loved ones, my body to my faith”: Giulio Casiraghi, a Communist factory worker from the outskirts of Milan, carved those words on the door of his jail cell before his fatal transfer to Milan's San Vittore prison.
7
Casiraghi could never have imagined the prophetic force of his words. His body and those of fourteen other political prisoners, shot and dumped in Piazzale Loreto on the morning of August 10, 1944, in reprisal for a suspected partisan attack, inflamed the Communist faithful as few others had. “They were one on top of the other covered with flies, lying beneath a terrible hot sun, one with his arms spread out, one all twisted up, one head down, one with his eyes wide in terror”;
8
face to face with the corpses of these fifteen anti-Fascist martyrs, Communist veterans vowed to make their struggle more punishing than ever. Workers from nearby Monza and Vimercate passed by the dead, shocked at the way their comrades were exhibited. Hundreds of Milanese citizens passed as well. One man took a gun and shot into the heap, but there were many women who dared to bring flowers and children who pushed to the front to see the spectacle of death. From the murderers to the victims to the spectators, this was a wholly Italian tragedy: August 10, 1944, was to go down in the memory of the Resistance.

*   *   *

IT HAS BEEN
said that Mussolini, knowing he could not avoid reprisals for the partisans' bodies, ventured that the Fascists would “pay a high price for the blood of Piazzale Loreto.”
9
What is certain is that the ferocious executions of August 1944—ordered by an SS commando but carried out by a Fascist squad—provoked a crisis at the highest levels of the Social Republic. Piero Parini, the Fascist official governing Milan and the surrounding province, resigned, and with him went any hope for a moderate administration in the Lombard capital, which instead became the focal point of the civil war. But the symbolic consequences of the event were more important and would have the greatest bearing for the body of Il Duce, as nine months before his death Piazzale Loreto had become a place of memory for anti-Fascists, not only for Lombardy partisans but for Resistance fighters throughout northern Italy. Just as a young man from Vicenza cycled the hundred miles to Milan to honor one of the widows and pay homage at the square, many partisans saw Piazzale Loreto as a symbol of an enemy who had to be defeated and a vendetta that had to be honored.

Fourteen political prisoners, shot and dumped in Piazzale Loreto on the morning of August 10, 1944. (
Foto Publifoto/Olympia
)

The Nazis' and Fascists' practice of exhibiting the dead bodies of the enemy left its mark on the literature of the period. Writers and poets of the Resistance—Corrado Govoni, Salvatore Quasimodo, Franco Fortini, Elio Vittorini—filled their work with images of dead people who had not been properly buried. There were partisans whose only grave was “a long coat, stiffened with frost,” mothers who raced toward sons “crucified on a telegraph pole,” heads of hanged victims left on the sides of a bridge and at the market, on the ground the “fingernails of those who had been shot,” and the bodies of boys “with serious faces, boys who had not died children,” scattered on the sidewalk.
10
But it was the fifteen bodies thrown into the square in Milan that left the most vivid mark. In the winter of 1944–45, Alfonso Gatto's poem “For the Martyrs in Piazzale Loreto” circulated widely in clandestine anti-Fascist circles:

It was dawn, and where people worked,

where the piazzale was the lit-up jewel

of the city moving to its lights

from evening to evening, where the streetcar's very screech

of iron on iron was a salute to the morning

and to the fresh faces of the living,

they wanted a massacre, so that Milan

would have everything mingled in the same blood

on its doorstep, its proud young sons

and its strong old heart clasped together as in a fist.

Gatto's anger was the anger of a Communist, but his grief was that of the entire city. Yet, unwittingly, the perpetrators' heartless message, their memento mori, offered the survivors some consolation, since they were uplifted by the victims'
ars moriendi
, by their courage in death:

I see the new day that at Loreto

above the red barricades the dead

are the first to hail, still in their work clothes

and with their hearts to the wind, still beating

with blood and their own purpose. And every day,

every hour, this fire burns eternal,

every dawn has its heart injured by that lead,

by those innocents snuffed out at the wall.
11

Another episode of violence against the partisans took place on the eve of liberation in Dongo near Lake Como, prior to Mussolini's capture there. On April 24, 1945, four partisans were shot and left on a hilltop as the anti-Resistance Black Brigades of the Social Republic went house to house on the outskirts of the town. Two days later, some of the townspeople, mostly managers and workers from the nearby Falck ironworks, climbed the hill to recover the four bodies. As they came back down the funeral procession grew, joined by other men and women. According to a local friar, the bodies were brought back into town by “a whole crowd of people eager to participate in this tribute of mercy and faith.” When the cortege arrived at the Falck gates, the mourners stopped and recited the prayers for the dead, and a “profound and religious feeling took hold of all those present.”
12
But the prayers were soon interrupted by gunshots as the Black Brigades arrived and began firing into the air.

What happened next seems almost tragicomic, taking place as it did just hours before the Liberation, as “men and women … bruised and bloodied” rushed through the mill gates or into nearby houses, leaving the four bodies to the Fascist militiamen. Only after friars from the local convent of the Madonna delle Lacrime intervened did the Black Brigades agree to turn the bodies over to the families and leave under cover of the nighttime curfew. The incident infuriated the townspeople, who were especially alert when they heard the next day that a column of Nazis and Fascists, possibly including Benito Mussolini, was moving along Lake Como.
13
It is likely that they told Colonel Valerio what had happened when he came up from Milan to carry out partisan justice. And it is easy to imagine that the incident gave Valerio good reason to extend his job beyond the execution of Mussolini and his men and to prolong their suffering beyond death.

*   *   *

BEFORE LIBERATION, PIAZZALE
Loreto served as a place of memory for anti-Fascists only in their imaginations. Once the city was liberated, it immediately became a genuine site of memory, even before Colonel Valerio and his companions arrived from Dongo with their Fascist dead. On the afternoon of April 27, the day before Mussolini's execution, partisan troops from the Oltrepò Pavese district marched to Milan and into Piazzale Loreto, where they were welcomed as heroes. The partisan brigades and the people of Milan celebrating in the square were all but paying official homage to the fifteen patriots who had been dumped there. The next afternoon they were joined by more partisan troops, who marched from the Valsesia hills. By now there were wreaths of flowers where the bodies had lain and a hand-lettered sign reading “Square of the Fifteen Martyrs.”

Thus on the morning of April 29, when the truck bringing Mussolini, Claretta Petacci, and several senior Fascist officials left their bodies in Piazzale Loreto, the partisans had hardly chosen just any Milan square. Colonel Valerio/Audisio was following the first rule of partisan vendetta: that justice should be carried out where injustice had been done. The retaliation was premeditated, according to Mussolini's wife, Rachele, who told her biographer that she had received an anonymous letter in Salò in which the writer promised, “We will take them all to Piazzale Loreto.”
14
It was also premeditated by Audisio, who claimed to have thought of dumping Mussolini in Piazzale Loreto back in August 1944, when he saw the fifteen patriots lying there. More likely, as Aldo Lampredi reported, the vendetta was planned at the last minute, decided during the journey from Dongo to Milan. In any case, it was a natural step given how much the partisans had suffered from the practice of the Fascist militiamen; they could scarcely resist doing the same when they had the chance.