Eighty years ago the Togliatti amnesty for "turn the page" southern fascism

The minister Keeper of the seals and leader of Communist Party Palmiro Togliatti linked his name toamnesty launched by De Gasperi government il June 22, 1946twenty days after institutional referendum which had sanctioned the birth of the Republic. A strong signal was needed that Italy was turning the page, and the presidential decree n. 4 it had to close a deep and festering wound that was not only political but also social.

A move made for the best interests of national pacificationbut which prevented us from historicizing the experience of fascism and the responsibilities not only in the consent to the regime but also of guerra lost and of the roots of civil war with the contrast between Italians.

The blow to justice

The transfer of skills fromHigh Court of Justiceextraordinary body, to ordinary judiciary to judge crimes committed during the period of dictatorship and in that of Republic of Salò was resolved in fact with a swipe of the ice. THE’criminal actionwhich with the provision was to be exercised only on crimes of particular heinousness, for a series of reasons distorted the historical meaning of the verification of the truth in the trial to settle a national consciousness on the twenty-year period and therefore the collective memory of the Italians, who en masse had given their adhesion and support to Mussolini.

The renunciation of an Italian Nuremberg

The dilution of responsibilities and the cancellation of roles and blame by renouncing punishment has led to a sort of collective amnesia and to the difficulties, reached in the present with all its verbal excesses, to a narrative that had also given up on instructing one Italian Nuremberg to truly close that experience in the name of historicization. The born again parties in fact they gave up on bringing out the most obvious and exact data that the fascism he had been a product of Italian society, and not just a tool for shaping it, thus renouncing even a bitter and painful confrontation. They were satisfied with the contrast between two categories of fascism e di anti-fascism to legitimize the newborn republic as something profoundly different that had repudiated the Twenty yearswithout explaining it thoroughly. Politics delegated to judiciary punishments for excesses, and therefore not only for crimes, and for historians the dichotomous explanation.

The judiciary and the emblematic case of Azzariti

Behind the initiative of Get awaywhich also encountered various distinctions and even open contrary positions within the government, there was probably also a hidden plan to delegate to the judges the far from simple task of resolving the tangle of responsibilities. On the other hand too anti-fascists prominent among their CVs was their adherence to the regime and even to its aberrations racism and the laws that made it the legal cornerstone of the State. There judiciaryas a whole, had received benefits and careers having given his consent to the system and allowed the operation of Special courts. L’purge had been almost unnoticed in this sector, almost no magistrate was found guilty by his colleagues and punished accordingly. It has become emblematic of the ferrying from dictatorship at the republic the case of Gaetano Azzaritidirector ofLegislative office of the Ministry of Justice and Justice from 1927 to the post-war period. With Mussolini he had been president of Race Tribunalhad joined the Manifesto which introduced the State racismand in the first government Badoglio had been charged with holding the Ministry of Justice. His only driving licence anti-fascism came from the fact that for this reason the republicans of Salò they had sentenced him to death, accusing him of simply having turned his jacket inside out. It will be part of the Forti Commission for writing the Constitutionwill have time to be appointed president of the court and in 1955 the Head of State Giovanni Gronchi will call him back from retirement like constitutional judge and second president of Consultation. The judiciary, behind the principle of having been a technical and not political body, had absolved itself from the very beginning.

Particularly heinous crimes and collective self-absolution

It is therefore not surprising that theTogliatti amnesty has in effect gone beyond the intention of punishing only serious cases committed before but also after the8 September 1943. In fact, there will be very few sentencing decisions. The stringent formula of «particularly heinous crimes» opened his shirts, and as for the political crimes the way out of the trials proved to be particularly wide: the presidents and members of the special courts and of courts of Salòi prosecutorsand therefore those responsible for the Pnfnewspaper editors, army and militia officers unless it was a question of massacres, torture particularly brutal, murders, lootingcrimes for profit. And neither do they partisan forcesespecially those on the left, were immune from quick showdowns, episodes of common crime passed off as summary or popular justice, massacres like the recent one in Porzus. L’amnesty extinguished the crime and also its consequences, if a conviction had occurred, and tens of thousands were released. To the conflict fought alongside Hitler in the narrative the deresponsibilising political label of “fascist war”, the acquittals of courts of justice became in daily practice theautoassoluzione of Italian society and people. And so, from step to step, the categories of fascism e anti-fascism have reached the point of abusing and trivializing contemporaneity, in a collective wash that prevented and perhaps still prevents today the formation and recognition of shared memory.