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Guilt, context and the historian: debating the Schio massacre: A comment on Sarah Morgan's ‘The Schio killings’
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 May 2016
Extract
In a recent issue of Modern Italy, Sarah Morgan has offered an analysis of the Schio killings (eccidio di Schio) of July 1945 by means of a ‘constructivist’ approach.1 She compares the narratives of events provided by the Communist party (PCI), the Allied Military Government (AMG), and partisans and partisan organizations, and shows how each narrative was related to different political interests and preoccupations. Thus, the PCI, which was primarily concerned with defending the image of the ‘Resistance’ on which its political legitimacy rested, maintained that those responsible for the killings of over. fty ‘Fascists’ held in the Schio prison were not real partisans but ‘agents provocateurs’. The AMG presented the killings as a brutal example of breakdown of law and order thus casting doubt on the viability of the model of grass-root governance provided by the Committees of National Liberation (CLN). Conservative political forces pushed the AMG narrative even further and chose to regard the Schio massacre as the beginning of a cycle of violence instigated by the Communist Left. Finally, partisans and partisan organizations argued that the killings were an act of popular justice within the context of a general sense of frustration for the lack of epurazione (purging of the Fascists) and the emotions generated by the news that all but one of the Schio anti-Fascists sent to the Mathausen concentration camp had died there.
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References
Notes
1. Morgan, Sarah ‘The Schio killings: a case study of partisan violence in post-war Italy’ Modern Itaty 2000 5 2 147–150Google Scholar
2. Il Giornale di Vicenza 28 04 2000 15Google Scholar
3. Rossi, Pio ‘L'eccidio di Schio. Ci fu qualche sconosciuto mandante?’ Numero Unico Schio 2000 86–88Google Scholar
4. Cooke, Philip ‘The Resistance Continues: a social movement in the 1970s’ Modern Italy 2000 5 2 161–73 ‘Resistenza continua’ see Cooke talks about Sartori's presence in Schio at the time of the killings hut mentions that such information comes from Dr Morgan whose sources, in turn, are the same Schio partisan circles that have put forward such a hypothesis.Google Scholar
5. E. M. Simini, … e Ahele uccixe Caino. Element! per una ritettura critica del bimestre delta ‘resa (lei conti’ Schio 29 oprile—7 laglio 1945. Schio. 2000.Google Scholar
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10. D‘Alema, MassimoRampini, F. Kosovo: gli itatiani e la guerra Mondadori Milan 1999 76 D'Alema's comments were prompted by the perceived necessity to explain the revenge killings of the so-called ‘Kosovo Liberation Army’ that NATO (and hence also his government) had helped take control of KosovoGoogle Scholar
11. On this key point, see the important contribution by Vivarelli, La fine di una stagione, pp. 15 and 104.Google Scholar