Giustizia e Libertà

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article or section needs copy editing for grammar, style, cohesion, tone and/or spelling.
You can assist by editing it now. A how-to guide is available, as is general documentation.
This article has been tagged since January 2007.

Sleeve emblem Giustizia e Libertà Partisans

Giustizia e Libertà (English: Justice and Liberty) was an Italian anti-fascist organization, active from 1929 to 1945.

[edit] Italian Anti-fascist organization (1929 – 40)

The anti-fascist organization Giustizia e Libertà was founded in Paris in 1929 by Italian refugees Carlo Rosselli, Emilio Lussu, Alberto Tarchiani and Ernesto Rossi, promoting the liberal Socialism of Piero Gobetti. They began to organize resistance against Italian Fascism, forming clandestine groups in Italy and commencing an intense propaganda campaign, publishing under Lusso's maxim: "Insorgere! Risorgere!" ("Rebel! Revive!). Carlo Levi was named a director of the Italian branch along with Leone Ginzburg, a Russian Jew from Odessa who had emigrated with his parents to Italy.

After a series of arrests and trials, (including the conviction of Levi) the movement was forced in 1930 to slow down this activity. In 1931 it joined to the Concentrazione antifascista (Anti-Fascist Concentration) and in 1932 began promoting a plan that did not aim at the restoration of the prefascist political picture but a new social democracy at whose center was a republican state, and called for economic rights and administrative decentralization. The group produced its own journal upon which Salvatorelli, De Ruggiero and other collaborated. This journal shared the politics of the groups leaders who sought to distance themselves from Communism and the Partito Comunista Italiano. At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, it organized its own brigades of volunteers to support the Spanish Republic.

Carlo Rosselli and Camillo Berneri headed a mixed volunteer unit of anarchist, liberal, socialist and communist Italians on the Aragon front, including a victory against Francoist forces in the Battle of Monte Pelato. The unit made famous the slogan: "Oggi in Spagna, domani in Italia", "Today in Spain, tomorrow in Italy". In 1937, Camillo Berneri was killed by Communist forces during a purge of anarchists in Barcelona. With the fall of the Spanish Republic in 1939, Giustizia e Libertà partisans were forced to flee back to France.

[edit] Italian Resistance arm of Partito d'Azione (1942 – 1945)

Giustizia e Libertà was forced to cease public operations when German troops occupied France in 1940. Its members were dispersed but largely reconstituted themselves as the Partito d'Azione in German-occupied Italy following the Armistice of of 1943. Its partisan brigades fought under the name of Giustizia e Libertà.

After September 8, 1943, Partisan units under the Giustizia e Libertà banner formed after the Italian capitulation to allied forces and the creation of the puppet state Italian Social Republic. As one of the largest non-communist partisan groups, they benefited from provisions and training denied the PCI units by the western Allies. Among its best known commanders was Ferruccio Parri, who, using the nom-de-guerre "Maurizio", represented the Partito d'Azione in the Military Committee of the National Liberation Committee of the Northern Italy (CLNAI). Centers of activity included Turin, Florence and Milan, where a resistance cell was headed by Ugo La Malfa, Ferruccio Parri and Adolfo Tino. Parri was arrested in Milan and turned over to the Germans, but he was later exchanged for German officials in the hands of the partisans. He returned to the fighting the conclusive phase of the Resistance and in the Milan uprising.

The writer Primo Levi was a member of a Partito d'Azione partisan group in Val d'Aosta. He was captured by fascists forces in 1943, handed over to the Germans in 1944 and deported to Auschwitz III (Monowitz).

Giustizia e Libertà were regarded as professional military units, that drew fighters from every social class. In the twenty months of the war, their units sustained 4,500 overall casualties, and the greater portion of their leaders.