2023-10-23 15:26:57
Time.news – March 1942. France has been split in half for two years: the north and Paris are directly occupied by Nazi Germany; in the centre-south the Vichy regime was established, free only on paper.
The former secretary of the PSI, Pietro Nenni, took refuge in a small town in the French Pyrenees, hoping not to be noticed. Even though it is located in an area of ”free” France, the collaboration of some elements of the Vichy government with the Nazi regime is strong. Furthermore, his name appears on a list of anti-fascist elements whose extradition to Italy Mussolini requested.
In those days an interesting note is written, which helps save Nenni from arrest. It was written by Angelo Tasca: an important historian and journalist, but also a former communist, who, having joined the PSI in the mid-1930s, had become Nenni’s main political opponent.
After the collapse of France, Tasca had decided to support the Vichy authorities and this allowed him to intervene on behalf of former comrades in difficulty. The document, found in the Angelo Tasca Fund preserved at the Feltrinelli Foundation, is an attempt to put Nenni in a good light: it highlights, in fact, the details that can “soften” the position of the Vichy authorities towards the socialist leader.
Tasca’s help to Nenni is a small historical “mystery”.. After the war ended, the rumor had circulated. The socialist leader never believed it and always considered Tasca an ambiguous character.
It is certain, however, that the former communist committed himself to trying to help some former comrades in the fight, such as Giuseppe Faravelli, Giovanni Faraboli and Mario Levi. These, freed from the Vernet concentration camp, sent him a telegram of thanks on 3 April 1942.
The note found
Despite the distrust shown by Nenni, Tasca really moved in his favor. In his book “In France in the storm”, the former communist recalls that in the extradition request made by Rome, “Nenni was accused of plotting I don’t know what with the communists”.
So, on the advice of a Vichy official, he decides to draft the note in favor of his former political opponent. The text of the document, written in French, reads: “27/3/1942. Pietro Nenni has never been and is not a communist. He is a journalist, who was a friend of Mussolini.
In 1914-1915 he led, alongside him, the campaign in favor of Italy’s intervention in the war against the Central Powers. In Italy he was the director of the great socialist newspaper Avanti, which was published in Milan. He is well known in the journalistic environment of Paris and Brussels, where he was a correspondent for several newspapers.
He was the secretary of the Italian Socialist Party. He has three daughters (four actually, ed.), of which two became French through their marriage to Frenchmen. He is also well known in the United States, where he refused to go in June 1940, despite the invitation he had received.”
Details favorable to the socialist leader are highlighted: the fact that he was never a communist; his old friendship with Mussolini; that he is well known in the journalistic environment; that he refused to flee to the United States.
Very different tones from those that Tasca had used against Nenni at the height of their political clash and which demonstrate how, beyond conflicts and even personal resentments, the solidarity between the exiles was often stronger than everything else.
However, in addition to Tasca’s intervention, Nenni had other cards to play: he had no shortage of acquaintances, including that of Pierre Laval, a former socialist who became one of the most influential leaders of the Vichy regime.
Nenni avoided arrest for over a year, until Vichy France’s relative autonomy from the Nazis was further reduced and when pressure from the fascist government for his capture became unsustainable. Arrested by the Gestapo, he arrived in Italy on 5 April 1943 and was sent into exile in Ponza.
He will wonder all his life if his “friend-enemy” Mussolini had intervened to take him out of the hands of the Nazis and to send him to an Italian island, where he is effectively put under “house arrest” but does not risk his life. He will never find a certain answer. According to the scientific director of the Pietro Nenni Foundation, Antonio Tedesco, “it is plausible, however, that the regime did not want to leave prominent Italian “escapees” like Nenni in German hands.
Mussolini considered the leaders of the anti-fascist parties the worst traitors and enemies of the regime and believed it was essential to “neutralize” them, and then judge them after the end of the war. It was – as underlined by the historian Gaetano Arfè – also a matter of national pride: given that they were Italians, he claimed that fascism had the task of punishing them”.
Reproduction is expressly reserved © Time.news 2023
#enemy #saved #Nenni #arrest