2024-01-09 01:00:48
Time.news – An SS officer wrote contemptuously in the report to his superiors that “the men who were not lying on the ground had been hit so badly that they were writhing and screaming” and it had been necessary to fire the final shots by the commander and some soldiers of the firing squad.
January 1944, the Verona trial of the hierarchs who on 25 July 1943 Grandi had voted on the Agenda in provocation the fall of Mussolini and the collapse of the fascist regime, it ended in blood, sealing an already written death sentence. For Adolf Hitler that had been a betrayal that had to be paid for with his life, and the republicans called for the same. The Amici della musica hall in Castelvecchio had been used as a courtroom, symbolically in the same place where the first (it would also be the last) national congress of the Republican Fascist Party was held in November 1943.
Of the 19 hierarchs who col vote of the Grand Council they had believed they could save what could be saved by sacrificing the Duce, but only six remained in the hands of the Germans and fascists, and among them Galeazzo Ciano, former foreign minister and son-in-law of Benito Mussolini, because he was the husband of his favorite daughter, Edda. He was at the top of Hitler’s black list who had already demanded Ciano’s head from the Duce on 15 September, without having to take into account the parental relationships of his father, father-in-law and grandfather. His wife Rachel was also for revenge.
It is still debated today whether in what way, and above all at what political price the Verona trial before the Special Tribunal for the defense of the RSI State, established for this purpose on 14 November 1943 (and approved by the Council of Ministers on the 24th) could fail or have a different outcome: the court was made up of nine politically appointed magistrates with clear fascist faith, as demanded and orchestrated by the secretary Alessandro Pavolini. On 17 October Ciano was arrested in Munich, where he had been since 27 August and where he had even reconciled with Mussolini, and was imprisoned in the Scalzi prison. He would soon be joined by Tullio Cianetti, Luciano Gottardi (who had even asked to join the PFR), Giovanni Marinelli and Carlo Pareschi, imprisoned first in Rome where they lived in their homes and then in Padua, then in Verona from 4 November; only Emilio De Bono, out of consideration for his age (he was born in 1866) and because he was quadrumvir of the March on Rome in 1922, was left in his house in Cassano d’Adda and subsequently hosted in a hospital room.
The investigation by judge Vincenzo Cersosimo, with the obstacles posed by the Germans who were certainly not interested in procedures or legal guarantees, it ended on 29 December. There was no legal basis for the trial, as the new justice minister Piero Pisenti claimed, starting from the accusation of treason, since Mussolini had been made aware of the contents of Grandi’s agenda and it was he who had summoned the same goes for the Grand Council. The question was exquisitely political, and intersected with the irreducible hatred of Adolf Hitler, Joseph Goebbels and Joachim Ribbentrop for Ciano, and the more rational interest of the German secret services for his diaries, embarrassing and compromising upon historical rereading.
It is no coincidence that Nazi espionage had placed the agent in close contact with Ciano Felizitas Beetz (aka Hildegard Burkhardt), secretary of the head of the SD in Italy, lieutenant colonel SS Wilhelm Höttl in full agreement with Ernst Kaltenbrunner, commander in chief of the RSHA. It was she, in love with Ciano, to weave a web with Edda to try to save his life, going even beyond the task of seizing the precious documents, and even becoming the architect of an SS operation to free the prisoner, which had been given the green light by Heinrich Himmler and Kaltenbrunner and was scheduled for the night between 7 and 8 January, few hours before the opening of the Verona trial scheduled for 9am, whose sentence had already been written: in fact all the witnesses cited by the defense will be rejected and only those from the prosecution will be admitted.
Edda had recovered the Diaries in Rome with the help of Count Emilio Pucci, sewing them inside the lining of a fur coat, and had delivered two diaries on the 4th making arrangements for the following day, which were however disregarded by the Germans after a phone call from Berlin: Hitler had learned of the plan from Goebbels and Ribbentrop and had blown up All. Of the six hierarchs on trial in Verona, on Monday 10 January five were sentenced to death and only Cianetti was sentenced to 30 years of imprisonment (he had retracted the vote of the Grand Council on the same night of 25 July, and for this reason he was saved thanks to 5 votes against 4); all the others, starting from Dino Grandi, had been tried and sentenced in absentia to capital punishment, and all of them survived the Second World War.
The requests for grace, after an absurd and embarrassed twenty-hour ballet of skills to avoid taking on responsibilities and not placing them on the shoulders of Mussolini already torn apart by his political and family role (they were not even delivered to him), they were rejected by the consul Italo Vianini: he had refused for four hours of rejecting them but then he was forced to sign by a telephone order from Renato Ricci followed by another written order, at 8 am on Tuesday 11 January.
Although it was already late to proceed with the shooting, usually at dawn (a time already set for that day), at 9 am the condemned men, as previously communicated to the Germans, were taken to the shooting range of Fort San Procolo. The firing squad, under the orders of Nicola Furlotti, was made up of 30 soldiers arranged in two rows. The Germans watched with interest and everything was filmed by a militia officer. The condemned were tied to a chair with their backs to them, according to Italian custom, and confessed to Don Giuseppe Chiot.
At 9.20, a moment before the discharge, Ciano turned around: during the night he had tried to commit suicide in his cell but the pill he thought was cyanide supplied by Felizitas Beetz was actually a banal sleeping pill. Her bullets did not kill her, her body was shaken by spasms and it took two shots to her head fired by Furlotti. At midday, opening the work of the Council of Ministers in Gargnano, Mussolini will say: “Justice has been done.” Edda would never speak to him again and in 1991 her son Fabrizio Ciano (1931-2008) titled one of his memoirs “When grandfather had dad shot”.
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