Guilt, context and the historian: debating the Schio massacre: A comment on Sarah Morgan's ‘The Schio killings’

Abstract

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.