Night of fire

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The night of June 11th to 12th, 1961, when 37 electricity pylons were blown up in South Tyrol , is called the night of fire . The night of fire was the climax of the attacks by the South Tyrol Liberation Committee .

background

After the end of the Second World War , the Paris Agreement stipulated the reintroduction of German school lessons, the equality of the Italian and German languages , the reacquisition of German first and family names, and equal rights in the allocation of public offices. The resolutions of the Paris Agreement found their way into the First Statute of Autonomy in 1948, but the German language was still subordinate to the Italian language and Italian applicants were preferred when public positions were awarded. From 1956 onwards, smaller groups were formed that tried to enforce their demands by force. The South Tyrol Liberation Committee (BAS), headed by Sepp Kerschbaumer , first carried out attacks in 1956 (on the Otto Huber barracks in Bolzano and the overhead line in Siebeneich ). In further attacks in 1957, 17 South Tyroleans were arrested and released after ten weeks in prison. They were soon assured of financial and organizational support from Austrians .

Since June 1960 the North Tyrolean faction of the BAS brought explosives and weapons to South Tyrol, the couriers were mostly Kurt Welser and Herlinde Molling.

After the failure of the South Tyrol negotiations between Austria and Italy in Klagenfurt on May 25, 1961, the North Tyrolean BAS set the time for the long-planned demolition of the electricity pylons.

procedure

On the night of June 11-12, 1961, electricity pylons were demonstratively blown up, which the BAS viewed as fascist symbols, such as the "Aluminum Duce" in Waidbruck . The attacks reached their climax on the Sacred Heart of Jesus Night, in which the Christian traditions and the vow of the Tyrolean estates of 1796 to celebrate the Sacred Heart Festival are celebrated every year with mountain fires and processions (cf.Andreas Hofer and Adoration of the Sacred Heart ). That night from June 11th to June 12th, 37 high-voltage pylons were blown up (19 in the Bolzano area). Large electrical centers and electrical works were paralyzed, the supply of electricity to the northern Italian industries and the Bolzano industrial zone was interrupted.

Although the attacks were not intended to be directed against people, road worker Giovanni Postal was killed when he found an unexploded bomb.

aims

The aim of the attackers was to make the world aware of the " South Tyrol problem". By blowing up the electricity pylons, the energy supply of the Bozen industrial zone - a model project for the attempted Italianization during fascism - was to be paralyzed. This goal was missed on the night of fire, but the action still received the hoped-for attention. As an immediate reaction, the Italian state massively increased its police and military presence in South Tyrol. One month later, during the so-called "little night of fire", power lines were cut again, so that parts of the northern Italian industrial areas were cut off from the energy supply and trains stopped on international connecting routes. This should put Italy under pressure.

Immediate follow-up events

The UN dealt again with South Tyrol in the same year after the first resolution in 1960, which had been passed before the events of the night of fire ; Shortly afterwards, the South Tyrolean People's Party (SVP) agreed with the Italian government to set up a parliamentary commission of nineteen , under whose leadership an extended autonomy for South Tyrol was worked out. To what extent the events of the night of fire had a positive or negative effect on these events is controversial among historians.

Those who were directly involved in the night of fire immediately fell into the crosshairs of the Italian authorities and were largely placed in custody. Some of the detainees were subjected to physical and psychological torture; the death of the 28-year-old Franz Höfler has not yet been clarified in this context. In 1963 94 people u. a. charged with murder (of the road warden Giovanni Postal) and attack on the constitution. A life sentence was deliberately avoided after the charges were mitigated by the judiciary. However, leading BAS activists had to serve several years' imprisonment. Some of them were released early because of good conduct. Some convicts have escaped imprisonment through exile in Austria. The leader of the BAS, Sepp Kerschbaumer , died in 1964 at the age of 51 in Verona prison.

reception

Street name in Eppan on the Wine Route

The opinion of the South Tyrolean population on the events was divided from the beginning. The BAS group did not in fact have broad support among the majority of the South Tyrolean population; Nonetheless, their obvious willingness to make sacrifices - especially after they became aware of torture in state prisons - earned the activists of the night of fire a relative degree of sympathy among the local population.

The political value of the night of fire is particularly controversial among historians. The question here is whether the aggravation of the political climate that has been brought about has had a positive or negative effect on the realization of the autonomy of South Tyrol (which was not the declared aim of the BAS activists).

In South Tyrol's media discourse, the events of the night of fire have been present since the 1980s, and are relatively prominent, albeit controversially, in comparison to socio-historical aspects of regional history or the history of the Italian community of South Tyrol (see list of literature). The memory of the events is initiated again and again by cultural associations such as the South Tyrolean Heimatbund and the South Tyrolean Schützenbund , but also by party political groups such as the Union for South Tyrol and South Tyrolean Freedom .

literature

Specialist literature

  • Elisabeth Baumgartner (ed.): Fire night. South Tyrol's bomb years: a contemporary history reader. Edition Raetia , Bozen 1992, ISBN 88-7283-010-9 .
  • Monika Erckert: Why did terrorism occur in South Tyrol? Thesis. University of Vienna 2000.
  • Manuel Fasser: One Tyrol - two worlds. The political legacy of the South Tyrolean fire night of 1961. Studienverlag, Innsbruck-Wien-Bozen 2009, ISBN 978-3-7065-4783-3 .
  • Herlinde Molling: That's how we planned the night of fire. Protocols, sketches and strategy papers from the BAS archive . Edition Raetia , Bozen 2011, ISBN 978-88-7283-406-0 .
  • Birgit Mosser-Schuöcker, Gerhard Jelinek: Heart of Jesus fire night. South Tyrol 1961. The attacks. The tortures. The processes. The role of Austria . Tyrolia Verlag, Innsbruck 2011, ISBN 978-3-7022-3132-3 .
  • Günther Pallaver : The pacification of the South Tyrolean terrorism . In: ders. (Ed.): Politika 11th Yearbook for Politics / Annuario di politica / Anuer de pulitica. Edition Raetia, Bozen 2011, ISBN 978-88-7283-388-9 , pp. 427-455.
  • Hans Karl Peterlini : The discomfort in history . In: Günther Pallaver (Ed.): Politika 11th year book for politics / Annuario di politica / Anuer de pulitica. Edition Raetia, Bozen 2011, ISBN 978-88-7283-388-9 , pp. 397-426.
  • Hans Karl Peterlini: South Tyrolean bomb years. From blood and tears to a happy ending? Edition Raetia, Bozen 2005, ISBN 88-7283-241-1 .
  • Hubert Speckner : From the "Fire Night" to the "Porzescharte"…. The "South Tyrol Problem" of the 1960s in the Austrian security files . Gra & Wis Verlag, Vienna 2016, ISBN 978-3-902455-23-9 .
  • Rolf Steininger : South Tyrol. From the First World War to the present. Studienverlag , Innsbruck 2003, ISBN 3-7065-1348-X .
  • Rolf Steininger: South Tyrol between diplomacy and terror . Three volumes. Athesia , Bozen 1999, ISBN 88-7014-997-8 .
  • Leopold Steurer : South Tyrolean publications on the bomb years between critical analysis, apology and trivialization . In: Günther Pallaver (Ed.): Politika 11th year book for politics / Annuario di politica / Anuer de pulitica. Edition Raetia, Bozen 2011, ISBN 978-88-7283-388-9 , pp. 367-396.
  • Leopold Steurer: Propaganda in the "liberation struggle" . In: Hannes Obermair et al. (Ed.): Regional civil society in motion - Cittadini innanzi tutto. Festschrift for / Scritti in onore di Hans Heiss. Folio Verlag, Vienna-Bozen 2012. ISBN 978-3-85256-618-4 , p. 387ff.

Literary adaptations

Web links

Commons : Fire Night  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Herlinde Molling: This is how we planned the night of fire , Bozen 2011. p. 109.
  2. ↑ Herlinde Molling: So we planned the fire night , Bozen 2011. p. 306.
  3. ^ Image of the "Aluminum-Duce" (destroyed by BAS in 1961) in the Italian-language Wikipedia
  4. ↑ Rolf Steininger: The fire night and what then . Bolzano 2011.
  5. ↑ Günther Pallaver: The pacification of South Tyrolean terrorism, in: ders. (Ed.): Politika11. Yearbook for Politics, Edition Raetia, Bozen 2011, pp. 139–440.
  6. ^ Peter Prantner: South Tyrol and the myth of the "night of fire". ORF.at, June 12, 2011, accessed on June 2, 2013 .