Francesco Fausto Nitti

Francesco Fausto Nitti (born September 2, 1899 in Pisa , † May 28, 1974 in Rome ) was an Italian journalist and fighter against Italian fascism .

life and career

Francesco Fausto Nitti was born on September 2, 1899, the son of Vincenzo Nitti (1871–1957), a Protestant priest of the Italian Methodist Church , and his wife Paola Ciari (1870–1932) in the Tuscan city ​​of Pisa. After schooling in Pisa, he joined the Italian armed forces at the age of 17 and subsequently fought for them in the First World War . After the end of the world war he returned to his homeland and started a large-scale campaign against fascism in Italy after the murder of Giacomo Matteotti , which is considered to be the beginning of Benito Mussolini's dictatorship . Because of his active anti-fascist propaganda he was arrested for the first time in December 1926 and had to serve several years in prison on the island of Lipari . Together with two other political prisoners , Carlo Rosselli and Emilio Lussu , he managed to escape in July 1929 after two and a half years of imprisonment, the three of whom found refuge in France . Like the other two political prisoners, he was involved in founding the resistance movement Giustizia e Libertà .

In 1937 Nitti came to Spain , where he served as a major in the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War . After the defeat of the Republicans, he returned to France, where he was immediately interned in a concentration camp . He managed to escape again via the phantom or ghost train of the Nazis, the nickname of the train that was supposed to deport all political prisoners and captured Allied pilots from Saint-Gilles / Sint-Gillis near Brussels to concentration camps in Germany at the beginning of September 1944 of captivity. With around 100 of the 700 or so prisoners on the train, he escaped to freedom in the Haute-Marne department after the prisoners removed planks from the floor of the wagon and were able to climb through them into the open. He then returned one more time to France, where he joined the Maquis and with them the French Resistance . He was awarded the Médaille de la Résistance for his achievements . After meeting his family again in the Basque community of Tolosa in 1946 , he subsequently returned to Italy with them. There he was still in various positions and in various activities for anti-fascist organizations. Among other things, he was also head of the Associazione Nazionale Partigiani d'Italia ( ANPI or ANPI for short ), the national association of Italian partisans. In Rome , where he settled after returning to Italy, he was then active as a politician on the city council for years. He died on May 28, 1974 at the age of 73 in the Italian capital.

literature

• Pietro Ramella: Francesco Fausto Nitti. L'uomo che beffò Hitler e Mussolini (= Aracne. 11: Scienze storiche, filosofiche, pedagogiche e psicologiche. 144). Aracne, Rome 2007, ISBN 978-88-548-1124-9 .
• Francesco Fausto Nitti: Il Maggiore è un rosso (= Nuovi Coralli. 87, ZDB -ID 26148-8 ). Einaudi, Turin 1974.

Web links

• Pietro Ramella: Biography Francesco Fausto Nitti. In: Storia XXI secolo. February 12, 2008 (Italian). 
• Stellan Kinberg: L'Isola del Diavolo. In: kinberg.net. August 17, 2008, archived from the original on June 30, 2016 (Italian). 
• Il confino politico del fascismo a Lipari con i più importanti oppositori del regime. In: Archivio Storico Eoliano. (Italian). 
• Armin Fuhrer: Destination Dachau concentration camp: contemporary witness reports how he freed himself from Hitler's “ghost train”. In: Focus Online . 16th March 2019 .