Day of the Liberation of Italy
The day of the liberation of Italy , officially Anniversario della Liberazione ( German : anniversary of the liberation ), is an Italian holiday . It is celebrated every year on April 25th and has a similar status in Italy as the Festa della Repubblica , the Italian national holiday . In a narrower sense, this day commemorates the armed uprisings on April 25, 1945, which the National Liberation Committee of Northern Italy (CLN) had called for. The uprisings greatly favored the Allied advance in the Po Valley; Several northern Italian cities, including Genoa and Milan , were liberated from the German occupation by the partisans of the Resistancea a few days before the arrival of Allied troops . In a broader sense, the holiday symbolizes the successful end of the struggle against fascism and National Socialism , which opponents of the regime only waged politically and partisans also armed from September 1943.
history
Immediately after the proclamation of the Cassibile armistice agreed by Italy and the Allies on September 8, 1943, the German occupation of Italy began ( fall of the axis ). A first spontaneous resistance movement arose in Naples , which liberated itself from the German occupation forces in an uprising known as the " Four Days of Naples " between September 27 and 30, 1943, and so the Allied troops took over the Allied troops on October 1, 1943 without a fight City made possible. While the Fascist Italian Social Republic was constituted under German protection and new military and security forces were being formed in central and northern Italy, the armed anti-fascist resistance, the Resistancea, was gradually being organized in these areas . Initially, it was a question of spontaneously formed groups, which as a rule committed themselves to certain anti-fascist parties or groups or were set up by them and were later coordinated by joint liberation committees. Many of the Resistancea units were led by former soldiers; In Piedmont in particular, there were autonomous resistance groups, which consisted mainly of former soldiers. There were also numerous armed women, especially in the socialist and communist-oriented groups.
After the troops of the Commander-in-Chief Southwest and at the same time Commander-in-Chief of Army Group C General Field Marshal Albert Kesselring had withdrawn from the Gustav Line in southern Italy to the Goth position in the northern Apennines in the summer of 1944 , northern Italy remained as the operational area of the Resistance . In September 1944, the Allies tried to break through the new German defensive position, but without achieving decisive success. During these battles, in the months after that and especially during the Allied final offensive from April 9, 1945, which led to the collapse of the German front lines near Bologna on April 20, the Resistancea in northern Italy tied up units of the Wehrmacht and the National Republican Army of Mussolini .
The city of Bologna was the target of partisan attacks as early as April 19, 1945. On the morning of April 21, she was liberated by troops of the II Polish Corps , the Italian combat group Friuli , which was also fighting on the Allied side, and partisans of the Maiella brigade . After partisans had occupied Parma and Reggio Emilia on April 24th, after a corresponding call by the Liberation Committee, led by the communist Luigi Longo , the politician of the action party Leo Valiani and the socialist and later President Sandro Pertini, a call took place on April 25th general uprising in a number of major cities in northern Italy.
The German combat commander of Genoa , General Günther Meinhold , refused the order to blow up the port and the industrial facilities and on April 25, 1945 - two days before the arrival of the Allies - agreed with the CLN to surrender his combat group. He avoided the death penalty imposed for this thanks to the protection of the CLN. The cities of Turin and Milan, in which uprisings and strikes had started a few days earlier, were abandoned by German troops on April 25th. Units of the 5th US Army entered liberated Milan on April 29th. The partisans handed over around 5,000 German soldiers to the British who entered Padua on April 29 . The German troops in northern Italy capitulated on May 2, 1945.
The Italian dictator Benito Mussolini fled with his lover Clara Petacci and a few other people on April 25 from Milan towards Lake Como . In Dongo , Mussolini was tracked down in a German military convoy by partisans of the 52nd Garibaldi Brigade "Luigi Clerici" on the afternoon of April 27 and shot the following day by an execution squad in Giulino di Mezzegra .
April 25th marks the beginning of a new phase of democratization, which culminated in the referendum of June 2nd, 1946 and the constitution of the Italian Republic of January 1st, 1948. In 2005, symbolically on Liberation Day, the last piece of the obelisk, brought to Rome by Benito Mussolini in 1937 after the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, was returned to Ethiopia from Axum . Liberation Day tends to be a public holiday in Italy today for the political left.
The Gran Premio della Liberazione cycling race has been held on the day of Italy's liberation since 1946 .
See also
Individual evidence
- ↑ This day in history: September 6, 1944: Italian resistance fighters persevere. history.com
- ↑ Marco Belogi, Daniele Guglielmi: Spring 1945 on the Italian front: a 25 Day Atlas from the Apennines to the Po River. Primavera 1945 sul fronte italiano: Atlante dei 25 giorni dall'Appennino al fiume Po. Mattioli 1885, Fidenza 2011 ISBN 978-88-6261-198-5 . P. 281
- ↑ www.news.bbc.co.uk , accessed April 25, 2014
- ↑ Il 25 aprile non è (solo) di sinistra . ecodisavona.it, April 24, 2018
- ↑ www.cyclingarchives.com , accessed April 25, 2014
