Senate Speaker Ignazio La Russa on
Friday criticized the Partisan attack during World War II that
led to the 1944 Ardeatine massacre in which 335 anti-fascist
prisoners and civilians were murdered as a reprisal.
The massacre at the Ardeatine Caves site (Fosse Ardeatine) near
Rome was revenge for the attack in Rome's Via Rasella on the
Bozen Police Regiment, a paramilitary unit which had been raised
from people in the largely German-speaking Italian province of
South Tyrol that had been annexed to the German Reich.
The attack, the biggest anti-German partisan attack in western
Europe, killed 33 soldiers and two civilians also died,
including an 11-year-old boy, although it is not known whether
this was due to the blast or the gunfire of the company in
response.
"Via Rasella was a page (in the history) of the resistance that
was anything but noble," La Russa, a founder member of Premier
Giorgia Meloni's right-wing Brothers of Italy (FDI) party, told
the Terraverso podcast of daily newspaper Libero.
"Those who were killed were a music band made up of
semi-pensioners, not SS Nazis.
"They (the Partisans) were well aware of the risk of reprisals
on Roman citizens, anti-Fascists and non".
He was speaking after being asked about the furore stirred by
Meloni saying the Ardeatine massacre victims were killed because
there were Italians, rather than because they were
anti-fascists.
He said this was a "trumped-up attack".
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