The strikes in northern Italy

At 10 a.m. on 1 March 1944 sirens wailed in the factories of Milan and the workers downed tools. The same day the Fiat works in Turin came to a standstill, and over the following days the strike spread to Genoa, Savona, Bologna, Venice and Porto Marghera, and on 3 March to Florence in Tuscany. It was a general strike in the German-occupied part of Italy, prepared by clandestine agitation committees in which the communists played the decisive role, and backed by the National Liberation Committee for Northern Italy (CLNAI) in Milan. It lasted until 8 March, when the committees themselves called for a return to work.

War chronologies record briefly under this date that anti-fascist strikes broke out in northern Italy. The description is apt but needs two additions. First, the strike also reached central Italy, above all Tuscany. Second, it was directed not only against Benito Mussolini’s Fascist Italian Social Republic but above all against the German occupier, which was running Italian industry for the needs of its own war. The number of participants is disputed. The police of the Social Republic counted 208,549 strikers, including some 119,000 in and around Milan over five days and some 32,600 in Turin over three days. The organisers and the later historiography of the resistance gave figures many times higher, running to several hundred thousand people. Even on the authorities’ figures, Italian historians regard it as the largest strike in German-occupied Europe; an often-cited comment in the New York Times of March 1944 held that occupied Europe had seen no mass action comparable to the revolt of the Italian workers.

The response came quickly. On the orders of Adolf Hitler, conveyed through the Reich’s ambassador to Mussolini’s government, a fifth of the strikers were to be deported to Germany. That plan was not carried out, but hundreds of people were arrested, and trains carrying workers left Florence and Bergamo for the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria. Many of them never returned.

A year earlier: March 1943

The right to strike had been abolished in Italy in the mid-1920s, and the criminal code of 1930 made stopping work an offence. Even so, the war, food rationing and prices that had roughly doubled since 1939 provoked the first protests as early as 1942: a miners’ strike at Carbonia in Sardinia in May and a women’s demonstration in Sesto San Giovanni near Milan. The real breakthrough came on 5 March 1943, when workers at the Fiat plants in Turin stopped work. The strike spread across the whole of the so-called industrial triangle of Turin, Milan and Genoa, and in the second half of March it took in the great factories of Milan and Sesto San Giovanni: Breda, Pirelli, Ercole Marelli, Falck and Magneti Marelli. According to historians’ estimates, some 100,000 workers had taken part by mid-March. The demands were primarily economic, but behind their organisation stood the underground cells of the Italian Communist Party, the socialists and the newly forming Action Party.

The regime responded with arrests, but the shock was enormous. Mussolini concluded that the Fascist party and the police had failed to see the outbreak coming, and he replaced the party secretary and the chief of police. The March strikes of 1943 were the first mass workers’ action in an Axis state during the war and showed how weary the country was of the conflict. Four months later the Grand Council of Fascism stripped Mussolini of power and the King had him arrested – the dictator’s fall in July 1943 had many causes, but the March revolt in the factories was one of the first signs of the crisis.

Occupation and the Salò Republic

After the announcement of the Italian armistice on 8 September 1943 the Wehrmacht took control of the north and centre of the country. A few days later German paratroopers freed Mussolini from the Gran Sasso, and Hitler installed him at the head of the Italian Social Republic, commonly known as the Salò Republic. Real power in occupied Italy, however, lay with the Germans: Field Marshal Albert Kesselring’s military commanders, the Higher SS and Police Leader General Karl Wolff, Ambassador Rudolf Rahn, and the offices responsible for armaments production and labour recruitment, answerable to the Armaments Minister Albert Speer and the Plenipotentiary for Labour Fritz Sauckel.

The factories of northern Italy were a valuable asset for the Reich. They produced engines, vehicles, aircraft, bearings and ammunition, and as Allied bombers destroyed plants in Germany their importance grew. Two German approaches competed here: Speer wanted Italian workers to work where they were, in factories reserved for war production, while Sauckel demanded that they be shipped to the Reich. For the workers themselves this meant starvation rations, low wages, air raids, the threat of deportation and a widespread fear of being conscripted into the army of the Social Republic.

As early as the autumn of 1943 short strikes for bread and wages broke out in Turin, Milan and Genoa, and in January 1944 the workers of Genoa stopped work. In the cities the communist armed groups of the GAP were active, and from the autumn they carried out attacks in Milan and other centres on Germans and Fascist officials. The Social Republic tried to win over the workers with slogans about returning to the “revolutionary” roots of Fascism: in February 1944 it issued a decree on the socialisation of enterprises, promising workers a share in the management of their plants. At the same time, however, the Verona trial and the execution of Galeazzo Ciano in January 1944 showed that the regime had become above all an instrument of repression. The promise of socialisation did not convince the workers, and the Germans, who wanted calm in the factories, received it with reluctance.

Preparations

The decision to call a general strike was taken by the communist leadership in occupied Italy, and it was carried out by clandestine agitation committees in individual factories. All the parties in the CLNAI backed it. The communist underground in the north was then led by, among others, Luigi Longo and Pietro Secchia. The slogans combined economic demands – higher wages, better supplies, payment of arrears – with political ones: an end to the deportation of workers to Germany, an end to conscription into Mussolini’s army, an end to the war. In line with their instructions, the workers were to stop the machines but stay inside the factories so as not to provide a pretext for shooting in the streets.

The authorities knew what was coming. On 29 February the head of the province of Turin, Paolo Zerbino, ordered compulsory leave in the factories, hoping that closed plants would not become scenes of protest. He nonetheless failed to prevent the strike.

Eight days in March

In Turin the strike began at the Fiat works and on 2 March spread to further factories, including Zenith, Viberti and Ceat; according to accounts from those days, some 70,000 workers stopped work. Zerbino threatened lockouts, loss of wages, arrests, deportation to camps in Germany, instant dismissal and the withdrawal of exemptions from military service. On 3 March Fascist militiamen attacked workers leaving the Fiat Grandi Motori plant, and the Salò government ordered troops to occupy the factories. The partisans supported the strike. The Garibaldi Brigades called for work to stop in the Valsesia, power lines were sabotaged in the Aosta Valley, and units west of Turin tried to cut communications with the Susa and Lanzo valleys.

In Milan and Sesto San Giovanni, after the morning sirens of 1 March, the workers stayed in the shop halls as planned and left only in the evening. The next morning they found the gates of Falck and other plants held by Fascist militia with machine guns. Some turned back home, and so the strike continued without a break over the following days. Technicians and office staff joined in, and in Milan, according to accounts from those days, so did some of the tram workers. There were strikes in Genoa, Savona and the industrial centres of Emilia and the Veneto.

The wave reached Tuscany on 3 March. That day most of the large factories in Florence came to a halt, and GAP groups set fire to the offices of the Fascist trade unions. The workers of the Pignone factory in Florence held out on strike for three days. Participation varied greatly from city to city and plant to plant: according to Italian historians’ tallies, it ranged from about half to the whole workforce. On 8 March the agitation committees decided that the political goal had been achieved and that continuing the strike would bring only losses, and they called for a return to work.

Repression and deportations

Hitler treated the strike as sabotage behind the front on which his troops were fighting at Monte Cassino and Anzio. According to accounts cited by Italian historians, he demanded through Ambassador Rahn the deportation to the Reich of 20 per cent of the strikers, some 70,000 people. The plan proved unworkable: mass deportations would have paralysed plants whose output the Germans themselves needed, and Speer’s offices opposed stripping the factories of skilled workers. In the end the repression was selective, but very harsh.

The arrests were carried out by the Italian police, the Fascist militia and the German SS. They were often based on lists drawn up by factory managements, which, alongside known “subversives”, former prisoners and internal exiles of the regime, included members of the strike committees, anti-fascist activists and ordinary skilled workers. People were seized on the shop floor, in the streets and at night in their homes. After a short spell in police stations and prisons such as Milan’s San Vittore, the Fascists handed them over to the Germans.

The earliest transport left from Florence. On 7 and 8 March those detained were gathered in a school on Piazza Santa Maria Novella, and on 8 March they were loaded into sealed wagons, about forty to a wagon, and taken to Mauthausen, which they reached three days later. Among them were people caught by chance: 17-year-old Mario Piccioli was arrested while looking for his mother, who had been detained the day before. The same transport carried Carlo Castellani, the all-time top scorer of Empoli football club, who died in the Gusen sub-camp in August 1944. From Lombardy and Piedmont workers were sent to barracks in Bergamo, from where further trains left for Mauthausen on 17 March and then on 5 and 13 April. A plaque at Bergamo station speaks of at least 865 deportees, including women; researchers consider this figure too low.

The total number deported for taking part in the March strike is hard to establish, since the transports were combined with deportations of political prisoners and partisans. Frequently cited estimates speak of about 1,200 people; other research, including that of the association of former deportees from Sesto San Giovanni, suggests a higher figure. Most of the deportees ended up in Mauthausen and its sub-camps, above all Gusen, where gruelling labour in the quarries and on the construction of underground factory halls, together with starvation, led to very high mortality. Only a minority returned home.

Its place in the history of the war

The strike of March 1944 brought the workers no material gains and did not turn into the insurrection some communist leaders had in mind. Its significance was political. It showed that occupied Italy was no quiet rear area, that the workers of the great cities had sided with the anti-fascist underground, and that the National Liberation Committee could lead a mass action in several regions at once. For the Allies it was proof that the Italian resistance enjoyed broad popular support. For the Social Republic it was a humiliation: its slogans about socialising enterprises turned out to be an empty gesture, and Mussolini’s regime could keep order in the factories only thanks to German force.

The repression also had the opposite effect from that intended. The threat of arrest and deportation drove many young workers to flee into the mountains, and according to some Italian historians as many as several tens of thousands of people joined the partisan units and urban underground networks over the following months. The Germans drew their own conclusions: in the months that followed they tended rather to buy the workers off with extra food rations, while at the same time preparing plans to destroy or remove factory equipment in the event of a retreat. Strikes and deportations did not cease. In the summer of 1944 more workers were deported from the factories of Genoa, and in the months that followed there were repeated strikes, especially in Milan and Turin.

The culmination came in April 1945. The insurrection proclaimed by the CLNAI on 25 April spread through the great cities of the north, and in many places workers who had struck in the factories a year earlier now defended them from destruction by the retreating Germans. The memory of March 1944 and of the “strikers’ trains” to Mauthausen became an enduring part of the tradition of the Italian resistance, and in Florence, Sesto San Giovanni and Bergamo it is commemorated with plaques and annual ceremonies.