Traitors spies and torturers. After 8 September, the Italian Social Republic could count on the hundreds of flankers who fought alongside the Nazis against those who wanted to drive out the invaders. They were guilty of heinous crimes and also contributed to the massacres and deportation of thousands of people. But what does it mean, so many years after his death, to discover that your father contributed to the deportation of hundreds of people? We talked about it with Marco Menin, son of Sergio, a Fascist spy and torturer. Menin, who was your father?

MENIN ANSWER: My father’s name was Sergio Menin and he was a craftsman, he worked in lift maintenance. I am an only child. I actually had a brother who was born dead younger than me and after me, let’s say after that trauma, there were no other family members. And my father had quite a complicated health event and he died at the age of 75 in 1996. And until his death he had told me very little, in fact almost nothing about the events of the Second World War, in which he had participated first as a soldier and then, as I discovered, in the political investigation office of the National Guard, Republic of Italy. So basically the political police of the Republic of Salò. When I first researched him, I made a discovery that disconcerted me because the first traces of him that can be found on the web, especially in court documents, refer to his participation in the activities of the Pasubio Partisan Division. Which was the largest partisan division in northern Italy with up to 1,500 armed partisans. And he was one of the members of the restricted command group that flanked commander Marozin. He was also a controversial figure, so much so that he was even sentenced to death by the Vicenza CLN in 1944 for disagreements with the management of resistance activities. Here my father appeared in numerous trials related to events of the Pasubio Division. And then later, however, shortly before the annihilation of the Pasubio Division he had moved to the city of Verona and joined another partisan formation, which was the Carlo Montanari Battalion. We have to take stock of the situation in Verona at that time. Verona was the nerve centre of fascist power, but also of the Nazi occupation of Italy. As it was on the Brenner Pass route and all the main commands of the Gestapo, the SS, and in any case the Wehrmarcht Italia were in Verona. So it was a city full of barracks, full of armed groups roaming the streets, full of military and political prisons. So it was extremely difficult to move in such a situation and Resistance activities in Verona were limited. But there was a group of young people, especially young people. I also mean high school students, 16-17 years old, who had formed in an attempt to save what could be saved, the dignity and structure of the city. Here’s my father who was a bit older, because he was born in 1921, so in 1944 he was 23 years old, he was still a young man but he had behind him an experience of years of war and also of having been a partisan, which put him on a step above and therefore he easily gained the trust of the boys of the Montanari Battalion and this marked the dramatic end of the Battalion. Because all of them and within a few days they were captured and deported to the concentration camps and of these very few returned. And I came into contact with my father’s story through the words of Ennio Trivellin, who at the time was the president of the Aned section of Verona, the National Association of Ex-Deportees, and when he went to speak in schools he would tell how he had been captured and give the name and surname of the traitor who had him arrested. What he did not have clear and what we can never be certain about, because this was not clarified even in court rulings at the time, and therefore today, when there are no more witnesses, it is even more difficult to understand, was whether he had joined the Pasubio Division because he had been infiltrated by the political investigation office, or whether he was a partisan, perhaps one of those who were politically unconvinced but who was fed up with the war and had taken refuge in the mountains, but then joined the fascists. On this element we will never be certain because no one will be able to remove the doubt. I remain convinced that my father, who had been a Fascist before 8 September in a convinced manner because he was born with the march on Rome and who would have remained a Fascist after 25 April because he had remained a member of the Social Movement even though he had not played any political role in Verona, but he was a person who had within him a sense of honour, of the word taken, of commitment. .. to think that he might have betrayed Fascism the first time to join the Partisans and then betrayed the Partisans to return to the Fascists, seems to me to be something completely out of line with what I have known. That he was a person with a very strong sense of honour, although clearly with all the misunderstandings that go with interpreting this honour with adherence to a political regime that had brought ruin to our country, that had oppressed, that had persecuted hundreds of thousands of people.

QUESTION BERTOLUCCI: Your father, to your knowledge, also had an active role in the torture?

MENIN ANSWER: So what I know… I have reconstructed his story through the court sentences that have remained but also through some testimonies from inside the cells of the political investigation office. Some of these also describe his participation in interrogations, in torture, in particular there is a very crude one by Mario Salazzari who is a sculptor who became a partisan and who was interrogated, tortured and who miraculously saved himself from a heavy sentence, if not death, and then managed to escape from prison before 25 April. And I remain truly bewildered because what I see in there is a person, in those stories I mean, is a person totally different from what I experienced as the son of an adult who was absolutely respectful, opposed to violence, let’s not talk about the women who went, beyond the stereotype a woman is not even touched with a flower, but that’s what was passed on to me. And to think that my father was listed as one of those who were used to interrogate women inside those cells really makes one shudder. Then actually, and I must also say that it is quite difficult to go and evaluate the testimonies of the time because my father, unlike others who had been arrested, managed to make himself a fugitive. So he remained in hiding until August 1948, apparently in a Franciscan monastery in the Venetian lagoon. And only after August ‘48 did he turn himself in. This means that the trials that took place, took place without his presence. And so this had the consequence that he could also on the one hand be pointed to as a scapegoat on whom it was convenient to shift the blame from his accomplices. And on the other hand that there was a lot of acrimony, a lot of rancour, a lot of anger towards him on the part of the survivors of those tortures. Because he was still the traitor. So while I can be a little more sympathetic, in inverted commas, towards the others who are in here and who may be making a contrite face, he was the one who betrayed us, the one who had us all captured and who then escaped and whose whereabouts are unknown, and he was an excellent target on whom to lay the accusations. And this also transpires from the verdicts where the judges themselves express doubts as to whether he was really guilty of all that was attributed to him. Having said that of course the guilt was there and perhaps not all of it but a good part of it. Certainly he was involved with the rank of deputy brigadier of the Fermi office and searches, he was involved after October 1944 when all the partisans of the Montanari Battalion were captured and he worked both in interrogations in cells and in raids, in actions, arrests of various kinds of the political investigation office.

QUESTION BERTOLUCCI: Since your father obviously never told you any of this, how did he find out? And how did he find out?
MENIN ANSWER: Well, in the meantime, I am still in the spirit today, but also as a job, I am a physics teacher. It has nothing to do with history, but in any case on Remembrance Day, I used to do reflections with my students. I used to spend that day thinking together about what had happened, so that it would never happen again. And in 2020, so we are talking about 24 years after my father’s death, for the first time I became curious to see if Google gave me any trace of his membership of the Italian Social Republic. I banally typed into the search engine his first and last name followed by the Italian Social Republic, thinking that some information would come to me. Up to that point I only knew that he had had something to do with the Social Republic, but I thought he had fit in a bit like many others, at the time everyone was a Fascist so you find yourself in a situation where you have to somehow muddle through, get by, save your life, and he had joined the Republic to save himself.Instead, hundreds and hundreds of documents opened up to me in which his role within Upi was immediately clear. And in which it was also immediately clear that he was involved in the partisan formations, which surprised me. Because instead the communication that was conveyed by him and also by my mother, was that the partisans were all opportunists, that is…. The telling of the story from him, was that the resistance had been a front thing that had had no value. So the fact that he had been a partisan for months and then changed his colours puzzled me and still puzzles me today as an idea. And I repeat, I am convinced that he was from the very beginning infiltrated within the Pasubio Division. But beyond that, for me it really was an avalanche of upheaval. Because I had lived through the last few years with my father’s illness and had to somewhat reverse the role of son, and I was the one who had to help, to assist, I was in his house when he died in his bed. And I spent days next to him talking, recounting. And to think that not even on his deathbed did it cross his mind to tell me anything about these events that, for goodness’ sake, were now so far away even for him… But it made me really sick. Also because my personal political path of social commitment had gone totally in other directions. And so initially the reaction was one of total rejection of that. And I have to say my son, who knew his grandfather well, who died when he was ten years old so he was no longer a small child, my daughter was younger so she has a somewhat faded memory of her grandfather, but my son had already lived together, important moments, and the first reaction he had was ‘I want to change my surname, because I don’t want my children to one day do what we did now and discover that the roots of their family are on that kind of history there’.

QUESTION BERTOLUCCI: What can a story like yours leave behind that you have decided to tell anyway?
MENIN ANSWER: So in the meantime, today has left me a little more serene. Now it’s been four, almost five. Because I begin to try to distinguish his personal story, which I do not justify of course because I am aware that my father was guilty of what we now call crimes against humanity, but they are crimes that were committed in a situation in which none of us today can imagine being in. And in these situations wrong choices, horrifying choices, criminal choices, can also involve normal people. And we have seen this in other situations. That is to say, to understand in Yugoslavia where I used to go on holiday before, when it was still called Yugoslavia and everyone lived together with their families and so on, and there were lagers where the torturer was the former neighbour, completely normal people, in those situations come to do absolutely incredible and unjustifiable, crazy things. So first of all it means that we must not get into those situations there. Because it means overwhelming everything that is our social culture, our relationships, our way of being, and therefore being careful not to take that slope that leads us into a slide from which we can no longer return. On the other hand, it made me realise how necessary it is for me to take responsibility, even more than before, to talk to young people about what happened. I would like to tell them how beyond the judgement on people there is a historical judgement that we cannot let go of, because that historical judgement must be built on the assessments of history and not on the assessments of memory alone. When I hear talk of building a shared memory I am very puzzled. Because my family memory, which was transmitted to me not directly because I was not told anything, but I was transmitted a memory of what in some way was the humus from which that story there was born. It was a memory that justified, that gave dignity to political choices that were aberrant, that were criminal. In other words, everything that we can historically say about fascism must be said. And it is not mitigated by the fact that people have a memory, perhaps linked to youth, linked to heroism, of justice, of honour of the Fatherland… that is, crimes are crimes and this cannot be justified and is not mitigated by the fact that some people can recount their choice. That is, it is fine for them to tell. But that does not transfer that all memories have the same value.