Earlier this year news reports emerged that celebrated director Spike Lee would be turning his hand to a slice of Italian WWII history, as he prepares his next film the Miracle of St. Anna (due for release next year).
The film focusses on four American soldiers trapped behind the Gothic line in Italy in 1944. It deals in particular with the massacre of civilians by Nazi troops in the town of Sant’Anna di Stazzema.
Lee is a frequent visitor to Italy (he has, in the past, held a season ticket for Inter Milan games), and the news that he was taking interest in an Italian story was generally welcomed. He has now, though, run into some controversy over his approach to the massacre.
A.N.P.I – the national association of partisans has published an open letter to the American director, over rumours coming from the set of the film, about his approach to the massacre.
ANPI Rimini publishes (in Italian) a letter, written by Didala Ghilarducci – herself a partisan, whose husband was shot by Nazis weeks after the massacre.
Ghilarducci and others are worried that Lee has taken an approach that suggests the massacre was carried out while Nazi troops searched the village for partisans.
It may seem laboured to the outsider, to argue about whether the massacre took place while Nazi troops searched for partisans, or whether it was a premeditated attack on civilians by the German troops. In either case soldiers lined up and shot 560 civilians in the town, including women and children.
In the political climate of today’s Italy, though, where the fascist period is often referred to neutrally or in glowing terms -telling us about ‘trains on time’ etc without mentioning the suspension of civil rights, the racial laws, the militarisation of society, and the violent supression of dissent – ANPI, it seems to this monkey, is right to fight for the correct portrayal of history. Suggestions that Nazis (and in various cases local Italian fascists) acted on the spur of the moment, pressured by a guerilla war, is significantly different from suggesting that a tactic of the war was the targetting of civilians. You’re entitled to your opinion, as the saying goes, but not to the facts.
The facts, as outlined by the magistrate Marco De Paolis, responsible for the judicial investigation into the massacre, are that ” Nazi soldiers massacred men, women and children and it was an act of terrorism, planned and organised in detail. Decided upon by the upper levels of the German Comand as a politics of terror to dissuade citizens from helping partisans.”