💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › rudolf-rocker-on-francesco-ghezzi.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 13:44:10. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
➡️ Next capture (2024-06-20)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Title: On Francesco Ghezzi Author: Rudolf Rocker Date: 1951 Language: en Topics: Italian anarchism Source: Retrieved on 23rd May 2022 from https://www.katesharpleylibrary.net/98sgqs Notes: Published in the Italian 3rd volume of Rudolf Rocker’s memoirs Rivoluzione in Involuzione (1918–1951) translation by Andrea Chersi, Centro Studi Libertari/Archivio G. Pinelli pp. 259–260 https://centrostudilibertari.it/sites/default/files/materiali/rocker_3_rivoluzione-involuzione.pdf Translated by Paul Sharkey.
I cannot recall the exact date, but it must have been in the autumn or
winter of 1921 that two young Italian comrades, Francesco Ghezzi and Ugo
Fedeli (Treni) arrived from Moscow. They had fled to Russia following
the monstrous harassment that had begun in Italy in the wake of the
Diana Theatre outrage in Milan, even though they had had nothing to do
with it. Fedeli and Ghezzi were two capable young men who shared our
ideas and I always enjoyed conversing with them. They were in Moscow at
the time of Kropotkin’s funeral and brought us photographs which our
publishing house published as a special album.[1]
As I was saying before, the German police back then did not get overly
exercised about political fugitives in the country, as long as there
were no particular pressures coming from foreign governments. Ghezzi and
Fedeli lived freely in Berlin for some time until the Italian government
somehow tracked down their address and applied to have them extradited.
Whereupon the pair were arrested and in danger of being handed over to
Italy. Tellingly, their arrest came during the Social Democrat Dr
Radbruch’s term as Justice minister of the Reich and he had already
shown himself indulgent of the Italian and Spanish governments in
handing over the Italian anarchist Boldrini and two comrades who the
Spanish police insisted had had a hand in the assassination of prime
minister Dato.[2]
Social Democratic Justice minister Radbruch had come up with his own
theory on “politically motivated offences” and it was not without
notable political subtlety. After Ghezzi and Fedeli were arrested, I
wrote an article on the subject in which I declared that, under that
theory, virtually any political fugitive might be liable to extradition.
“Is it not a disgrace that a Social Democratic Justice minister of the
German Republic needs to take lessons on politically motivated offences
from a bourgeois government like the British? Back in the day, the
British government had refused to extradite Stepniak (Kravchinsky) who
had stabbed the notorious General Mezenkov in the street and then
declined to extradite the Russian revolutionary Hartmann, accused of
having had a hand in the execution of Alexander II. The British minister
of Home Affairs had not offered any sophisticated rationale as to
motives, but regarded both incidents as political acts and guaranteed
them a safe haven in England But in the cases of Ghezzi and Fedeli there
was not even the slightest glimmer of evidence that they had had any
part in any crime: extradition would have been the only crime.”
We promptly organized mass protest demonstrations and did all we could
in such cases. But above all we sought to mobilize the Social Democratic
proletariat into getting involved in the campaign and found that support
was only lukewarm. And yet the extradition was prevented, but the pair
were expelled from Germany. Fedeli was freed first and then Ghezzi,
after promising to quit Germany within eight days. Given that France had
refused him entry, he applied for a visa from Russia, which was granted.
That decision proved his undoing, because he vanished in Russia without
trace.
Augustin Souchy who wrote to Fedeli the year before seeking news of
Ghezzi got this curt response from Italy in October 1949: “We have not
heard directly from Ghezzi from well before the war. Even his family
have heard nothing from him. According to reliable sources, he died in a
concentration camp in Russia.”
[1] The album is available online
https://archive.org/details/2917627.0001.001.umich.edu
[2] Giuseppe Boldrini had carried out the Diana Theatre Bombing (see
https://www.katesharpleylibrary.net/mkkxk6
). He died in Mauthausen in 1945. Luis Nicolau Fort and his partner
LucĂa Joaquina Concepcion were arrested in Berlin, 29 Occtober 1921.
Both were extradited to Spain.