The Red Devil

All over Europe. Communists have made great play with their claim of having been the greatest anti-fascist and resistance fighters of them all. Faced with evidence that they had murdered, betrayed or eliminated non- Communist leaders, Communists retort that their critics are trying to impugn the glory of the resistance, and, besides, it was wartime, spies were everywhere, and things were confused.

Nowhere has this defense been more effective than in Italy, where close to a dozen Deputies have been enjoying parliamentary immunity, for years untouched by allegations of wartime crimes. Most conspicuous of these was hard-drinking, high-living Deputy Francesco Moranino, who was only 24 when he commanded the 12th Garibaldi Division of Red Partisans in Italy's northern hills and styled himself, in the local dialect, Gemisto--the Devil. The Communists hailed him as a patriotic hero; the country was in a mood to accept their estimate, and De Gasperi made him an under secretary in his 1947 Cabinet.

Safe Conduct. At that time few knew the story of how five non-Communist partisans led by one Emanuele Strasserra had disappeared in the Devil's territory late in the war. Moranino insisted that he had had them guided to safety in Switzerland. Then in 1947 the bodies were discovered buried by a mountain road near Moranino's headquarters-- and far short of the Swiss border. Moranino changed his tale, said they had been executed as Fascist spies, and shrugged off accusations from the safety of his parliamentary immunity. But the relatives of the murdered men persisted, and the police began to accumulate evidence that even Moranino's fellow Communists could not talk away. Early last year the Chamber of Deputies voted to suspend Deputy Moranino's immunity. By that time Moranino had fled to Communist Prague. Last month he went on trial in absentia in Florence's court of assizes.

A brutal story of treachery unfolded at the trial. Strasserra was an authentic hero of the resistance, with an unimpeachably anti-Fascist record. Trained by the OSS at Bari, he and an aide were slipped into Genoa in mid-1944 to report German troop movements and to establish liaison with resistance groups. When he lost his radio in a Gestapo raid, he and his companion lit out for the hills. He found Devil Moranino, and assuming him to be a fellow patriot and partisan, asked Moranino to get him to Switzerland, where he would be able to re-establish contact with the Allies.

Strasserra discovered that Moranino's Reds were grabbing more than their share of the arms dropped by the Allies. He declared that he was going to tell the Allies so, Moranino saw to it that he did not.

Supplying a guide and safe-conduct passes, Moranino sent Strasserra and four other non-Communist partisan leaders off into the mountains for Switzerland. At the trial, the ex-partisan guide admitted that on Moranino's orders, he led the five men along an Alpine road to a brush-covered hillock, where six Moranino men waited. Spotting them, Strasserra cried: "We're friends. We are going to Switzerland." He was still waving his safe-conduct pass and talking when bullets cut him short. Destroying the evidence, the Reds buried their victims hastily beside the road, took their money and papers back to Moranino. The Devil gave the killers 300 lire (then about $3) each. One of them testified: "We realized the killings were not very clean, but we had our own lives to worry about."

Two of the murdered men had left their wives and children in a hut in a nearby village. When weeks passed without word from their husbands, they went to Moranino's headquarters and asked for news. A few nights later, two Moranino partisans called at the hut, told them Moranino wanted to see them. As they were passing the local cemetery, the partisans pulled out revolvers and shot the women dead. They roused the cemetery keeper and ordered him to bury the bodies. The cemetery keeper testified: "The partisans were pleased because snow was falling and it covered the bloodstains."

Other ex-partisans testified to Moranino's calculated treachery to supposed allies. A rival Socialist group was wiped out when Moranino's Reds deliberately retreated on either side of them without warning. A leader of an Allied mission charged with arranging for arms drops testified that, late in the war, a Moranino aide confided to him drunkenly: "Now that we have the arms, we don't need you any more." A few weeks later Moranino's Reds again retreated abruptly in the midst of a German assault. The Allied mission was annihilated.

Political Crime. Italian Communism marshaled its biggest guns in defense of their hero, led by Partisan Chief Luigi Longo, now a Deputy. But, faced with the evidence, the Communist defense had to acknowledge that the victims were neither spies nor Fascists, and that it had been a "tragic mistake." Retorted the public prosecutor: "It was a dry and cold-blooded common crime . . . infamous, indecent, cruel murder."

Under Italian law the seven killings could be judged an act of war (no penalty), a political crime (ten years imprisonment) or a common crime (life imprisonment). To underline his point that such killings were done on party orders and not just by one individual's impulse, the prosecutor asked for a finding of political crime. After eight hours of deliberation, the court so found.

A ten-year sentence would scarcely affect Moranino in his Prague sanctuary, where he lives with a Communist mistress and runs the Communist radio program beamed at Italy. But it was a verdict long overdue on the crimes of many another Communist who put his party above his country even in wartime.

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