Primo Levi's Resistance by Sergio Luzzatto

Author:Sergio Luzzatto
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780805099560
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

Lions and lambs

After several months of indecision, the Aosta Special Court of Assizes prevailed over the courts of Asti and Turin, winning the right to try Cagni there first.8 The months-long dispute over the venue would redound in Cagni’s favor, not only because the public and private passions of the civil war were waning as time passed, but also because by the fall a passionate new cause had begun to occupy the anti-Fascists of Valle d’Aosta: the question of whether their region should remain in Italy under a special autonomous statute or secede from the country outright. The region’s most distinguished Resistance veteran, the historian Federico Chabod, had managed to obtain autonomous regional status for Valle d’Aosta and was set to become its first regional president. In the way stood a newly formed separatist group, Union Valdôtaine, and various ex-partisans who wanted Valle D’Aosta to be annexed by De Gaulle’s France.9

Nevertheless, the case against Cagni went forward. There was still a desire to try anyone who had been involved in the repressive apparatus of Nazi-Fascist power—functionaries in the prefecture and the police, bosses and militiamen in the Republican National Guard, officers and men of the Black Brigades, volunteers with the Alpine Musketeer corps, spies at the Cogne steel works, doctors and journalists at the service of the enemy, and the women who had collaborated as secretaries, interpreters, informers, or mistresses to the Germans. Although the team of magistrates at the Special Court of Aosta was small they were hard-working, and managed to conduct ninety-nine trials between June and December 1945, plus another fifty-two the following year.10 More than 250 defendants were tried, among them Cagni, who would appear in court in April 1946.

During the investigative phase Cagni’s case involved several other people as well, including Alberto Bianchi and Domenico De Ceglie, suspected of complicity with Cagni under the same two articles of the wartime military criminal code that figured in the charges against Carnazzi: aiding and providing intelligence to the enemy.11 The investigators turned their attention primarily to Cagni, however, because neither Bianchi nor De Ceglie could be found. A report filed in January 1946 with the Aosta police political department stated that “De Ceglie, at the time of surrender of the Social Republic, left Aosta for an unknown destination.”12 And a report on Bianchi tentatively reconstructed what became of him after he left Aosta in October 1944 to take part in special police training near Milan: “during the journey he appears to have been taken aside by partisan elements near Santhià and shot.”13

In mid-January 1946, the deputy prosecutor in Aosta questioned Cagni closely and at length. But just as he had done when questioned in Turin in the summer of 1945, Cagni replied with a series of denials and alternative versions. “Redi” had not been a spy when he appeared in the Val d’Ayas in December 1943, he claimed; he’d been sent by the prefect merely to report “with a simple yes or no” whether there were any partisans in the area.

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