This is what they did with ITALIAN WOMEN in World War 2!

Saturday, Sept. 11, 1943, was, in the words of the Piedmontese diarist Carlo Chevallard, a “day of humiliation and shame.” Chevallard, of French-Swiss descent, was the director of a metal factory and a cool observer of daily events. The streets of Turin were eerily quiet, except for the sounds of sporadic gunfire. There were no newspapers and the radio was silent. 

The few people who ventured onto the streets wandered about like “lost souls” trying to find out what was happening. Calls for volunteers to resist the German occupation went unheeded. Italy was now cut in two, the south in the hands of the Allies, the centre and the north occupied by the Germans, and communication between the two virtually ceased. For Ada and the anti-Fascists across Piedmont, Liguria and Emilia-Romagna in the north, it was a question of how to react, what to do next, how to tell friends from enemies and how best to navigate the coming months.

Rommel had been brought back from Salonika to command Armed Group B in northern Italy. He was both feared and disliked by the Italians, who held him responsible for the loss of their colonies; for his part, he did little to conceal his contempt for them. 

He now dispatched his men, who had been arriving over the last few days from France and the Eastern Front, to Turin, to disarm the Italian soldiers, most of whom were hanging forlornly about their barracks, in Levi’s words, “like a defeated flock of sheep.” Soon, these men were being marched off along the avenues to the trains waiting at Porto Nuova to carry them to a transit camp at Mantova, then on to Germany. Watching these sad, uncertain men, Ada began to cry.

As the barracks emptied, so the looters arrived. In need of almost everything, hungry and angry, the people of Turin bore away flour, salt, blankets, shoes, sheets and pistols, which would soon prove useful, descending on military warehouses like armies of ants, bringing with them wheelbarrows and prams on which to load their loot. Vehicles were dismantled and stripped down to the chassis. At midday, the looting reached a point of frenzy at the main military storeroom on Corso Regina Margherita. But by now the Germans had got wind of what was happening and the soldiers sent to investigate began to shoot. A fire broke out; people ran. When the firemen arrived they found a scene of horror: 17 dead, their bodies scattered among piles of clothing and torn sacks of wheat.

“It was thus,” wrote one woman later, “that our war began.”

Then, something extraordinary happened. The 2,000 men of the Nizza Cavalleria regiment stationed in Turin had been ordered by their confused officers to remain in their barracks. German soldiers arrived in tanks, surrounded the building, disarmed the men and lined them up to march to the station. Five hundred of them were told to mount their horses and follow behind. Outside, however, hundreds of women of all ages had gathered, holding stones. As the back half of the mounted troop was suddenly cut off from the front by a passing tram on Corso Sommeiller, these women surged forward shouting: “Escape!” They pelted the riders in front with the stones, to make the horses panic. The Germans opened fire with machine guns. Chaos followed. Men were pulled or jumped off their horses and were hastily spirited into doorways or down alleyways. The avenues were now full of frantic riderless horses, soon shot dead by the Germans and as soon butchered and picked clean down to their carcasses by Turin’s famished citizens.

Later, having been taken in by families, hidden and given civilian clothes, the soldiers were taken to the railway station, walking arm in arm with young women and posing as their fiancés, and put onto local trains heading out of the city in the rainy autumn twilight. Five young women collected five English soldiers who had escaped from their prisoner-of-war camps and were now in hiding, and led them to the station, where they handed them over to two other waiting women. In the countryside, train drivers slowed down to allow wandering soldiers to escape. That day, dozens of young girls, whose Saturdays had been spent singing hymns to the Duce in their neat uniforms, shed their unquestioning obedience to Fascism and were busy pretending to be girlfriends to total strangers. These scenes, in different forms, were taking place all over occupied Italy. “It was thus,” wrote one woman later, “that our war began.”