Abstract
Giacomo Matteotti was kidnapped and killed at 4:30 p.m. on Tuesday June 10, 1924. All the men who committed the crime belonged to a Milanese group of fascist arditi (a military corps created during the First World War to conduct particularly dangerous missions behind enemy lines), and all were members of the fascist Ceka organization—a secret police force created by Mussolini to carry out actions of intimidation against anti-fascist leaders, modeled on the Russian Cheka.
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Notes
- 1.
Archivio di Stato Trieste, Prefettura, Gabinetto, b. 52.
- 2.
Ibid.
- 3.
ACS, PS, Affare Matteotti, sc. 1.
- 4.
“L’oscuro equivoco del contrabbando d’armi destinate alla Jugoslavia”; in newspaper Il Popolo d’Italia, 21 August 1923.
- 5.
“Per la notizia del contrabbando di Grado. Una smentita dell’Ufficio Stampa del Pnf”; newspaper Il Popolo d’Italia, 19 August 1923.
- 6.
Filippo Filippelli was an old, close acquaintance of Arnaldo. He was born in Cosenza in 1890, earned a law degree, and moved to Milan before the war. After the war he joined an anti-Bolshevik league and then joined the fascist movement. In 1920 he had joined the administration of the Popolo d’Italia as a fundraiser and secretary to Arnaldo Mussolini. After the March on Rome, when they decided to open a daily newspaper in Rome as the unofficial organ of the government, the Mussolini brothers did not hesitate to entrust the paper’s direction to Filippelli. Judging by the documents that were seized as part of the investigation into the Matteotti murder, Filippelli functioned as a true leader, lobbyist, and tireless intermediary between the economic and financial milieu and the new fascist ruling class. He had ties with FIAT, Ligurian steel companies, SIAP oil tankers, Piedmont hydroelectric companies, Tuscan ship building companies, banks, and financial institutions.
- 7.
AS Roma, Processo Matteotti, Esami, vol. I, 284, De Bono deposition of 9 July 1924.
- 8.
Cesare Rossi’s memoir in Mauro Canali, “Documenti inediti sul delitto Matteotti. Il memoriale Rossi del 1927 e il carteggio Modigliani,” in Storia Contemporanea, n. 4, August 1994, 601.
- 9.
AS Roma, Processo Matteotti, Esami, vol. I, 284, De Bono deposition of 9 July 1924.
- 10.
AS Roma, Processo Matteotti, Requisitoria presentata alla Procura Generale, 61 and 103.
- 11.
Copy of the telegram in ibid., Atti generici, vol. II, 40–41.
- 12.
The telegram from Marinelli to De Bono is in ibid., vol. V, 46–47; for the telegram from De Bono to Poggioreale see ACS, Direzione generale PS, Ufficio Cifra, telegrammi in partenza, telegr. n. 12104. De Bono telegrafava: “Release Austrian Otto Thierschald.”
- 13.
See AS Roma, Processo Matteotti, Esami, vol. I, 55–56, Modigliani deposition of 19 June 1924.
- 14.
Ibid., Interrogatori, Otto Thierschald, 9, interrogation of 23 June 1924.
- 15.
Ibid., Atti generici, vol. II, 134, deposition of Velia Matteotti on 28 June 1924.
- 16.
Ibid.
- 17.
Ibid., Esami, vol. I, 250, deposition of Arturo Dell’Aquila.
- 18.
See also ibid., vol. III, 216–223, deposition of 17 October 1924.
- 19.
See also ibid., Interrogatori, Otto Thierschald, 43, interrogation of 22 October 1924.
- 20.
See also ibid., Esami, vol. I, 333, deposition of 11 July 1924.
- 21.
See his memoir in Canali, “Documenti inediti sul delitto Matteotti,” 590. Modigliani, too, believed that the Ceka’s original plan was to kill Matteotti during his trip to Vienna; see G. E. Modigliani, L’assassinio di Giacomo Matteotti, New York, Italian-American Labor Council, 1945, 8.
- 22.
The telegram is in AS Roma, Processo Matteotti, Documenti, vol. I, 36.
- 23.
Ibid.
- 24.
AS Roma, Processo Matteotti, Esami, vol. I, 376, deposition of Tomassini of 22 July 1924.
- 25.
Ibid., vol. II, deposition of Ester Erasmi and Domenico Villarini, 24–27 and 35–37.
- 26.
Ibid., vol. III, 372–373.
- 27.
Ibid., vol. I, 250–251.
- 28.
Ibid., vol. II, 251–257, deposition of Giovanni Olivo of 9 September 1924; and ibid., 375–378, deposition of Rodolfo Sartori of 18 September 1924.
- 29.
The ID card was picked up by two cart drivers who drove by immediately following the kidnap**. They handed it in to the police only two days later.; see. AS Roma, Esami, vol. II, 258–259.
- 30.
Sentence of the 1947 Matteotti trial, 60–61.
- 31.
AS Roma, Processo Matteotti, Esami, vol. II, 80, deposition of Ovidio Caratelli of 16 August 1924; this is the first of three Caratelli depositions.
- 32.
Ibid., 116–117, deposition of Geremia Conti of 21 August 1924.
- 33.
Ibid., 118–119.
- 34.
Ibid., 183, deposition of Salvatore Cau.
- 35.
Ibid., Atti generici, vol. VI, 44–48.
- 36.
See the sentence of the 1947 Matteotti trial, 52.
- 37.
Ibid., 67–69.
- 38.
Mauro Del Giudice, Cronistoria del processo Matteotti (Palermo: Lo Monaco, 1954), 68.
- 39.
AS Roma, Processo Matteotti, Esami, vol. II, 412, deposition of Nello Quilici of 23 September, and ibid., 136, deposition of Armando Bevilacqua, journalist of the newspaper Corriere Italiano.
- 40.
Ibid., Interrogatori, Aldo Putato, 40, interrogation of 27 August 1924. Previously Putato had stated he first found out from Panzeri when he went to get the Lancia in the Viminale courtyard.
- 41.
Ibid., Esami, vol. I, 239, deposition of Giacomo Acerbo.
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Canali, M. (2024). June 1924. In: The Matteotti Murder and Mussolini. Italian and Italian American Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41471-8_2
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