Enzo Ferrari with fascism period

Sorry, but I'm confused. What is the point of your comments?

 

One final comment from reading Luca Dal Monte's book "Enzo Ferrari". Pages 380 to 383 cover his support and help of Jews and the partigiani.

Footnote 26 on page 284 states that "On February 20, 1979 on Enzo eighty-first birthday (well his birth registration day) the Association of Italian Partigiani went to Maranello to personally award Ferrari the Gold Medal of the Resistance."

 

This confirm once more what I've said in my previous post.
Consider that in those years after the end of the war, in the Modena and Reggio Emilia area, the life was very very dangerous for who has been fascist or simply wasn't communist (and Ferrari wasn't), so the only way to survive and live in peace was to keep a foot in both camps.
As a result of this way of life, Ferrari was deeply respected even by the communist adminisration of Modena and this permitted to celebrate the funeral of his son Dino even if with fascist honors.

 

Ferrari got also respected as being after WWII one of the strong supporters of the 'aerautodromo' and the 'miracolo modenese' what brought work and prosperity for Modena and the Emilia.

 

http://www.repubblica.it/online/cronaca/ferrari/diario/diario.html

"Enzo Ferrari "
from our correspondent MICHELE SMARGIASSI


MODENA - The life of the not yet Prancing Horse is hanging by a thread. The man who can cut it, an irony of history, is a doctor: but in the study of Enzo Ferrari, in the Modenese stable in Via Trento and Trieste, this October morning of 1944, he appears as the "Altavilla" partisan. Officially he came only to ask him for money: "Contribution to the liberation struggle". In reality it is there to study it, to judge it, and to pronounce a sentence. Ferrari does not know, but he is condemned to death. The Gap want to do it out for collaboration with the Germans. But that "too grown up, lanky and shabby youngster" who will become the Drake, somehow understood it anyway. It could humiliate itself, or try to buy life. Instead it cuts short: "I do not mind for myself but for the work that remains to be done". A few minutes later, the partisan Altavilla pedaled towards his secret hiding place; on the barrel, tied with string, a parcel with 500 thousand-pound notes. A small fortune, something like a billion today.

Altavilla will tell the Gap: "That man needs us more alive than dead". But first he said to himself: "This man has a dream to fulfill, we can not cripple the Cavallino". The unpublished story that comes from the diary of the partisan Giuseppe Zanarini, recovered six years after his death and published by a young Modenese reporter that coincides is also called Ferrari, Stefano (the book: "Ricordando Altavilla") is as compelling as a novel. . But also uncomfortable like the bed of a fakir for Modena, who at his Ferrari dedicates unceasingly beautiful exhibitions and ugly monuments, but who can not stand shadows on the myth.

And the question "Ferrari, which side was it?" he has only embarrassed answers. "That diary is false, however exaggerated", "No, it's all very true": a review was enough in the Gazzetta di Modena to put ex partisans against former partisans; and to reopen an issue that the post-war red Modena had tried to embalm in a picture of democratic oleography: Ferrari friend of the first Communist mayor Corassori, Ferrari who helps the dismissed workers, Ferrari national-popular hero. To which the malevolent counterpoint the Ferrari that rides Mussolini sull'Appennino, who was photographed among the hierarchy, from Arpinati to Balbo, and above all the Ferrari entrepreneur who, like many colleagues, made war profits by manufacturing also components for crawlers. Obscuring both, Ferrari is neither fascist nor communist but only a Ferrari, a lover of every engine, an estimator of a few men, contemptuous of all ideologies.

The story only says that in 1943, the Commendatore is already a legend. Even if the "reds" will be born only in '47, on the Alfa Romeo of the Modenese team, Nuvolari is already looking at the world. But it is not just the poetry of the engines. In 1943 Ferrari opened the Maranello factory and tripled the workers. A "master", like all colleagues subjected to the partisan tax. In Modena, the tax collector is Giuseppe Zanarini, formerly a physician of San Cesario, a cultured communist, degraded to that task "delicate and repellent" due to political restlessness. Enzo Ferrari also pays regularly. But one day his bill becomes very heavy, no longer payable in cash. And here we must trust the diary of "Altavilla", written many years later, in Africa, where Zanarini had escaped after breaking up with the "impregnable" PCI.

Everything really looks like a novel: starting with the Gap boy who "came out of the fog, on a bicycle, and told me: Ferrari was eliminated, but before proceeding we need your judgment. in three days". For Zanarini it is like "going out of history": images of executioners and victims of the revolution, Robespierre, Danton. He knows that Ferrari is not without stain: "He had to deal with a reality that required to come to terms with Nazis and black brigades". He decides: "I will judge only the man".

That morning Ferrari received him in the stable. He is pale, tired. He has just reached the news of the death of his friend Edoardo Weber, a Bolognese carburetor industrialist executed in the street by the Gap for his German origins and his sympathies. "That death was an announcement of death for him," Zanarini notes sharply. Yes, Ferrari has already understood everything. He looks at his interlocutor in the eye, and speaks to him as he speaks a condananto on the gallows: "I struggled to pursue a dream born in my father's workshop, when I was a boy, I learned tenacity from him ...".

Altavilla is shaken: he has read the classic tragedies, he knows how to measure the stature of a character. "This man is terribly fond of his idea as a builder, and his fascism is only this love". Look for a way out. He finds it: "Once again I said to myself: argent fait la guerre". Brutally, he asks for 500 thousand lire. Ferrari does not bat an eyelid: "Leave me twelve days". It's over. "The sword of Damocles moves away". Ferrari will pay, when it dies: but life is saved. The sentence of acquittal that Altavilla makes to the Gap together with money is thin: "He is a worker very busy in his business", he is not an enemy. The file is closed.

"Inverosimile ...". Director of the Historical Institute of Resistance, author of a monumental monograph on Liberation in Modena, Claudio Silingardi is perplexed. "No one was interested in executing Ferrari, who in the autumn of 1944 was already cooperating intensively with ClN.In his house was hidden the secret archive of the PCI. And when it was a matter of rescuing the double-domestià podesta that helped the partisans, was Ferrari to take him away with his car ". Remember a dead man on a dead man. Witnesses, few. The eighty-year-old lawyer Nino Nava, who represented Justice and Freedom in the Modenese cln, shakes his head: "Ferrari was not nice to me, it financed both the republics and the partisans, but we did not issue sentences".

And the Gap? He smiles: "The Gap, not even Togliatti knew what they did". Mist, therefore, like the one from which the mysterious messenger of death on a bicycle appeared. In his memoirs, Ferrari does not mention the episode. But Stefano Ferrari has an ace up his sleeve to claim the good faith of his hero: "Here is a letter from the Drake to Zanarini". Between the two, cemented by that "terrible '44", an intense friendship was born. In 1987 the former partisan sends his draft diary to the man who saved from the gallows and who in the meantime has become a world celebrity, and Ferrari replies in his purple ink: "I knew quite a few things, others I learned surprising ". Enigmatic, but it is not a denial. "Zanarini was a limpid man", a friend and partner, Bertino Zanoli, defends him "The truth is that they censored him, I gave the diary to the Anpi years ago, but they kept it in a drawer. The polemics between partisans do not weaken with age, and the "Ferrari case" risks rekindling enmities and jealousies.

 

Edoardo Weber, of carburetor fame, was a victim of his politcs:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eduardo_Weber

 

«Enzo Ferrari was always loyal» The Modena Partisan Association denies the validity of the revelations of Zanarini's diary on the constructor's death sentence - And published in a MODENA book - Modena section of Anpi (National Partisan Association) contests the validity of the episode recounted in recent days, through anticipations on a book, according to which Enzo Ferrari would pay a large sum to the partisans to not be killed. The story appears in the book by a reporter from Modena, Stefano Ferrari, entitled "Ricordando Altavilla". Here is a part of the diary of the partisan Giuseppe Zanarini, recovered after his death by a former comrade in arms, Alberto Zanoli, and now published. "When the president of the 'Anpi di San Cesario - writes the Anpi - put at our disposal the diary, after a careful examination we considered it inappropriate to publish it while recognizing the contribution of Dr. Zanarini to the struggle for Liberation". The Association adds that "of this was discussed with Zanoli himself and he gave ample information to the leaders of the Anci di San Cesario explaining that the text found no evidence in the historical reality and, on the contrary, contributed to casting shadows on the loyal relationship. amply documented and testified by the Modena-based manufacturer Enzo Ferrari with the Resistance ». According to the book in October '44 Giuseppe Zanarini, known as Altavilla, had an interview with Ferrari in his workshop. At the end, the founder of the Cavallino paid a figure equal to one billion today. "We need it more alive than dead," said Altavilla. According to the book, Ferrari risked being killed, because he was accused of collaboration, a few days after the partisans were killed by the Bolognese industrialist Edoardo Weber, accused, and for this shot, of having collaborated with the Nazis.



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Bonjour Christian.Fr,

Qu'est ce que l'italie début 1945 ? Un pays divisé en deux, ravagé par une guerre civile, d'un coté une partie de l'armée qui continue à se battre du coté allemand et de l'autre la résistance, composée de divers groupes communistes. Rien d'étonnant de constater que ceux qui ont senti le vent tourner cherchaient à minimiser leur implication après avoir été volontairement ou pas, au devant de la scène.

 

would it please be possible to write here only in english?
it takes too much time to translate by translator into english
in the french section the french language is of course ok

 

For those who are interested in Ferrari ww2 late war/postwar period here's some information extracted from the book "Enzo Ferrari's secret war (David Manton, Bridgehampton Publishing Limited, 2011) :

"War can be good for business, and Ferrari's enterprise flourished, as did those many of his associates.
All were members of the ruling fascist party, a link not as sinister as it might seem to readers 70 years later.
To remain in business during the 20 aggressive years of the Mussolini era , Italian industrialists had to be members of the party.
The same compulsory membership applied to senir managers of compagnies and even to most shopkeepers."

"Some industrialists, like Alfa Romeo's Gobbato, who spoke fluent German, were close to the nazi party and were identified in Italy
as high profile fascist supporters."

"Others, like carburetor king Eduardo Weber and his business partner Enzo Ferrari , followed a pro fascist approach in their compagny
publications and publicity."

"Ferrari was among those who made the occasional appearance dressed in full facist uniform, but only when the situation or a particular
ceremony demanded it"

"Ferrari was a member of Confindustria. He was in the public eye, and he used to join the fascist parades. Once or twice, before 1943,
i saw him in fascist uniform, but at that time it was a common evil"

To my point of view, it was fun to learn that Sergio Scaglietti was the Modena's partisans "top bomb expert" !

Interesting story too about Gioacchino Colombo (designer of the first Ferrari v12 engine), active member of the fascist party promised to a lenghty prison sentence or a "judgment by gunshot" but suddenly cleared of all his mistakes.