#Biography - Italy

Giorgio Marincola

Long forgotten, the figure of Giorgio Marincola has been rediscovered in recent years as a symbol of the colonial crimes of fascism and the transnational nature of the Resistance Movement.

Giorgio Marincola was born in 1923 in Italian Somalia, the son of Giuseppe, a senior infantry marshal, and Askhiro Hassan, a Somali from the Abgal Kabyle. Contrary to the customs of the time, his father recognized both children as mestizos (in addition to Giorgio, Isabella, born in 1925) and brought them to Italy. Giorgio grew up in Pizzo Calabro with his uncles and moved to his father's house in Rome in 1933.

Here he attended the royal Umberto I high school and had as a professor of History and Philosophy the militant actionist Pilo Albertelli, later killed at the Fosse Ardeatine. In 1941 he enrolled in medical school, intending to specialize in tropical diseases, and then returned to work in his home country. In the fall of 1943 he joined a partisan group linked to the Partito d'Azione and operated in Rome in the third zone of the PdA, Salario sector. Following the arrest of a comrade he decided to move to Corchiano, in the province of Viterbo, where he participated in sabotage actions and armed clashes. After the liberation of Rome, in June 1944 he enlisted in the Special Operations Executive and left for the province of Brindisi, where he received Allied military training. At San Vito dei Normanni airport, he was attached to the Bamon mission and parachuted near Zimone in the province of Biella.

On January 17, 1945, he was imprisoned by an SS unit in the Biella prison and from there transferred to Villa Schneider, at the German military police headquarters. There they forced him to speak during a Radio Baita broadcast, during which he chose to extol the Resistance, lashing out against the fascist regime. The broadcast was interrupted, "with atrocious sounds of beatings." In March 1945 he was transferred to the Bolzano Transit Camp. When the camp was decommissioned by the Germanic authorities on April 30, 1945, Marincola instead of repairing to Switzerland decided instead to reach Val di Fiemme, where partisans were still fighting the retreating Nazi army. The Germans killed him on May 4, 1945, at a checkpoint near the village of Stramentizzo, the site of one of the last Nazi massacres in Italy

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