Filippo Acciarini 1888 - 1945

Born 5.3.1888 in Sellano
Died 2.3.1945 in Mauthausen

Biography

He was born in Sellano (Perugia) on 5 March 1888, but, few years after his birth, his family came back to their origin village, Recanati (Macerata). There, he studied until 1906, when the conflicts with his father, who didn’t accept his adhesion to the ideals of socialism. He left school and moved to work in Rome, at the State Railways. His political and union commitment cost him two transfers: the first in Tivoli, in 1908, and the second, in 1913, in Turin. Even in Turin, which became his city since then, Filippo Acciarini undertook to a clear and determined defence of the instances of the Italian Socialist Party and, at the same time, in a courageous and constant opposition to the fascist regime and its violence. Fired in 1923 by the railways, joined the editorial staff of the Avanti!, until the suppression of the newspaper in 1926. In 1927, he was arrested and taken to trial by the Special Court for the Defence of the State with the accusation of carrying out a “dangerous form of subversive propaganda” through the activity of the “international red aid”, that would have worked, as a patronage form for political prisoner, to rebuild dissolved political party and to organize an armed uprising. After seven months of detention, in July 1928, he was acquitted, due to insufficient evidence, and released from prison.

In 1929, he started to work as meter auditor for the society who managed the telephonic business (STIPEL), where he worked until January 1943, showing in the eyes of the police “regular conduct”, and, in 1937, he was expunged from the subversive register of the General Direction of Public Security of the Ministry of the Interior, where he had been included in 1919. Since 1940, he started again an intensive political activity, in collaboration with other socialist militants of the Piedmont region, and in contact with exiled leaders in France, to rebuild the Socialist Party in Turin and Piedmont, and to support the anti-fascist forces. After the downfall of the Fascism, on 25 July 1943, he became contributor to the Turin trade unions’ news of La Stampa. and then, in August, he had been given the editorial staff of the famous socialist newspaper Avanti!.

In March 1944, he was one of the organisers of the general strike against hunger and terror in Turin. After the conclusion of the big labouring mobilisation, he was arrested, locked up in “San Vittore” prison in Milan, and then transferred, for a brief period, to the Fossoli concentration camp. Deported to Mauthausen, he reached the camp on 24 June 1944, and he was classified as “Schutzhäftling”. He was transferred to Großraming, and later to St. Valentin, and then retransferred to Mauthausen. According to the documentation preserved in the archive of the Mauthausen Memorial, he was interned in “Sanitätslager”, where he died on 2 March 1945, probably for a cardio-circulatory arrest. But it is mostly probable that the reasons of his death must be ascribed to the arduous conditions of weakness and starvation in which he was, as the other deportees, especially the ones in “Sanitätslager”. In support of this theory, there is the testimony of Mino Micheli, deported and Acciarini’s friend, who saw him death in the snow in the morning, where he was put the previous evening when, with other ill deportees in an arduous condition of weakness and starvation, had been taken out from “Sanitätslager” and exposed to a long severe winter night.

Saverio Colacicco

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