| Indro Montanelli | |
| Birth Name: | Indro Alessandro Raffaello Schizogene Montanelli |
| Birth Date: | 22 April 1909 |
| Birth Place: | Fucecchio, Kingdom of Italy |
| Death Place: | Milan, Italy |
| Nationality: | Italian |
| Other Names: | Cilindro ("Top Hat")[1] |
| Alma Mater: | University of Florence |
| Years Active: | 1930–2001 |
| Known For: | One of the fifty World Press Freedom Heroes, work at Corriere della Sera, founder of il Giornale, author of Storia d'Italia |
| Notable Works: | General Della Rovere (1959) |
| Awards: | Order of the Lion of Finland Princess of Asturias Awards World Press Freedom Heroes |
Indro Alessandro Raffaello Schizogene Montanelli (pronounced as /it/; 22 April 1909 – 22 July 2001) was an Italian journalist, historian, and writer. He was one of the fifty World Press Freedom Heroes according to the International Press Institute.[2] A volunteer for the Second Italo-Ethiopian War and an admirer of Benito Mussolini's dictatorship, Montanelli had a change of heart in 1943, and joined the liberal resistance group Giustizia e Libertà but was discovered and arrested along with his wife by Nazi authorities in 1944. Sentenced to death, he was able to flee to Switzerland the day before his scheduled execution by firing squad thanks to a secret service double agent.[3] [4] [5]
After World War II, Montanelli continued his work at Corriere della Sera, where he started working in 1938, and distinguished himself as a staunch conservative columnist for many decades. An intransigent, anti-conformist, and anti-communist, he defended the idea of another political right, which was sober, cultured, pessimistic, and distrustful of mass society.[6] [7] In 1977, the Red Brigades terrorist group kneecapped him;[8] years later, he forgave them.[6] He was also a popular novelist and historian, especially remembered for his monumental Storia d'Italia (History of Italy) in 22 volumes.[6] [7]
After leaving the Corriere della Sera in 1973 due to a perceived turn to the left,[9] Montanelli worked as the editor-in-chief of Silvio Berlusconi-owned newspaper il Giornale for many years but was opposed to Berlusconi's political ambitions, and quit as editor of il Giornale, which he founded as il Giornale nuovo in 1974, when Berlusconi officially entered politics in 1994.[10] He returned to the Corriere della Sera in 1995 and worked there until his death.[6] [7] Both the Italian centre-left and centre-right tried to reclaim his figure; the former, which overlooked his conservatism and anti-communism, emphasized his anti-Berlusconist militancy while the latter, after having portrayed him as a useful idiot of the post-communist left, underplayed his opposition to Berlusconi.[6]
Montanelli was born in Fucecchio, near Florence, on 22 April 1909. His father, Sestilio Montanelli, was a high-school philosophy teacher and his mother, Maddalena Doddoli, was the daughter of a rich cotton merchant. The name Indro was chosen by his father after the Hindu god Indra.[6]
Montanelli obtained a law degree from the University of Florence in 1930, with a thesis on the electoral reform of Benito Mussolini's Italian fascist regime. Allegedly, in this thesis, he maintained that, rather than a reform, it amounted to the abolition of elections. According to him, it was during his permanence in Grenoble, while he was taking language lessons, that he realized that his true vocation was that of a journalist.
Montanelli began his journalistic career by writing for the fascist newspaper Il Selvaggio ("The Savage"), then directed by Mino Maccari, and in 1932 for the Universale, a magazine published only once fortnightly and that offered no pay. Montanelli admitted that in those days he saw in fascism the hope of a movement that could potentially create an Italian national conscience that would have resolved the social and economic differences between the north and the south. This enthusiasm for the fascist movement began to wane when in 1935 Mussolini ordered the suppression of the Universale along with other magazines and newspapers that expressed critical opinions on the nature of fascism. It was in 1934, in Paris, that Montanelli began to write for the crime pages of the daily newspaper Paris-Soir, then as a foreign correspondent in Norway, where he fished for cod for a bit, and later in Canada, where he ended up working on a farm in Alberta.[11]
From there, Montanelli began a collaboration with Webb Miller of the United Press in New York. While working for the United Press, he learned to write for the lay public in an uncomplicated style that would distinguish him within the realm of Italian journalism. One lesson he took to heart from Miller was to "always write as if writing to a milkman from Ohio". This open and approachable style was something he never forgot and he had often recall that very quote during his long life. Another notable anecdote from Montanelli's time in the United States occurred while he was teaching a course. One of the students had asked him to explain the meaning of the essay that Montanelli had just read out. Montanelli told him he would repeat it since he clearly did not understand. Hitting the table, the red-faced student cut him off and angrily told him, as a matter of fact, that if he had not understood Montanelli's essay, then it was Montanelli who was the imbecile and needed to change it. It was then that he realized that he, who had come from the authoritarian regime of Fascist Italy, had just had a confrontation with democracy. During this time, Montanelli conducted his first interview with a celebrity, Henry Ford, who surprised him by admitting he did not have a driver's license. During the interview, surrounded by American art depicting pastoral and frontier subjects, Ford began to reverentially talk about the Founding Fathers of the United States. Looking at the decor, Montanelli asked him how he felt about having destroyed their world. Puzzled, Ford asked what he meant. Undaunted, Montanelli pressed on that the automobile and Ford's revolutionary assembly line system had forever transformed the country. Ford looked shocked, and Montanelli realized that, like all geniuses, Ford had not had the slightest idea of what he had really done.[12]
When Mussolini invaded Abyssinia (Ethiopia) in 1935 with the intent of making Italy an empire (Second Italo–Abyssinian War), Montanelli immediately abandoned his collaboration with the United Press and became a voluntary conscript for this war. Aged 23, Montanelli was put in charge of a 100-strong army of local men. He later said: "It was a beautiful two years."[13] He said he believed then that this was the chance for Italy to bring civilization to the perceived savage world of Africa. While stationed in east Africa, Montanelli bought and married a 12-year-old Bilen child to act as his sex slave, a common practice of Italian soldiers in Abyssinia.[14]
Montanelli began writing about the war to his father who, without Montanelli's knowledge, sent the letters to one of the most famous journalists of those times, Ugo Ojetti, who published them regularly in the most prestigious Italian newspaper, the Corriere della Sera.
On his return from Abyssinia, Montanelli became a foreign correspondent in Spain for the daily newspaper Il Messaggero, where he experienced the Spanish Civil War on the side of Francisco Franco's Nationalist troops. In this period, he shared a room with Kim Philby who, decades later, would reveal himself to the world as one of the greatest Soviet mole spies that ever existed and that one day disappeared. Years later, Montanelli received a mysterious note from Philby saying: "Thanks for everything. Including your socks." After the capture of the city of Santander, Montanelli wrote that "it had been a long military walk with only one enemy: the heat". This judgement contrasted with the propaganda of the times that painted that battle as a glorious bloodshed on the side of the Italian contingent. In fact, the only casualty he noted but never reported was a single death in the Alpini regiment caused by a mule kick that threw the trooper down into a dry river bed. For this article, he was repatriated, tried, and expelled from the National Fascist Party (PNF) and from the official organization of Italian journalists. When in the trial he was asked why he had written such an unpatriotic article, he replied: "Show me a single casualty of that battle: because a battle without casualties is not a real battle!" The trial ended with an acquittal.
The stand Montanelli took against fascism led him to his first serious conflicts with the Italian authorities. His PNF membership was revoked thereafter and Montanelli did nothing to regain this important document that at the time conferred a series of important privileges on its holders; the country was dominated by Mussolini's fascist movement. To avoid the worst, the then minister of culture Giuseppe Bottai offered in 1938 to Montanelli the job of director of the Institute of Culture in Tallinn, Estonia, and lecturer in Italian at the University of Tartu, Estonia. In this period, Aldo Borelli, the then director of the Corriere della Sera, asked Montanelli to engage in a collaboration as a foreign correspondent; he could not be employed as a journalist because this had been forbidden by the fascist regime. Montanelli began to correspond for this newspaper from Estonia and Albania during the Italian annexation of this country.
On 1 September 1939, Germany invaded Poland. Montanelli was sent to report from the front in a Mercedes accompanied by German state functionaries. In the vicinity to the city of Grudziądz, the car was stopped by a convoy of German tanks. On one of these stood Adolf Hitler himself a few feet from Montanelli. When Hitler was told that the only person in casual clothes was Italian, he jumped out of the tank. Eyeing Montanelli like a madman, he began a ten-minute hysterical speech followed by a military salute and exit. Albert Speer, who had also been in the convoy with fellow artist Arno Breker, corroborated the story in 1979. Apart from this episode, which Montanelli was forbidden to report, there had been little to report because the invasion of Poland was completed so rapidly that it was over within weeks. It was allegedly he who reported about the Skirmish of Krojanty and created a myth from it.
Montanelli was not welcome in Italy, and decided to move to Lithuania. The joint Nazi German–Soviet invasion of Poland instinctively told him that more was brewing on the Soviet Union border. His instinct was correct because shortly after his arrival in Kaunas, the seat of the Lithuanian government, the Soviet Union issued its ultimatum to the Baltic republics. At this point, Montanelli continued to travel towards Tallinn as it was his wish to see the last of a free and democratic Estonia, which was soon invaded by the Soviet Union. At this point, Montanelli was not popular in Italy nor Germany because of his pro-Estonian and pro-Polish articles, and had been expelled by the Soviet Union for being a foreigner. Thus, he was forced by the events to cross the Baltic Sea and reach Helsinki, the Finnish capital.
In Finland, Montanelli began writing articles about the Sámi and the reindeer, although this was not for long as Vyacheslav Molotov had made requests on the Finnish government for the annexation of part of the Finnish land to the Soviet Union. The Finnish delegation, headed by Juho Kusti Paasikivi, had refused to give in to these requests and on their return it was clear that war was in the air. Montanelli was not able to write about the details of the talks between the Soviet and Finnish delegations, as they were shrouded in strict secrecy; he was able to interview Paasikivi, who was happy to fill him in on everything except for the content of the talks.
Throughout the Winter War that ensued, Montanelli wrote hotly pro-Finnish articles both from the front and from bomb-stricken Helsinki, writing about the almost mythical enterprises of the battle of Tolvajärvi, and of men like captain Pajakka who, with 200 Sámi, successfully confronted 40,000 Russians in the region of Petsamo. Back in Italy, Montanelli's stories had been followed with great enthusiasm by the public but not so enthusiastic was the response of the fascist leaders who were committed to an alliance with the Soviet Union. When Borelli, director of the Corriere della Sera, had been ordered to censor Montanelli's articles, he had had the courage to reply that "thanks to his articles the Corriere increased its sales from 500,000 to 900,000 copies: are you going to reimburse me?" When the Winter War was over and the non-aggression pact was signed between the Soviet Union and Finland, Montanelli was personally thanked by the elusive Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim himself for writing in favour of the Finnish cause.
Before his return to Italy, Montanelli witnessed the Operation Weserübung (the Nazi German invasion of Norway), and was arrested by the German army for his hostility towards the German–Italian alliance. He escaped with the help of his friend Vidkun Quisling and made a run for the north of the country where the English and the French were disembarking their troops at Narvik. He was met by the one-eyed, one-armed Major Carton de Wiart who explained that there were no more than 10,000 Allied troops in Norway, many of them not even trained for battle. Nobody seemed to know where their garrison was. The British wanted to go inland and attack the Germans, but the French wanted to stay put and consolidate their positions. After having seen the clockwork invasion of Poland by the German troops, Montanelli found this disarray a worrying sight. When the Germans began bombing these positions the Allies were forced to embark once again and beat a hasty withdrawal to England.
With Italy's entrance in the war (June 1940), Montanelli was sent to France and the Balkans. He was assigned the responsibility of following the Italian military campaign from Greece and Albania as correspondent. Here, he recounted to have written little: "I remained at that front various months, writing almost nothing, a small reason was because I fell ill with typhus and a huge one because I refused to push as a glorious military campaign the quaking pummeling that we caught down there."[15] An article published on 12 September 1940 issue of Panorama was considered defeatist by the censors of Minculpop (Ministry of Popular Culture), who in turn ordered the closure of the periodical.
After witnessing war and destruction in the Balkans and the disastrous Italian invasion of Greece, Montanelli decided to join the Italian resistance movement against the fascist regime by joining the liberal Giustizia e Libertà clandestine group. Here, he met socialist leader Sandro Pertini, who would later become president of Italy from 1978 to 1985. Montanelli was eventually once again captured by the Germans, tried, and sentenced to death. In the Milanese prison of San Vittore, he met Mike Bongiorno, who would later become one of the most famous Italian television personalities. In prison, he also made the acquaintance of General Della Rovere, who was said to have been arrested while on a secret mission on behalf of the Allies. In fact, this man was a thief called Giovanni Bertoni, a spy for the Germans. Bertoni was so taken in by the military character he was playing that he refused to relay any information to his German captors and was executed like a real enemy official. After the war, Montanelli dedicated a book to this incident, Il generale Della Rovere (1959), which later turned into a Golden Lion-winning movie directed by Roberto Rossellini and starring Vittorio De Sica.
Salvation came at the end of 1944 with the help of unknown conspirators who arranged for his transfer to a prison in Verona. The transfer was then transformed into a dash for the Swiss border. The identity of these conspirators remained a mystery until decades later when it appeared that it had been the result of collusion by several agencies. Among them, Marshal Mannerheim allegedly put pressure on his German allies. To Nikolaus von Falkenhorst, the commander of the German troops stationed in Finland, he said: "You are executing a gentleman." This resulted in Berlin's opening of an inquiry. In 1945, while hiding in Switzerland, he published the novel Drei Kreuze (Three Crosses), which later appeared in Italian with the title Qui non-riposano (Here They Do Not Rest). Inspired by Thornton Wilder's The Bridge of San Luis Rey, the story begins on 17 September 1944 when a Val d'Ossola priest buries three unknown corpses and commemorates them with three anonymous crosses.
Throughout the post-war years, Montanelli retained an idiosyncratic and particularly undiplomatic style, even when this made him very unpopular among his peers and employers. This is well illustrated in his book La stecca nel coro, which translates as "The False Note in the Chorus" with the meaning of "Going Against the Current", and that is a list of leading articles he composed between 1974 and 1994.
After the war, Montanelli resumed his career at the Corriere della Sera, famously authoring deeply sympathetic articles from Hungary during the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. His first-hand reportages inspired him to write the play I sogni muoiono all'alba (Dreams Die at Dawn), which was later adapted to film. In 1959, Montanelli interviewed for the first time in history a pope, office at the time held by Pope John XXIII; the pope declared that he picked Montanelli exactly because he was an atheist and not a Catholic sympathizer.[16] From the mid-1960s, after the death of the newspaper's owners, Mario and Vittorio Crespi, and the serious illness of the third brother, Aldo, the ownership of the newspaper passed upon Aldo's daughter, Giulia Maria. Under her tight control, earning her Montanelli's moniker the czarina, the daily took a sudden turn to the left. This new launch took place in 1972 with the abrupt dismissal of director Giovanni Spadolini. Montanelli expressed a cutting indictment of the procedure in an interview on L'Espresso, declaring: "A director is not sent away like a thieving house-servant." Turning to the Crespi family, he branded their "authoritarian, bullying junta ways that they have chosen in order to impose their decision".
After breaking with the Corriere della Sera, which he perceived as having moved too much to the left,[9] Montanelli founded and directed a new conservative daily, il Giornale nuovo, from 1973 to 1994, together with Enzo Bettiza. In his last interview before his death in 2017, Bettiza said that Montanelli despised the bourgeoise he defended and admired the communists he attacked. About the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, Bettiza said that Montanelli was convinced the revolt was due to workers wanting true socialism.[17]
On 2 September 1977, Montanelli was shot four times in the legs by a two-man commando of the Red Brigades, outside the Milanese head-office of Corriere della Sera.[18] [19] The terrorists made sure to give him non-mortal wounds. His friend and surgeon was amazed at how "four shots could hit those [long, thin] chicken legs of his and still completely miss a major artery or nerve bundle". In his typical ironical and satirical vein, he thanked Il Duce. He credited his indoctrination as a child in the Balilla fascist youth and its mantra, "to die on your feet", for saving his life. He maintained that had he not held on to the railing during the incident the fourth shot would have surely hit him in the stomach.[20] In what supporters of Montanelli saw as a petty instance of insult to injury,[21] the Corriere della Sera dedicated an article to the incident omitting his name from the title ("Milan ... journalist kneecapped"),[22] for which the paper's editor Piero Ottone received criticism.[23] [24] This was not limited to the Corriere della Sera, as it happenend during a period in which the Red Brigades were targeting journalists through the use of kneecapping, without murdering them, and two other journalist suffered the same fate in the matter of days.[25]
In later years, Montanelli said that he expected the attack and was not surprised by it,[26] and came to forgive the terrorists,[6] who saw him as a servant of the regime,[9] as well as of multinational corporations.[27] [28] In il Giornale, he wrote days after the attack that "the prose of the Red Brigades does not differ much from that of certain weekly magazines which point to me as 'the watchdog of the bourgeoisie'."[29]
When Silvio Berlusconi, who since 1977 had held the majority of shares in il Giornale, entered politics with the founding of a new populist political party, Forza Italia, Montanelli came under heavy pressure to switch his editorial line to a position favourable to Berlusconi. Montanelli never hid his bad opinion of Berlusconi, saying: "He lies as he breathes." In the end, protesting his independence, he founded a new daily, for which he resurrected the name La Voce ("The Voice"), which had belonged to a renowned newspaper run by Giuseppe Prezzolini. La Voce, which had garnered a devoted but limited readership, folded after about a year, and Montanelli returned to the Corriere della Sera. In 1994, Montanelli was awarded the International Editor of the Year Award from the World Press Review.
From 1995 to 2001, Montanelli was the chief letters editor of Corriere della Sera, answering a letter a day on a page of the newspaper known as "La Stanza di Montanelli" ("Montanelli's Room"). Montanelli spent his last years vigorously opposing Berlusconi's politics. He was a mentor to a significant group of colleagues, followers, and students including Mario Cervi, Marco Travaglio, Paolo Mieli, Roberto Ridolfi, Andrea Claudio Galluzzo, Beppe Severgnini, and Roberto Gervaso. Montanelli died on 22 July 2001 at the La Madonnina clinic in Milan. The following day, the Corriere della Sera published a letter on its front page titled "Indro Montanelli's farewell to his readers".
Montanelli had been nicknamed "The Prince of Journalism" by his own colleagues while he was still alive, gaining large esteem and consent even from liberals and political left-oriented journalists; Enzo Biagi, Giorgio Bocca, Aldo Grasso, Gianfrancesco Zincone, and many others considered him a master of the profession and his objectivity and attention to history as a model to teach and replicate. As a result, both the Italian centre-left and the Italian centre-right tried to reclaim Montanelli for themselves. Politically, Montanelli was an anti-communist who defended the idea of another political right, which was an alternative to that of Silvio Berlusconi, whom he opposed. Since his death, the political left emphasized Montanelli's anti-Berlusconism over his anti-communism and conservatism, while the political right minimized his opposition to Berlusconi after having accused him of being a useful idiot of the post-communist left.[6]
A polarizing figure, Montanelli's journalism was distinct from both the prevailing pro-government journalism, which was linked to the ruling Christian Democracy, and to the liberal-democratic journalism of the likes of Mario Pannunzio, whom Montanelli admired.[6] In his letters, Montanelli once said: "If you lack the holy fire inside, if you're not made for this work, if you lack a natural appendice with a typewriter... it's pointless to do this job."[30] He left for posterity a number of first-person reportages and interviews with important historical figures, including Charles de Gaulle, Benito Mussolini, Pope John XXII, and Winston Churchill.[31] [32] [33]
Angelo Del Boca, the historian who first researched Italian war crimes in Ethiopia and made Montanelli acknowledge the use of poison gas in 1996 that he had previously denied, retained great esteem for Montanelli and defended his marriage with the young girl. He said: "It makes no sense [to call him a racist and rapist], it was an act of integration, especially since Montanelli kept a good relationship with her for years. At the time, but maybe even nowadays, it was normal to marry women of that age in Africa; it was initially encouraged as an element of fraternization."[34] [35] Giuseppe Sala, Milan's mayor of the centre-left Democratic Party, refused to remove the statue on the grounds that it was to honour his journalistic contributions. He said: "He was a great journalist who fought for freedom of the press. When we judge our own lives, can we say that ours is spotless? Lives must be judged in their complexity." He argued that "lives should be judged in their totality", while recognizing his dismay at the lightness of the way Montanelli spoke about his actions in Abyssinia.[36] Among others, the group Sentinelli di Milano had asked Sala to remove Montanelli's statue from the gardens of Porta Venezia because "until the end of his days, Montanelli proudly claimed the fact that he had bought and married a twelve-year-old Eritrean girl years to be his sex slave."[37]
During his long career, Montanelli was involved in several controversies, the most notable being his child bride.
While working as a journalist for the fascist magazine Civiltà Fascista, Montanelli had argued that under no circumstances soldiers should fraternize with black people, at least "until they had been given a culture."[38] [39] In March 2019, the feminist group Non Una Di Meno poured pink paint on the statue erected in honour of Montanelli, who had bought an Eritrean child as a wife.[40] In June 2020, a statue of Montanelli in Milan was vandalized by activists in the context of the Black Lives Matter movement.[41] [42] [43] The activist group Rete Studenti Milano labelled Montanelli "a colonialist who made slavery an important part of his political activity" and said he "cannot and should not be celebrated in the public square". This was also done to highlight the fact that, when aged 24 and working in Italian Ethiopia (former Abyssinia), he married a young girl, by buying her from her family, as was customary among locals, and in his interviews affectionately referred to her as "a little docile animal". The marriage falls into what was known as the practice, a relationship between Italian men and local women that was commonplace in the then Italian colonies. The next day, Rete Studenti Milano and Laboratorio universitario Metropolitano revendicated a street painting dedicated to the memory of the young girl by the street artist Ozmo.[44]
In a 1969 episode of the talk show L'ora della verità (The Hour of the Truth), Montanelli told host Gianni Bisiach of his child bride: "I think I chose well. She was a beautiful girl of 12 years. I'm sorry. But in Africa it's different." During the interview, his account was interrupted by a question from the feminist and journalist Elvira Banotti, who asked him how he could justify his marriage to a child, since marriage in Europe to a 12-year-old girl would be considered abhorrent; Montanelli replied that "in Abyssinia that's how it works", and that "at 12 years they normally marry, they are women already". In a 1982 interview with Biagi, Montanelli called her "a little docile animal",[45] and said that he bought her for ₤500.[46] According to Montanelli, the relationship was never violent or nonconsensual, and both the family and the girl always reported as agreeing to it; the girl still showed affection towards Montanelli years after their separation by naming her first-born child Indro. Details are confused and Montanelli was inconsistent when talking about it. Initially, he stated that she was 12 years old; later on, he described her as 14 years old.[47] [48] [49] At times, she was referred to as Destà;[50] other times, she was known as Fatima.[51] [52] Marco Travaglio, one of Montanelli's students, defended him. He said: "He was not a paedophile. He loved that little girl, he wanted to become Abyssian, and adapted to a tradition."[53]
During the global 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, Montanelli came under scrutiny for his racist attitudes and actions. While working at the fascist magazine Civiltà Fascista, Montanelli wrote many articles expressing racist ideas, declaring the superiority of the white race, and supporting colonialist ideals.[54] While stationed in Italian Ethiopia during the Ethiopian War, Montanelli married a 12-year old Eritrean girl (as it was custom for the institution of the ), who later married an Eritrean officer of his platoon.[55] [56] [57] Due to those controversies, protesters defaced a statue erected for him in Milan and demanded it be removed in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement. He also denied the use of poison gas during the war in Ethiopia; he acknowledged their use in 1996.[58]
His intervention and diatribe with Banotti continued for the whole episode of Bisiach's talk show L'ora della verità. The practice of the madamato, which Montanelli referred to in the interview,[59] was a temporary more uxorio relationship (as husband and wife) between Italian citizens and local women, often girls between 8 and 12 years of age, which was legal at the time in the Italian colonies;[55] [56] [57] it was abolished by the Fascist Racial Laws that prohibited miscegenation.[60] About his child bride, Montanelli stated: "I struggled a lot to overcome her smell, due to the goat tallow with which her hair was soaked, and even more to establish a sexual relationship with her because she had been infibulated at birth, which, in addition to putting up an almost insurmountable barrier to my wishes (it took the mother's brutal intervention to demolish it), rendered her completely insensitive."[61] Although those facts were known and had been discussed into the 21st century, as Montanelli openly discussed the events, they achieved international attention and further scrutiny in the wake of the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests.[58]
Another notable controversy of Montanelli's career was related to his statements regarding the Nazi–Fascist and World War II years. In 1996, he sent a letter to the former Nazi officer Erich Priebke, whom he revered as "Mr. Captain", after the first 15-year sentence that he considered to be senseless. He sympathized, and said: "As an old soldier, and even if from an army very different from his, I know very well that you could not do anything different from what you did."[62] About the Ardeatine massacre, he reclaimed the death of Giuseppe Cordero Lanza di Montezemolo and as "two of my old and dear friends" to whom he compared himself in his detention in the San Vittore Prison, where he said "I could suffer the same fate as the hostages of the Ardeatine".[62] He said that "even among us Italians there are men who think right...even when those who think and see unfair are the masters of the square", and concluded: "Best wishes, Mr. Captain."[62]
In 1999, during the trial of the Nazi captain for the Piazzale Loreto massacre, Montanelli was cited by the defence as a witness. He attributed all responsibility to the fascists. He said: "In San Vittore, it was known that the reprisals had been carried out by the repubblichini [supporters of the Italian Social Republic]. And the ways in which it happened confirm this: the Germans used to act ruthlessly but according to the regulations, instead the one in Piazzale Loreto was a slovenly operation, the fascists made the prisoners get off the trucks and made them start running, then shot them in the shoulders."[63] When pressed on the possibility of taking fifteen prisoners without the consent of the SS officer, he replied: "Yes, because in prison the prisoners were divided into those 'hostages' of the repubblichini and those in the hands of the Germans, and each had his own freely."[63] He retorted: "The interrogations of the Germans were long, unnerving, but neither I nor anyone else was subjected to brutality."[63] The public prosecutor then exhibited a letter of his from that period in which he wrote that "with a particularly delicate caress the Germans broke my rib and injured my liver".[63] In response, Montanelli justified himself by contradicting himself, and said: "It wasn't me who was beaten, but Gasparini. And it wasn't the Germans who beat up but the repubblichini."[63] For the first time, he reduced the role of the cardinal Alfredo Ildefonso Schuster in his release from prison to attribute it to the OVRA spy (at the time, he was known as Ugo Osteria), without clarifying his permission to expatriate by Saevecke. To the indignation of the victims' families throughout his deposition, he concluded: "They may as well make noises, I don't give a damn about their noises. I don't tell lies."[63]