Italy Marks One of Europe's Deadliest Bombings

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"Italy Marks One of Europe's Deadliest Bombings"

Bombing of the Central Train Station at Bologna, Italy

Magazine article

By: Thomas Sheehan

Date: January 22, 1981

Source: Feature Article from The New York Review of Books.

About the Author: Thomas Sheehan is Professor of Religious Studies at Stanford University.

INTRODUCTION

In 1980, Bologna was the center of the Italian Communist Party, making the city a target for anti-communist extremists.

On the morning of Saturday, August 2, 1980 at 10:25 a.m., an improvised explosive device (IED), packed with forty-four pounds of explosive materials detonated inside the central railroad station in Bologna, Italy. Eighty-five people were killed and an additional two hundred were injured.

Minutes after the attack, an accomplice called into the city's leading newspaper and claimed responsibility in the name of the Armed Revolutionary Nuclei, a Neo Fascist group. Neo Fascism and Neo-Nazism seek to reintroduce the fascist and nazi principles of government that ended with the conclusion of World War II (1939–1945). Neo-fascism usually reveres the 1922–1943 Italian fascist dictatorship of Benito Mussolini (1883–1945), especially his policy of nationalizing industry and business; neo-nazism is described as an attempt to reintroduce the racist policies of the Nazi regime.

On September 26, 1980, an attempted attack was also carried out by a neo-Nazi at the entrance to the Oktoberfest celebrations in Munich, Germany. The bomb, which exploded prematurely, killed the bomber and twelve other people and wounded an additional 215. A week later in Paris, another attack by neo-Fascist extremists outside a synagogue killed four people and injured thirteen.

These series of attacks, with the Bologna attack garnering the most attention and causing the greatest number of casualties, introduced Europeans to the danger of modern terrorism. Since the beginning of the 1970s, Europe had witnessed numerous attacks by various extremist groups. The neo-Fascist groups were also proven to have ties with Middle Eastern terrorist networks, receiving support and training from camps in Lebanon.

In recent years, the threats presented by neo-Fascist groups have reemerged. The Internet has been widely utilized by neo-Fascist and neo-Nazi groups, and despite being banned in several European nations, neo-fascist and neo-nazi groups have become increasingly vocal and visible in society, reinvigorating public concerns over the possible threats represented by these groups.

PRIMARY SOURCE

Bologna, August 2, 1980. It was a hot Saturday morning, the first weekend of Italy's traditional holiday month, and thousands of vacationers jostled their way to and from the trains in Bologna's central railroad station. In the midst of that noisy crowd someone stopped midway between the second-class waiting room and the coffee bar, put down a heavy suitcase, and quickly left the station. The suitcase contained over forty pounds of explosives, perhaps stable nitroglycerine, connected to a timer. At exactly 10:25 a.m. it exploded, ripping through the crowd, tearing apart the reinforced concrete walls, and bringing the roof crashing down on hundreds of bodies and parts of bodies.

In the bloody aftermath, rescue squads worked for over twelve hours to pull the dead and maimed from the rubble. As they labored, a young neofascist entered a telephone booth across town and dialed Bologna's leading newspaper. "This is the Armed Revolutionary Nuclei," he said. "We claim responsibility for the explosion in the railway station." The final toll: eighty-five dead—the eldest an eighty-six-year-old man, the youngest a three-year-old child—and more than two hundred wounded.

Eight weeks later, on the evening of September 26, a young man, Gundolf Koehler, tried to place six pounds of explosives in a refuse can at the entrance to Munich's Oktoberfest. The bomb went off, killing him and twelve others, wounding 215 people. On Koehler's body were found documents linking him to the illegal paramilitary Defense Sport Group of the neo-Nazi Karl-Heinz Hoffmann, who styles himself the "spiritual descendant" of Adolf Hitler and who has organized military maneuvers in southern Germany for his followers. Arrested along with twenty-four of his militants, Hoffmann was later released for lack of evidence.

A week later in Paris a twenty-six pound bomb exploded in front of the rue Copernic synagogue, where hundreds of Jews were gathered for sabbath services. The bomb killed four persons and wounded thirteen; if it had gone off twenty minutes later, when services would have ended, it would have killed scores of worshipers leaving the synagogue. The act was claimed by the European National Fasces (FNE), the same group that had machine-gunned five Jewish buildings in Paris a week earlier.

These latest of neofascist massacres have awakened Europeans to what many of them had managed not to see: the maturation over the last five years of what analysts now call Eurofascism—loosely associated but politically aligned neo-Nazi groups, many of them dedicated to terrorism, all of them intent on saving Europe from the twin evils of capitalism and Marxism. While their membership is relatively small, they are well funded and some have access to training camps in Lebanon. In an interview given eight days before the Munich explosion, the PLO leader Abu Ayad revealed that in late 1979 two members of Hoffmann's group were captured in Lebanon and confessed to him that they and some thirty other European fascists were training at the Falangist camp at Aquru, northeast of Beirut. The Germans told Ayad that their Italian comrades were about to "begin their operations with a major terrorist attack in the city of Bologna, because it is run by the Left."

The Eurofascist groups include the British Movement in England, New Force in Spain, the Flemish Militant Order in Belgium, Third Position and Armed Revolutionary Nuclei in Italy. In Germany there are sixty-nine extreme right groups (about 18,000 members in all), of which twenty-three are armed. In 1979, police raids on these German groups netted sixty-six pounds of explosives, 125 hand grenades, and more than 175 guns. On January 30, 1980, the day Hoffmann's Defense Sport Group was banded, police broke into his fortress headquarters at Ermreuth castle near Nuremberg and found everything from rifles and handbombs to a fully armed military vehicle.

In France, besides the two rival law-and-order organizations called New Forces Party and the National Front (which together polled some 200,000 votes in the 1978 legislative elections), the radical right is composed of two main "autonomist" groups: Marc Fredricksen's National European Action Federation (FANE)—one-third of whose membership is allegedly made up of policemen—and the Nationalist Revolutionary Movement (MNR) of Jean-Gilles Malliarakis, who seeks to prepare his followers for "the day of the great cleansing" in France. (Mr. Clean's group has a more nationalistic focus, Fredricksen's group a more European one.) FANE was dissolved by order of the French government last September, but it immediately reconstituted itself as the European National Fasces (FNE), with the same directorate and members. Fredricksen, who was recently sentenced to eighteen months (twelve suspended) for hate articles in his magazine Notre Europe, denies that FNE is responsible for the synagogue bombing. But he does admit that "the attack could have come from former FANE members who were shocked by the ban on their organization."

In Italy, the extreme right has long been active and well protected by the authorities, including the Italian Secret Services. A 1969 bomb explosion in Milan (sixteen dead) was at first blamed on anarchists, one of whom, under mysterious circumstances, fell to his death from the sixth-floor window of a police station. Later the massacre was traced to two neofascists, Franco Freda and Giovanni Ventura, and to an agent of the Secret Services (SID) named Guido Giannettini. Giannettini fled the country, but continued to receive checks from SID for a full year. He and three high SID officials were eventually jailed for conspiracy in the massacre, but the question of possible complicity on the part of high-ranking military and political figures has never been adequately clarified. . . .

Italy is living through its worst period since World War II. Inflation has passed 20 percent, young people can find no jobs, the political system is as unstable as the ground which recently shook under the impoverished villages of the south and took thousands of lives, many of which might have been spared if the Italian bureaucracy had simply taken the pains to enact a long-needed civil defense program. The country's fortieth government, just installed, has already been undermined by the biggest scandal in the history of the republic, a matter involving $2.2 billion of unpaid oil revenues and millions of dollars in kickbacks to government officials. . . .

In politics this sad and beautiful country seems more and more to resemble the Andrea Doria: faultily constructed at the beginning, its defects covered over for reasons of power and money, its potential for destroying innocent lives enormous. Italy is fertile soil for messianic terrorists who would right all its deep-seated wrongs by pulling a trigger or setting a timer. Could it be that Mussolini was right after all? "It's not impossible to govern the Italians," he once remarked. "It's simply useless."

SIGNIFICANCE

The attack on the Bologna train station represented the most costly acts of terror in the post-World War II period in Italy. Neo-fascist terrorism differentiates itself from other forms of politically driven terrorism in the fact that it acts as a reaction to what the terrorists view as a threat to their system of values. The principal threats to their beliefs come in the forms of capitalism and communism and attacks by neo-fascists have historically been directed at institutions which represent those systems.

The Bologna attack served as the largest international incident highlighting the dangers represented by neo-fascism, but attacks driven by similar political extremist motives have occurred around the world. For example, right-wing terrorists carried out high-profile attacks including the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 and the bombing at Centennial Olympic Park, Atlanta, during the 1996 Summer Olympics. The majority of domestic terror attacks that occur in the United States are carried out by political extremist groups.