Camillo Berneri

Camillo Berneri (; 1897–1937) was an Italian anarchist and anti-fascist activist. Born in Lodi, Berneri joined the Italian Socialist Party at an early age, but quickly became dissilusioned with its lack of militancy and failure to oppose Italian imperialism. He then became an anarchist, joining the Italian Syndicalist Union (USI), and briefly worked as a schoolteacher before being forced to flee into exile after the rise of the Fascist dictatorship in Italy. Among exiled Italian anarchists, he became one of the movement's leading figures, which attracted the attention of fascist spies and the French police. From 1928 to 1931, he was arrested, imprisoned and expelled from multiple different countries in western Europe, none of which had a legal agreement about what to do with him.

After receiving a pardon, he rejoined the Italian anti-fascist movement, building an alliance between the anarchists and the liberal socialists of Giustizia e Libertà (GL). He also came into conflict with the Italian Communist Party (PCI), which he came to regard as an expression of "left-wing fascism". After the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, he held a conference of Italian anarchists in which they planned to lead an armed return to Italy in the event of its defeat in the war. He then went to fight in the Spanish Civil War, before finding a career as an anti-fascist journalist in Barcelona. There he exposed evidence of Italian plans to annex the Balearic Islands, called for the Spanish Republic to recognise Moroccan independence and denounced moves by the Republican government which he considered counterrevolutionary. During the May Days of 1937, Berneri was arrested in his home and executed near the Palace of the Generalitat of Catalonia. The main theories about his death hold that his killers were either Stalinists, Catalan nationalists, members of a Francoist fifth column, the OVRA, or Italian anarchists in the employ of Interior Minister Ángel Galarza, all of which had the motive and means to carry out the assassination. Provided by Wikipedia