The Osoppo-Friuli Brigades were founded on Christmas Eve 1943 at the Archiepiscopal Seminary of Udine, drawing together liberals, socialists, and Catholic volunteers who had been organizing resistance cells since the Italian armistice in September. They were fiercely anti-fascist but also fiercely anti-communist, and as Tito's Yugoslav partisans pushed deeper into Istria and Venezia Giulia, the Osoppo fighters grew alarmed at the prospect of losing Italian territory to Yugoslavia after the war. The communist Garibaldi Brigades, operating in the same Julian and Carnic Pre-Alps, saw things differently. Under pressure from the Yugoslav IX Army Corps, they viewed the Osoppo's resistance to Yugoslav territorial claims as obstruction at best, collaboration with the enemy at worst.

Toffanin, whose nom de guerre was Giacca, arrived at the Osoppo command post with a list of charges. He accused the brigade of hoarding Allied weapons, hindering cooperation with Tito's forces, and most damningly, maintaining contacts with the fascist Decima Flottiglia MAS in hopes of creating a buffer against Yugoslav expansion. There was also the matter of Elda Turchetti, a young woman BBC radio had identified as a possible German spy. Ironically, it was Giacca himself who had turned Turchetti over to the Osoppo for judgment. They had examined her and found her not guilty -- BBC radio, it turned out, was not always reliable in such matters, since German intelligence often planted disinformation. None of this mattered to Toffanin. Four Osoppo partisans died in the initial ambush. The survivors were taken prisoner and summarily executed over the following days. Their commander, Francesco De Gregori, was among the dead; he would later receive the Silver Medal posthumously.

Who gave the order remained a matter of bitter debate for decades. The chain of command ran through tangled lines of authority. The communist leaders of the Udine Federation -- Modesti and Tambosso -- approved the operation. The orders came from the Yugoslav IX Army Corps. And according to Father Bello, a Catholic priest and former Osoppo commander who participated in a reconciliation ceremony in 2002, Palmiro Togliatti himself, leader of the Italian Communist Party, gave his approval. A British Liaison Officer attached to Slovenian partisans had sensed what was coming. Days before the massacre, he reported that communist forces had taken Osoppo partisans prisoner, and he warned the Foreign Office in London. The report reached Fitzroy Maclean, head of the British military mission, who was asked to raise the matter directly with Tito. It was too late.

Seven years after the killings, in 1952, Mario Toffanin and 36 former GAP members were sentenced to a combined 777 years in prison. By then, Toffanin was living in Prague and working as a welder; the Italian Communist Party had spirited him out of the country. The other convicted members served little or no time, thanks to amnesties that folded the war's brutalities into the postwar settlement. Giovanni Padoan, a Garibaldi Brigade political commissar who received a thirty-year sentence on appeal in 1959, had been sent first to Czechoslovakia, then to Romania before his conviction was confirmed. He returned to his native Cormons after receiving amnesty that same year. Elda Turchetti, the woman whose supposed espionage had served as one pretext for the massacre, was formally cleared of all allegations at the trial in Lucca.

On 8 August 2002, fifty-seven years after the killings, Giovanni Padoan and Father Bello stood together at the site of the massacre. Padoan, then ninety-three, denied personal involvement -- he claimed he had been at the Yugoslav partisan headquarters in Cerkno that day -- but he took responsibility, offered his apology, and asked forgiveness from the survivors and the victims' families. He explained that the Cold War had prevented such a gesture at the earlier trial. The names of the seventeen dead are inscribed on a memorial at Porzus: Ado, Guidone, Aragona, Make, Ateone, Massimo, Barletta, Porthos, and the others, known by their noms de guerre. The site remains a place where Italians reckon with the fact that resistance, like the war itself, was never as simple as its myths suggest.