Introduction Italy In The Second World War: Alternative Perspectives (Brill Publishing Summer 2018)

iii Italy and the Second World War Alternative Perspectives Edited by Emanuele Sica Richard Carrier LEIDEN | BOSTON For use by the Author only | © 2018 Koninklijke Brill NV Contents Contents v Contents Acknowledgments ix Notes on Translators x List of Contributors xi Introduction 1 Emanuele Sica Part 1 1940–1943: Occupations 1 Allied with the Enemy: the Italian Occupation of Yugoslavia (1941–43) 15 Eric Gobetti 2 The Military Court of Cettigne During the Italian Occupation of Montenegro (1941–1943) 34 Federico Goddi 3 The Italian Occupation of Crete During the Second World War 51 Paolo Fonzi 4 Italian Governing Apparatuses in Occupied France, 1940–1943 Niall MacGalloway 76 Part 2 1943–1945: The Other War: Fighting the Germans 5 The Regio Esercito in Co-Belligerency, October 1943–April 1945 95 Richard Carrier 6 The Italian Regio Esercito Co-Belligerent Soldiering, 1943–1945: A Grassroots Perspective 126 Nicolò Da Lio For use by the Author only | © 2018 Koninklijke Brill NV vi 7 Contents Multi-National Special Operators: The San Marco Marines, the Italian Partisans, and Allied Armies in Italy, 1943–45 154 Cindy Brown Part 3 Fascism bis, Resistance, and Civil War 8 War of Resistance and Resistance to War: Scenes of the History of the Guerrilla War 175 Luca Baldissara 9 From Fascism to the Italian Civil War: The Republican Fascist’s Identity from 1943 to 1945 203 Amedeo Osti Guerrazzi 10 Fighting Women: The Case of the Italian Social Republic 1943–45 224 Federico Ciavattone 11 Punishing the Fascists: An Intense Debate During the Italian Civil War 249 Andrea Martini Part 4 Ethnic Identities and Legacies of Violence 12 “We Istrians Do Very Well in Russia”: Istrian Combatants, Fascist Propaganda, and Brutalization on the Eastern Front 275 Nicolas G. Virtue 13 Fighting Alongside the Allies in Italy: The War of Soldiers of Italian Descent Against the Land of Their Ancestors 299 Matteo Pretelli and Francesco Fusi 14 Justice Delayed, Justice Denied: The Punishment of War Crimes Committed in Italy by the Germans After 8 September 1943 325 Paolo Pezzino For use by the Author only | © 2018 Koninklijke Brill NV vii Contents Epilogue 356 Richard Carrier Select Bibliography Index 364 361 For use by the Author only | © 2018 Koninklijke Brill NV Introduction Introduction 1 Introduction Emanuele Sica Italy in the Second World War: Alternative Perspectives fills an important page in the history of the Second World War by focusing on the Italian war experience, which has been overshadowed in international research by the attention paid to its senior Axis partner. Additionally, one challenge in studying Italian history has often been the cultural and linguistic gap separating academic communities.1 As recently asserted by John Gooch, ‘’For the reader with no Italian, coverage of Italy’s war is patchy and generally unsatisfactory.’’2 In an effort to widen the perspectives on the period, this volume has gathered junior and senior scholars from around the world whose original research focuses on the Italian war experience—that is, examining and appraising the Second World War through the lens of Italian soldiers and civilians, and of populations occupied by the Italian army. At times focused on high-level politics and diplomatic history, at times taking a history from below, this collective effort offers a multifaceted approach to a troubled and controversial period in Italian history. Chapters have been organized both chronologically and thematically: the first half focuses on the years 1940–1943, when Italy was a faithful, albeit at times erstwhile, ally of Germany in its quest for “a place in the sun.” Joining the fray in the ill-prepared Battle of the Alps in June 1940,3 Italian armies followed Il Duce’s dictum of a “parallel war” and subsequently occupied, with the 1 As an example, the best account of the Italian army from the Ethiopian campaign to the end of the Second World War, Giorgio Rochat, Le guerre italiane 1935–1943. Dall’impero d’Etiopia alla disfatta (Torino: Einaudi, 2005), is still waiting for an English translation, while there is no volume in English on the Italian army during the Second World War. Moreover, little has been published or translated on Italian colonial wars. See Bruce Vandervort, To the fourth shore: Italy’s war for Libya, 1911–1912 = Verso la quarta sponda: la guerra italiana per la Libia, 1911–1912 (Roma: Stato maggiore dell’esercito, Ufficio storico, 2012), Nicola Labanca Oltremare, Storia dell’espansione coloniale italiana (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2007). For a synthesis in English weaving political, strategic, and military dimensions on the Italian war effort in the Second World War, James H. Burgwyn, Mussolini Warlord: Failed Dreams of Empire, 1940–1943 (New York: Enigma Books, 2012). 2 John Gooch, ‘’Mussolini’s strategy, 1939–1943, bibliographical essay’’ in Evan Mawdsley and John Ferris, The Cambridge History of the Second World War, Volume 1 Fighting the War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), p. 727. 3 On the Battle of the Alps, Emanuele Sica, “The Italian army and the Battle of the Alps,” Canadian Journal of History (Autumn 2012: volume 47, number 2), 355–378. © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2018 | doi 10.1163/9789004363762_002 For use by the Author only | © 2018 Koninklijke Brill NV 2 Sica significant help of their German counterparts—Greece (April 1941), the former Yugoslavia (April 1941) and France (November 1942). The impact of these military occupations has been neglected until recently, perhaps following the myth of the bono italiano (Italian goodfellow). In this softened portrait, Italians were depicted as good-natured persons, pious family men who were kind to civilians and thus incapable of committing atrocities.4 To be sure, this paradigm was carefully orchestrated by Mussolini’s government in the interwar years, in an effort to frame the occupation of Ethiopia as a selfless campaign by the Italian state to bring affluence to the Horn of Africa.5 The myth was later resurrected after the 1943 Armistice by almost the entire political spectrum to demarcate the Italians from the heartless cattivo tedesco (wicked German): the anti-Fascist parties intended to stress the fight of the Italian nation against the Nazi invaders and their Fascist minions, while the military and conservative circles wanted to distance themselves as much as possible from their former ally.6 Moreover, the impellent postwar reconstruction campaign dictated the need to move on and end the civil war.7 In truth, the Cold War was already knocking at the door. By 1947, Western democracies focused on stemming the Red Tide in Europe, and thus swept under the rug war crimes dividing future NATO allies. Most German generals were quickly amnestied,while no Italian ‘’Nuremberg’’ ever occurred to judge Italian generals accused of war crimes and genocide.8 It is only in the last decade that the occupations of foreign 4 Filippo Focardi Il cattivo tedesco e il bravo italiano: la rimozione delle colpe della seconda guerra mondiale (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2013). 5 Angelo Del Boca, Italiani, brava gente? (Vicenza: Neri Pozza, 2005), pp. 48. Angelo Del Boca has been among the first historians after the war to denounce the Italian use of gas in Ethiopia against military and civilian targets alike. See Angelo Del Boca, I gas di Mussolini (Roma: Editori Riuniti, 2007). 6 Filippo Focardi Il cattivo tedesco e il bravo italiano: la rimozione delle colpe della seconda guerra mondiale (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2013), pp. 180–181. The fabricated image of the good-natured Italian was further enhanced by the narrative of Italian soldiers saving Jewish minorities in France and in the Balkans from German dragnets: see Rodogno, Davide, “Histoire et historiographie de la politique des occupants italiens à l’égard des Juifs dans les Balkans et la France métropolitaine (avril 1941-septembre 1943),” Revue d’Histoire de la Shoah, vol. 204, no. 1 (2016), 275–298. 7 Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe (New York: Penguin, 2005), pp. 47–48 8 The most glaring example was Ethiopia’s futile attempt in the postwar years to have Italian generals such as Pietro Badoglio and Rodolfo Graziani tried, and the volte face of the British Foreign Office on Ethiopian demands. See Richard Pankhurst. “Italian Fascist War Crimes in Ethiopia: A History of Their Discussion, from the League of Nations to the United Nations (1936–1949).” Northeast African Studies 6, no. 1 (1999), 83–140. For use by the Author only | © 2018 Koninklijke Brill NV Introduction 3 lands and the complex relationships with both autochthonous authorities and civilians have been increasingly examined.9 1940–1943: Occupations Essays on four territories occupied by the Italians appear in the first part of this volume. Eric Gobetti analyzes the occupation of Yugoslavia from the beginning of the invasion until the armistice of 8 September 1943, stressing the importance of this war theater for the Italians. The Fascist establishment deployed its entire available military and diplomatic means to conquer and later on occupy the area, including more than 300,000 soldiers of the Regio Esercito. No military occupation could properly function without the help of local “collaborators” willing to compromise with the occupying army for a variety of reasons, and the Balkans were no different. Interestingly, while the relationship with the Croatian Ustashas, who were formal allies of the Axis, was increasingly problematic, Italian officers forged solid bonds with Serbian nationalist Chetnik leaders, in part due to the mutual hatred of the Croatian regime and Communist partisans as well as to the unpreparedness of the Italian army to confront a full-fledged insurgency. Lack of a counterinsurgency doctrine can in part explain the uneven choices in occupation policy, but Gobetti underlines the fundamental issue of seeking an entente with a population widely stereotyped as barbarian and inherently inferior to the Italian Stirpe. Federico Goddi and Paolo Fonzi’s essays present two case-studies of the Italian occupation in the Balkans. Goddi zeroes in on the occupation of Montenegro through the lens of the repressive Italian apparatus, epitomized 9 The first historian who conceptualized Italian military occupations during the Second World War is Davide Rodogno, in Il nuovo ordine mediterraneo: le politiche di occupazione dell’Italia fascista (1940–1943) (Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 2003; for its English edition, Fascism’s European Empire: Italian Occupation during the Second World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). For the occupation of France, see Emanuele Sica, Mussolini’s Army in the French Riviera: the Italian Occupation of France (Champaign, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 2016) and Jean-Louis Panicacci, L’occupation italienne: Sud-Est de la France, juin 1940- septembre 1943 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, coll. ‘Histoire,’ 2010); for the occupation of Yugoslavia, Eric Gobetti, Alleati del nemico: l’occupazione italiana in Jugoslavia (1941–1943) (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2013); on Slovenia, Amedeo Osti Guerrazzi, Italian Army in Slovenia: Strategies of Antipartisan Repression 1941–1943 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016); on the occupation of Montenegro, Federico Goddi, Fronte Montenegro: Occupazione Italiana e Giustizia Militare (1941–1943) (Gorizia: Leg edizioni, 2016); and on the occupation of Greece, Marco Clementi, Camicie nere sull’Acropoli: l’occupazione italiana in Grecia (1941–1943) (Roma: DeriveApprodi, 2013). For use by the Author only | © 2018 Koninklijke Brill NV 4 Sica by the Military Court of Cettigne. Due to its rugged terrain, a boon for local partisan bands, Montenegro was never truly pacified, notwithstanding the fact that it had the highest ratio of soldiers to inhabitants (almost one soldier per three locals) in occupied Europe, nor the presence of such an iron-fisted ruler as the Commander of the Italian IX Army, General Alessandro Pirzio Biroli. The study of the Military Court of Cettigne is thus enlightening on how Italian justice was meted out in the region. Paolo Fonzi, on the other hand, focuses on the military occupation of the largest island of Greece, Crete, which was occupied in May 1941 by the German army on its Western half and by the Italians on its Eastern one. Life in the Italian occupation zone on Crete varied considerably from that in the German one as well as from the Italian zones in continental Greece, because Eastern Greece had few resistance organizations. In fact, Fonzi’s essay underlines that, while the first months were marred by several albeit relatively minor incidents, the relationship between occupiers and occupied improved, owing to better food distribution to the populace by the Italian army. However, the isolation and dull life on the island ultimately sapped the soldiers’ morale. Finally, Niall MacGalloway examines the occupation of France, which formally began in June 1940 with the Armistice of Villa Incisa, and ended precipitously on 8 September 1943. Relations between Fascist Italy and the collaborationist Vichy regime started on bad footing, largely as the result of the erroneous assumption that the war would be over by 1940 with the surrender of Great Britain. Thus, the Franco-Italian armistice resulted in a botched document that left unanswered more questions than it solved. This situation vastly favored Vichy, underlining the Axis partners’ different strategic and political interests. In the meantime, increasingly-frustrated Italian officials of the CIAF (Italian Armistice Commission) found their range of choices narrowed by the structural inadequacy of their organization, until the full-fledged occupation of the French Riviera in November 1942 permanently divested the CIAF of its role. 1943–1945: The War on the Peninsula The second part of this book analyzes the period from the fall of Mussolini in July 1943 to the end of the hostilities in 1945.10 The demotion of the Duce and 10 For an account of Italy at war between 1943 and 1945, see Philip Morgan, The Fall of Mussolini: Italy, Italians and the Second World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) and Victoria Belco, War, Massacre, and Recovery in Central Italy, 1943–1948 (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2010). For use by the Author only | © 2018 Koninklijke Brill NV Introduction 5 his subsequent arrest by King Victor Emmanuel III on 25 July is a convenient cut-off date for this volume, as it represented a political watershed in Italy’s history. “Il Duce ha sempre ragione” (The Leader is always right), a long-proclaimed shibboleth echoing through countless marches and political meetings, rang hollow owing to the poor Italian military record. The King’s decision only expressed the disillusionment of the establishment. However, it failed to get the Italians out of the morass of the Second World War. On the contrary, General Pietro Badoglio’s secret negotiations with the Allies and the subsequent Armistice of Cassibile signed on 3 September11 only worsened the fate of the peninsula, which would become the site of a long, and at times ferocious, confrontation between Allied and Axis armies. The primary and immediate victim of the Armistice was the Italian army, whose units were caught completely off-guard by the 8 September armistice declaration. The Germans managed to ensnare more than 1 million Italian soldiers, 710,000 of whom would end up in German prison camps, some until the end of the war.12 Italy was split in half, with the center-north in the hands of the German army under the command of General Albert Kesselring, and the bottom half governed by the King and his most trusted generals in what became known as the Kingdom of the South. Fighting the Germans Richard Carrier traces the involvement of regular units of the Regio Esercito in the war of liberation between October 1943 and April 1945. This participation was hindered by the ambiguity of the Allied policy toward Badoglio’s government and the immediate large-scale disintegration of the army following the 8 September announcement. Nevertheless, contingencies forced the Allies to reconsider the role of the Italians. By the end of 1943, the Allied armies were willingly depending on masses of Italian soldiers in supportive roles. Military necessity forced the Allies, in 1944, to expand the combat role of their co-belligerent. At the conclusion of the war, 321,386 Italian servicemen were serving under the United Nations—a significant contribution to the Allied campaign against Germany. Nicolò Di Lio tackles the same theme from a different perspective, giving a voice to the rank-and-file who chose to fight in the co-belligerent Italian Army. 11 12 On the Armistice and its consequences, see Elena Aga Rossi, Una nazione allo sbando (Bologna: il Mulino, 2006). On the Imi (Internati militari italiani), the Italian POWs in Germany, see Gabriele Hammerman, Gli internati militari italiani in Germania, 1943–1945 (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2004). For use by the Author only | © 2018 Koninklijke Brill NV 6 Sica Changing sides left many scars on Italian society, which is reflected in the testimonies gathered by Di Lio. The rationale behind continuing the fight encompassed a broad spectrum, ranging from geographical factors (for those who were cut off from their families by the war) to political allegiances, especially in the case of left-wing militants, and hatred against occupiers, whether Germans or Allied. In any case, the swift evolution of motivations is surprising, especially during the first months following the armistice. Di Lio also underlines the hybrid nature of the reborn Italian army, torn between the paternalism, mostly in the officer corps, of those who saw the Italian army as a bulwark against any social and political revolution, and the troops drawn from antiFascist organizations and partisan bands who balefully tolerated being cogs in a conservative machine. Understandably, this hostility led to desertions and disciplinary issues that may have affected the cohesiveness of some of these refurbished units. In studying the case of the San Marco Marines, Cindy Brown complements the two previous chapters. A few select volunteers of the San Marco regiment were recruited by the American Office of Strategic Services and helped in undercover operations such as sabotaging railway lines, gathering information, and linking partisan bands with Allied units. San Marco marines were especially crucial in networking Canadian intelligence officers with partisans to organize risky, but ultimately effective, operations to weaken the Gothic line. Brown also pinpoints that the choice to fight on the Allied side was far from being an automatic one: as in the case of normal units of the Regio Esercito, much depended on one’s place at the times of the armistice and political allegiances. Fascism 2.0, Resistance, and Civil War Concurrently with the Axis-Allied confrontation, the Italian peninsula became the theater of a conflict that pitted Repubblica Sociale Italiana (the Italian Social Republic or RSI) paramilitary groups against antifascist partisan bands. The RSI has long been ignored in the Italian historiography of the Second World War. The prevailing narrative in the immediate postwar focused on the redemption of the Italian nation after September 1943 and thus refused any “to grant any identity, any dignity to the Fascist enemy.”13 William Deakin’s 13 Toni Rovatti, “Linee di ricerca sulla Repubblica sociale italiana,” Studi Storici, 2/2014, volume 55, 287–299. Citation at 287. At a conference in 1959, Gianpaolo Pansa, a journalistcum-historian, provocatively asked why the RSI was being understudied. He was vehemently rebuffed by many attendees on the grounds that studying the RSI would only For use by the Author only | © 2018 Koninklijke Brill NV Introduction 7 book The Brutal Friendship, published in 1962, was certainly instrumental in replacing the RSI as an actor, albeit one considered at best a subordinated puppet of the Germans. The breakthrough came with Claudio Pavone’s magnus opus, Una guerra civile, Saggio sulla moralità nella Resistenza, which somberly assessed the furious violence in the civil war between the Repubblichini and the Italian Resistance.14 On one side, Fascist hardliners led by Benito Mussolini were intent on cleansing Italian soil from “traitors,” a catch-all label under which they grouped all who opposed the continuation of the war with the Axis side.15 Leftist militants, soldiers from the largely disintegrated Regio Esercito, and draft-dodgers evading the call to arms of the new Fascist Republican army consolidated partisan formations cropping up in central and northern Italy to counter the newly-reconstituted Fascist state. Contrary to what befell the RSI, the existence of the Italian Resistance was universally acknowledged in Second-World-War historiography right after the end of the hostilities. In what would become the most resounding test case of “public use of history,” the commemoration of the Resistenza redeeming the Italian nation after more than two decades of Fascist regime constituted one of the foundation pillars of the new Italian Republic.16 In truth, the “hegemonic narrative” of the patriotic Resistance united in a “second” Risorgimento against the Axis forces at times acted as a divisive factor, with each political party, chiefly the Christian-democrat (DC) and Communist party (PCI), shaping the war events to accommodate its own overarching narrative.17 Indeed, the first comprehensive book of the history of the Resistance, Roberto Battaglia’s 1953 Storia della resistenza italiana, was heavily influenced by the author’s political affiliations, first in the Partito D’Azione as a resister, then in the postwar years 14 15 16 17 legitimize it—see Philip Cooke, The Legacy of the Italian Resistance. (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), p. 76. Interestingly, almost half a century later, Pansa would himself become a controversial figure with his dubious books on violent partisan reprisals against RSI militants and civilians. Claudio Pavone, Una guerra civile. Saggio sulla moralità nella Resistenza (Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 1991; for the English translation A Civil War: A History of the Italian Resistance, London: Verso, 2014). On the RSI, Luigi Ganapini, La repubblica delle camicie nere (Milano: Garzanti, 2010); Mario Avagliano and Marco Palmieri, L’Italia di Salò, 1943–1945 (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2017). Paolo Pezzino, “The Italian Resistance between history and memory,” Journal of Modern Italian Studies 10(4) 2005, 396–412. For more on the evolution of the public use of the Resistance, see Filippo Focardi, La guerra della memoria: la Resistenza nel dibattito politico italiano dal 1945 ad oggi (RomeBari: Laterza, 2005), especially pp. 3–55. For use by the Author only | © 2018 Koninklijke Brill NV 8 Sica as a communist.18 Ultimately, the myth of the Resistance acted as a coagulant of all democratic forces in the “Years of Lead,” when extremist terrorists groups from both ends threatened to undermine the stability of the Republic.19 Pavone’s monograph reinserted the Resistance into the complex events of the 1943–1945 war fought on the Italian peninsula. Pavone asserted that three wars were waged concomitantly: a war of liberation against the German occupiers, the already-mentioned civil war, and an ensuing class war. He focused on inner motivations of the Italians fighting these wars by widely using memoirs, diaries and other literary publications. After the end of the Cold War, historians’ attention shifted towards a more inclusive assessment of the Resistance, by encompassing the war experiences and eventual resistance of the Italian civilians who endured the violence of the German occupiers in what has been labelled the Guerra ai civili (war against civilians).20 German punitive occupation in turn heightened the ‘’resistance to war’’ of the Italian population.21 This “civil resistance,” whether from striking factory workers, draft-dodgers, or civilians hiding Jew,s has increasingly been acknowledged as an important factor shaping the events transpiring in the Second World War.22 In accord with these historiographical trends, Luca Baldissara analyzes the Italian Resistance movement from a long-term perspective, assessing the deep-seated anti-Fascist feelings associated with joining the partisan move18 19 20 21 22 Roberto Battaglia, Storia della Resistenza italiana: 8 settembre 1943–25 aprile 1945 (Turin: Einaudi, 1953). On the book reception, see Cooke, The Legacy of the Italian Resistance, pp. 53–55. The most up-to-date synthesis on the Italian Resistance is Santo Peli, Storia della Resistenza in Italia (Turin: Einaudi, 2006). Focardi, La guerra della memoria, pp. 52–55. It was especially important to wrest the legacy of the Resistance from far-left terrorist organizations such as the Red Brigades, which actively sought to portray themselves as the true heirs of the Resistance—see Cooke, The Legacy of the Italian Resistance, pp. 118–123. Luca Baldissara, “Ripensando la storia della Resistenza,” Italia Contemporanea, 275 (2015), 129–156. There is an exhaustive literature on German atrocities in war-torn Italy written in the last two decades; for a holistic view, see Lutz Klinhammer, Stragi naziste in Italia, 1943–1944 (Rome: Donzelli, 1997); Gerhard Schreiber La vendetta tedesca 1943–1945. Le rappresaglie naziste in Italia (Milano: Mondadori, 2000) e Carlo Gentile I crimini di guerra tedeschi in Italia (Turin: Einaudi, 2015; original language Wehrmacht und Waffen-SS im Partisanenkrieg: Italien 1943–1949, Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2012). More recently, see Gianluca Fulvetti and Paolo Pezzino (eds.), Zone di guerra, geografie di sangue: l’Atlante delle stragi naziste e fasciste in Italia: (1943–1945) (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2016) Simona Colarizi, L’opinione degli italiani sotto il regime 1929–1943 (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1991), pp. 270–282 and Paul Corner, The Fascist Party and Popular Opinion in Mussolini’s Italy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), esp. pp. 227–244. Jacques Semelin, Sans armes face à Hitler (Paris: Payot, 1989) For use by the Author only | © 2018 Koninklijke Brill NV Introduction 9 ment, which for Baldissara could predate the events of 8 and 9 September 1943. Indeed, almost a decade of wars, from the invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 and the massive military help to Franco’s Nationalists, to the invasion of Albania in 1939 and the string of disappointments during the Second World War, had worn down the Italian population, which at the same time had to endure an overall decline in the quality of living conditions, increased food rationing, and aerial bombardments. Discontent among the Italian populace erupted in March 1943 in widespread strikes in the Northern industrial pole, the first strikes ever registered in an Axis country. This disaffection of the working class was certainly instrumental in the creation of partisan bands after September 1943. Baldissara posits that guerilla warfare was not an ingrained tactic among Italian partisans, but had to be learned from scratch, with the possible exception of former soldiers who had fought anti-partisan groups in occupied territories. Partisans, however, were not fighting solely against Germans, but against other Italians who sided with Il Duce until the very end. The choices of those who remained with the Italian Social Republic, however, were fraught with consequences. As stated by Amedeo Osti Guerrazzi, their fateful decision was fuelled by a Manichean propaganda, dividing the peninsula between faithful Fascists and miserable traitors such as the King, the Army’s highest echelons starting with General Badoglio, the bourgeois, the capitalists, and members of the working class—in a word, all the voltagabbana (turncoats) who had never truly believed in the cause and who were the real reason behind the dismal Italian military record. The Fascist militants’ gaze turned then towards Germany, idealizing the Wehrmacht as a perfect war machine. Fascist Repubblichini turned into staunch Nazifascists, deeply anti-Semitic, ruthless against all those standing in their way, treating armed partisans and unarmed civilians with equal brutality. Osti Guerrazzi also underlines the responsibility of Fascist paramilitary groups, such as the Black Brigades, in the brutalization of the civil war. Women who had collaborated with the RSI have been, until recently, pigeonholed as informers and prostitutes.23 Federico Ciavattone’s essay focuses on women who embraced the RSI cause, abetting the new regime either in noncombat roles such as nurses, or in more active and dangerous participation in 23 On nuancing this binary perspective, Francesca Gori, ‘’I processi per collaborazionismo in Italia. Un’analisi di genere,’’ Contemporanea, 4/2012, 651–67; and Roberta Cairoli, Dalla parte del nemico. Ausiliarie, delatrici e spie nella Repubblica sociale italiana (1943–1945) (Milan-Udine: Mimesis, 2013). See also Cecilia Nubola, Fasciste di Salò, Una storia giudiziaria (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2016). For use by the Author only | © 2018 Koninklijke Brill NV 10 Sica the war effort via infiltration and counter-espionage missions. In an ironic twist for a branch of the population who had always been cast by Fascist propaganda as a subordinate group of diligent housewives and compliant mothers, Fascist women questioned the masculinity of Italian soldiers and proclaimed their unwavering allegiance to Mussolini by joining the Servizio Ausiliario Femminile (Women’s Auxiliary Service S.A.F.). Volunteers, after being vetted both psychologically and politically, attended courses ranging from first aid to self-defense, in preparation for their role in supporting anti-partisan operations. By combing memoirs and diaries of women volunteers and their companions-in-arms, Ciavattone digs out the voices of these women, their support even for the most appalling counterinsurgency operations in the civil war, and the heavy price they paid as summary justice was carried out in the last months of the war. Punishing the Fascists, as Andrea Martini explains, was a widespread priority for those who had endured two decades of Fascism. If the principle of making collaborators pay was widely accepted, though, the choice of who should take the responsibility to mete out justice became controversial. The government of the Kingdom of the South, supported by the Allied Military Government (AMG), wanted to take the helm of the purging process in order to assert its legitimacy in the now free areas. However, it met with the opposition of the Committee of National Liberation for Upper Italy (CLNAI), a politicomilitary entity formed in January 1944 to link the political action of the regional Committee of National Liberation, headed by anti-fascist parties’ militants, and of partisans. The CLNAI wished to judge Fascist collaborators unitarily and summarily. Along with an urge to vent their frustration for two decades of oppression, resisters wanted to take the politics of retribution into their own hands, as they feared that ordinary judicial bodies would include individuals tied to the old regime. Their actions proved extremely controversial and sometimes degraded to score-settling, a common feature in liberated Europe. Ethnic Identities and Legacies of Violence The last part of the volume focuses on two aspects that are central to a full understanding of the conflict in Italy: the role of ethnic minorities in the gargantuan armies of the belligerents in both camps, and the judicial legacies of the violence unleashed against Italian civilians by German units. Many of the armies of the 1939–1945 period were multi-faceted organizations that included a whole spectrum of different racial minorities. Nicholas Virtue and Francesco Fusi / Matteo Petrelli’s papers tackle this aspect from two For use by the Author only | © 2018 Koninklijke Brill NV Introduction 11 different perspectives. Virtue’s chapter deals with soldiers of the Regio Esercito of Slavic ethnicity from Istria, a peninsula bordering the northeastern Italian region of Friuli Venezia Giulia, which had been annexed by the Italians following the First World War. Perusing letters coming from the Eastern front, Virtue shows that the Slavs conscripted into the Italian army suffered as much as their peers from the difficult conditions on the Eastern front. Officially in Russia to root out and free the population from the godless Bolshevik plague, the Italian Expeditionary Corps (CSIR, later in Fall 1942 rechristened the Italian Army in Russia or ARMIR) participated in the disastrous Battle of Stalingrad and suffered heavy casualties during the Soviet offensive strike (Operation Saturn) and the following chaotic retreat.24 The Istrian soldiers perhaps fared better due to their ethnic and linguistic proximity to the local populace. What is surprising, though, is that their experience did not differ much from that of their ethnic-Italian counterparts. Thus Virtue’s work depicts a keen sense of isolation and disenchantment mixed with the fierce nationalist belief of exporting civilization to a backward part of the world. On the other hand, Matteo Petrelli and Francesco Fusi examine Allied soldiers of Italian descent in the United States, and to a lesser extent in Canada and Brazil, who participated in the Italian campaign. Mostly coming from the states of New York and New Jersey, these second-generation Americans fought valiantly, strongly identifying with the cause of their adopted homeland. That is not to say that being deployed to their ancestral land left them aloof. On the contrary, more than a few experienced mixed feelings at fighting against their relatives and feared they might be cast as traitors if captured by the Italians. Nevertheless, Italian-American soldiers acted as cultural and political mediators, bonding with the local population, women included,25 and with partisan groups. The deeds of the thousands of Italian-Americans who fought on the Italian soil still await full recognition by public opinion and the academic community. Two years of military operations, coupled with the civil war, wreaked havoc on the Italian peninsula. This tension erupted in vicious massacres perpetrated by German units with the help of Fascist paramilitary groups. German 24 25 Out of the 235,000 soldiers who went in Russia, more than half were killed, went missing in action, or became POWS. On the CSIR and ARMIR, see Maria Teresa Giusti, La campagna di Russia, 1941–1943 (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2016). As many as 10,000 marriages were celebrated between American soldiers and Italian girls; see Silvia Cassamagnaghi, Operazione Spose di guerra. Storie d’amore e d”emigrazione (Milano: Feltrinelli, 2014). For use by the Author only | © 2018 Koninklijke Brill NV 12 Sica violence killed more than 20,000 Italian civilians.26 Paolo Pezzino’s chapter concludes the volume by examining the controversies surrounding the prosecution (or more often the lack thereof) of German war criminals from the end of the war to the present. The Allies appeared to employ a double standard when prosecuting German commanders: while those who had caused the death of Allied soldiers, were swiftly punished, often by execution, those who had overseen civilian massacres were generally spared death sentences. Cold War politics trumped ideals of justice as Germany and its army became pillars of NATO. War crimes were quietly forgotten in the drawers of history, or should we say in a cabinet—more specifically, the so-called Cabinet of Shame (Armadio della Vergogna) discovered only by pure luck in 1994.27 New evidence was then uncovered to help reopen older cases of massacres by German units. Pezzino highlights the bland attitude of German courts, which often dismissed evidence due to the statute of limitations or minimized the culpability of German officers and soldiers by stressing that they were merely ‘’obeying orders’’. Moreover, the justification for the harsh treatments of Italian soldiers and civilians alike was the so-called duplicitous nature of the Italians, ultimately considered traitors to Germany both in the First and Second World War. As shown by the breadth and wealth of monographs published each year, the Second World War is still a vivid, controversial event that sparks wide interest both in popular culture and in the academic community. These original contributions merely hint at the renewal of interest in the studies of the role of Italy and the Italians between 1940 and 1945. It is hoped this volume will promote further inquiry in an understudied nation that paid a heavy price for its involvement in the disastrous expansionist dream of a brutal dictator. 26 27 Lutz Klinkhammer, Stragi naziste in Italia, 1943–1944 (Roma: Donzelli, 1997, 2006). In 2012, Germany and Italy co-funded a research project, under the guidance of historians such as Paolo Pezzino, to create a database for the acts of violence committed by German soldiers during the Second World War. In 2017, the database, L’Atlante delle Stragi Naziste e Fasciste in Italia (‘’Atlas of the Nazi and Fascist Massacres in Italy’’), was made available via the interactive website at <http://www.straginazifasciste.it>. In it, hundreds of folders documenting German atrocities in the Second World War had been literally shelved by Italian military prosecutors. Mimmo Franzinelli. Le stragi nascoste. L’armadio della vergogna: impunità e rimozione dei crimini di guerra nazifascisti 1943–2001 (Mondadori: Milano, 2003). For use by the Author only | © 2018 Koninklijke Brill NV