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Italian Society during World War II Italian Society during World War II
Shira Klein
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Recommended Citation Recommended Citation
Klein, Shira. “Italian Society during World War II.” In
The Routledge History of the Second World War
,
edited by Paul R. Bartrop. Routledge, 2021.
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19
Italian Society during World War II
Shira Klein
On 10 June 1940, Benito Mussolini stood on the balcony overseeing Rome’s famous Piazza
Venezia. To the cheers of thousands below, he roared: “Men and women of Italy, of the Empire,
and of the Kingdom of Albania. Listen! An hour, marked by destiny, beats in the heart of our
homeland … The declaration of war has already been delivered to the ambassadors of Great
Britain and of France … And we will win! Italian people! Take up your weapons, and show your
tenacity, your courage, your value!”
1
With this short, passionate speech, the Italian dictator
launched Italy into a conflict that would claim the lives of 444,523 Italians and bring about far-
reaching changes to the peninsula’s entire population.
2
This chapter showcases what life was like for ordinary Italians during the Second World
War. Up to the 1980s, a typical textbook on Italian history told a narrative of victimhood and
heroism, promoting the idea that most Italians had never wanted to join the war in the first place,
and resisted both the Fascists and the Germans. It was Mussolini and his henchmen, according to
this narrative, who led unwilling Italians into war. The Italian rank-and-file were anti-Fascist
heroes and victims of the leadership’s repressive tactics, whereas the Fascist leaders were
villainous perpetrators.
3
Since the 1990s, historians have shown that Italians suffered from the
conflict but also inflicted suffering on others, and that anti-Fascism remained on the sidelines
until relatively late in the war. Further, some scholars have asked a broader set of questions about
Italians’ life under battle, probing how their experiences of war developed over time. How, then,
did war affect Italians’ daily reality, and how did it shape their opinion of Fascism? To what
extent did Italians join the anti-Fascist resistance, and conversely, what role did they play in
persecuting minorities and committing atrocities? What was their relationship with Nazi
occupiers in the north, and Allied occupiers in the south?
Italian Society on the Eve of World War II
Italy’s entry into war was an apt culmination of nearly two decades of Fascist militarism, empire-
building, and dictatorship. Mussolini, or “il Duce” (“the Chief”), as he liked to be called, had
come to power in 1922. During the early years, the right-wing middle class—particularly small
business owners, white-collar professionals, small farmers, industrialists, and church
functionaries—feared a Bolshevist-style revolution. Middle-class citizens lost their confidence in
the centrist government and shifted their allegiances rightward, to Mussolini and his Partito
Nazionale Fascista (PNF, or National Fascist Party). Mussolini’s supporters breathed a sigh of
relief when he took over the government in October 1922.
4
Fascist Italy of the 1920s and 1930s took on a series of characteristics that would later be
amplified during the war years. The anti-left and anti-democratic regime crushed all union
activity and silenced dissenting voices with brutal violence. When the socialist leader Giacomo
Matteotti spoke out in parliament against the Fascist Party in 1924, he was kidnapped, stabbed to
death, and buried by the roadside. The Fascist regime glorified militarism, extolled Italy’s past
battles, and whipped up enthusiasm for the 1935-1936 invasion of Ethiopia. This conquest,
accompanied by racist propaganda, served the Fascist vision of a virile, fighting Italy, and
fulfilled Mussolini’s dream of an Italian empire. By 1940, Italy had added Abyssinia to its
previous holdings of Somalia and Eritrea to create Italian East Africa, and taken over Albania
and the Dodecanese islands.
5
The Fascist regime popularized its ideology—anti-Socialism, a desire for military and
colonial might, and veneration of Mussolini himself—through relentless indoctrination. In 1933,
membership in the PNF became a prerequisite for employment in state-controlled sectors,
including the military, regional governance, and education. State employees had to give the
Roman salute, and schoolteachers were required to wear PNF uniforms. The slogan “Mussolini
is always right” appeared everywhere, as did larger-than-life busts and wall paintings of the
Duce, and a plethora of Fascist paraphernalia, such as medals engraved with the fascio symbol (a
bundle of rods bound to an axe). The government operated after school youth groups from the
age of six, which delivered military-style education, replete with uniforms and toy weapons. By
1937, some 7,532,000 youngsters, nearly 18 percent of a population of 44 million, enrolled in the
youth movement.
6
The Fascist Party sought to control society through a carrot-and-stick approach. To
Italians who became Party members, the regime offered jobs, higher wages, and profitable
contracts. Membership in Fascist organizations also had its perks. Fascist recreational clubs
operated theaters, libraries, and sporting groups, while women’s groups taught literacy and
handed out coupons.
7
In parallel, the regime maintained an elaborate system of political
repression. In the 1920s, the government targeted organized anti-Fascists—communists,
socialists, and anarchists. Offenders faced brutal interrogations, were forced to drink castor oil (a
laxative), and sentenced to confino, political confinement in remote villages in the south. In the
1930s, authorities arrested people for anything they considered “antinational” or “subversive,”
including mocking Mussolini, questioning the Ethiopian war, homosexuality, and belonging to
Evangelical or Jehovah Witness groups. The Fascist regime sentenced 15,000 Italians to confino,
and 25,000-50,000 to penal island colonies, concentration camps, prisons, and workhouses. It
issued 200,000-300,000 probation sentences and warnings. Thousands more, whose cases were
examined but not tried, spent months and sometimes years in prison awaiting release.
8
Interwar
Italy did not kill its own citizens, unlike Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, but committed
numerous atrocities outside its borders, including massacres and rape in occupied Libya and
Ethiopia.
9
Just how many Italians supported interwar Fascism is impossible to know, but historians
agree that the 1935 conquest of Ethiopia marked the regime’s high point. Most Italians supported
colonialism, believing that whites had a right to rule over people of color. The mid-1930s were
dubbed the “years of consent.”
10
There were exceptions, of course, including anti-Fascists and
nonconformists. Events in the late 1930s stirred discontent, especially the League of Nations’
imposition of sanctions on Italy and Mussolini’s growing alliance with Hitler, enshrined in the
1939 Pact of Steel. Still, as Philip Morgan noted, “there was no absolute rejection of the regime”
until well into World War II.
11
The war in Italy progressed in two parts. From 1940 to summer 1943, Italy fought as an
independent power alongside Germany. In summer 1943, the Allies took over southern Italy and
worked their way northward, while the Germans took over the north and reinstated Mussolini in
a new government.
Italians at War: 1940-1943
“We will win!” boasted Mussolini from his balcony, the first of many assurances that Italy
marched into the war prepared for the challenges ahead. Newspapers, meticulously censored by
the government, conveyed Italy’s readiness for war and astounding military might. Cinema
newsreels and postcards showed shiny military equipment and disciplined crowds obeying the
authorities.
12
In the early months of the war, Italians shared the PNF’s enthusiasm and
confidence. Rome was “fighting against the democracies for the freedom of peoples, and it will
win,” wrote an infantry sergeant to his mother in June 1940. A Sicilian official commented that
soldiers and their families had a “tranquil mind and full faith in the destinies of the fatherland,
and in the happy conclusion of the war.”
13
The regime’s propaganda, however, disguised a bleak reality. Italy struggled to defend
itself against the Allied aerial bombardments that immediately followed Mussolini’s declaration
of war. The Italian Royal Air Force lacked training in defending Italy’s skies. Units responsible
for intercepting enemy planes suffered severe manpower and supply shortages. Italy’s few anti-
aircraft batteries had no radio or radar capability until 1943. Some had no technology at all:
soldiers watching for enemy raids on a mountaintop near the French border rang a metal bell
when they spotted a plane, alerting men at the foot of the mountain who then phoned a warning
to men manning the anti-aircraft batteries in Turin. By the time these responded, the bombs had
already fallen.
14
Civilians scrambling to protect themselves encountered utter chaos. Constantly changing
blackout hours caused confusion and protests. The alarm system often activated too late, after
bomb victims had already reached the hospital, or rang when no enemy planes were in sight,
spurring a needless rush to air-raid shelters. Since most aerial attacks took place at night, these
over-active sirens resulted in continual sleep deprivation. There were few air-raid shelters, and
most were in terrible condition.
15
A witness described Naples’ shelters as lacking “the most basic
sanitary facilities, with no proper toilets and no drains. The stench makes the air … almost
unbreathable… [with] many cases of women and children fainting due to the lack of necessary
nutrition.”
16
Bombs rained down on the peninsula. The attacks of 1940 and 1941 targeted industrial
and port centers such as Turin’s FIAT plant, Milan’s economic hub, and Genoa’s refineries and
shipyards. The bombardment abated during the first nine months of 1942 but resumed with
ferocity in October. Allied bombers killed hundreds on each raid, affecting every region of Italy,
and in some cities, flattening entire neighborhoods. From 1940 to 1945, the Allies dropped 370
tons of bombs, killing over 60,000 civilians.
17
As the bombings intensified in late 1942, morale dropped, and Italians began to lose trust
in the regime. Government-controlled propaganda insisted that Italy had no cause for concern,
yet reality clearly contradicted such claims. Italians grew wary of state-run information.
Meanwhile, leaflets dropped by Allied aircraft, and programs on the (illegal) Italian-language
BBC radio, provided more factual intelligence on the war’s developments. These external
sources gave a more accurate picture of Italy’s failed Greek campaign in late 1940, Allied gains
in Libya in early 1941, the capture of 130,000 Italian prisoners of war, and the definitive defeat
of Axis troops in North Africa in 1943.
18
The regime attempted several tactics to regain its popularity. To limit the reach of the
BBC, the state threatened to arrest anyone caught listening in, and added an Italian channel with
“light music” to draw listeners to national radio. To no avail: people continued to tune into the
BBC, which expanded by November 1943 to 4.5 hours of daily Italian-language transmissions.
19
The state also produced counter-propaganda showing the carnage the Allies wreaked on Italian
hospitals, churches, and homes. Officials fabricated tales about British and American evil, for
example, that enemy planes dropped bombs in the shape of toys, dolls, and even butterflies,
which would explode in the hands of Italian children. The strategy of reviling the Allies
backfired; it stirred fear and shook Italians’ confidence in their leaders.
20
“Every day,” recorded
a diarist in 1943 Rome, “we [switch] the radio on with shaking hand and [ask] the terrible
questions: which of our dear, illustrious, courageous cities has been violated last night? How
many more dead? And the bombs … the 4,000 pound-bombs, death that comes from where we
look when we pray to God.”
21
Throughout 1942, Italians grew increasingly disillusioned with the
war, the PNF, and Mussolini.
A severe food crisis also chipped away at the regime’s prestige. Food shortages had
begun during the Ethiopian war in 1935 and worsened considerably from 1940. Instead of
stimulating agricultural production, which dropped 25 percent from 1938 to 1943, the
government stockpiled and rationed the food supply. In 1940, rations applied to coffee, sugar,
oils, rice, and pasta, and a year later also to bread and meat. Italian rations were insufficient and
among the lowest in Europe. A university professor in Trieste in 1942 and early 1943 surveyed
300 families in 15 provinces, finding that only two percent of urban families, both middle- and
working-class, were eating enough. Hunger and malnutrition lowered productivity, as civilians
had no energy to work. Rations also triggered a black market, as Italians sought illegal sources of
food.
22
The government’s system for controlling prices aggravated food shortages instead of
solving them, sparking even more discontent. Beginning in the mid-1930s, the regime attempted
to regulate food costs by buying grain from farmers, depositing it in official stockpiles called
ammassi, and selling it to citizens at fixed prices. Farmers, however, resented delivering all their
grain over to ammassi administrators, who sold it to the population at more than twice the price.
Therefore, producers often withheld supplies and sold directly to consumers on the black market.
The state responded with punitive measures, leading to farmers and shopkeepers, traditionally
the base of the PNF’s support, now turning against the regime. Endless rulings on food only
made matters worse; by fall 1943, the regime had issued 177 decrees dealing with meat alone.
Food prices skyrocketed on the black market, and panicked Italians turned to hoarding. One
Milanese accountant was sent to the confino in summer 1940 for hiding in the walls of his
apartment over 100 kilograms each of olive oil and rice, 45 kilograms of sugar, almost as much
pasta, and a staggering 6.2 tons of coffee.
23
Conversely, when Neapolitan Fascist officials in late
1942 skimmed flour rations to make sweets for themselves, they received no punishment at all;
the man who exposed them, though, was sentenced to a year’s exile.
24
By summer 1943, when the Allies were poised to land in North Africa, Italians had lost
faith with the PNF and Mussolini. Historians who have studied the public mood rely on millions
of letters written by Italians and opened and summarized by the censor.
25
These summaries, as
well as reports by informers, show that Italians blamed their own government, not the Allies, for
the disastrous effects of the war. “The population is furious,” wrote one informer about the
public mood in Milan in October 1942, “because the authorities have shown that they are
absolutely unprepared.”
26
Citizens scrawled angry graffiti, including “If you weren’t ready for
war, you shouldn’t have entered it;” “A reward to whoever can tell me the front where the
Duce’s sons are fighting;” and “Long live the English.”
27
In April 1943, top Fascist official
Roberto Farinacci wrote of Cremona, “the unbelievable is happening. Everywhere, in the trams,
the theatres, and the air-raid shelters …, people are denouncing the regime, and not only this or
that party figure, but the Duce himself.”
28
Growing numbers of Italians actually hoped for an
Allied takeover, reasoning that anything was better than the hunger, fatigue, and constant threat
of the airstrikes.
29
However frustrated Italians were with their government’s weak defenses and dismal food
policies, they rarely turned to political activism. In the first three years of the war, there was
almost no anti-Fascist resistance. The one instance in which Italians in the first stage of war did
gather in organized resistance, occurred in March and April 1943, when some 100,000 factory
workers, led by communists, went on strike in Turin and Milan, protesting meager pay, long
work hours, the food crisis, the bombs, and the wider war. The regime’s rapid response,
however, which punished the communist organizers while conceding to pay workers higher
wages, prevented the strikes from spreading. Yet when Mussolini fell from power in July 1943, it
was not because of an angry population demanding his downfall, but rather the result of an elite
putsch by the King and senior Fascists.
30
In popular retellings of the period 1940-1943, Italians often feature as the “decent bad
guys,” the Axis nation who did no evil, the Brava Gente (“good people”). Blockbuster films like
Life is Beautiful and Captain Corelli’s Mandolin popularize the views that Italians did little harm
to Jews, and that when Italians occupied territories—Albania, Croatia, Dalmatia, Greece,
Montenegro, and Slovenia—they were particularly kind and gentle. These stories surface in
novels, documentaries, Wikipedia articles, and museum exhibits, but less so in academic
scholarship. Historians in the last 30 years have exposed a more sober truth. Starting in fall 1938,
the Italian government launched a racist campaign against the peninsula’s 45,000 Jews (a tenth
of a percent of the total population). With no pressure from Germany, Italy issued one racist
decree after another and spread anti-Jewish propaganda through the press. Jewish children were
expelled from schools, adults lost their jobs, and marriages between Jews and non-Jews were
forbidden, among other measures. In 1940 the regime interned foreign Jews in concentration
camps, and subjected adult Italian Jews to forced labor. Although persecution began as a top-
down initiative of the government, ordinary Italians wasted no time joining in, for instance, by
denouncing Jews to the police for trying to evade the race laws. Verbal and physical violence
towards Jews soared in these years, most often inflicted by acquaintances.
31
Italy’s wartime invasions also differed sharply from Hollywood tales of peace-loving
troops. Italians in the Balkans carried out brutal occupations between 1940 and 1943, dubbed by
historians as “Mussolini’s Dirty War.” As they cracked down on resistance movements, Italian
soldiers raped women, shot hostages and partisans who had surrendered, burned villages, and
carried out massacres. In one case in February 1943, in Domenikon, Greece, Italian soldiers
rounded up the village men—145 in total—and executed them as punishment for a partisan
killing of nine Italian soldiers, a ratio of 16 Greeks for each Italian life. Italian troops deported
110,000 men, women, and children from Croatia, Slovenia, and Montenegro, to concentration
camps. In the notorious Italian-run camp on the island of Rab, Croatia, poor sanitary conditions
and maltreatment of prisoners resulted in 1,435 dead, 20 percent of the camp’s internees.
32
Ironically, the one group Italians protected and saved—in occupied Greece, Yugoslavia, and in
southern France—was Jews. When Germany began deporting Jews to killing centers, Italians
secured exemptions for thousands under their control. Still, Italian authorities in Yugoslavia
routinely turned away Jewish refugees at the Italian-Croatian border, knowing that they would
face death camps if caught by the Germans, and rape, torture, starvation, and murder, if the
Croatian Ustaša movement found them.
33
North and South: 1943-1945
On 10 July 1943, British and American forces landed in Sicily. Seeing that the tide was changing
in favor of the Allies, the King and several Fascist leaders hastily decided to switch sides. On 25
July they ousted Mussolini and formed a new government with a military officer, Marshal Pietro
Badoglio, at its head. For 45 days Badoglio pretended to continue Italy’s alliance with Germany,
all the while carrying out secret negotiations with the Allies to reach an armistice. On 8
September he broadcast to the world that he had signed the agreement. The same day, in
response, Germany poured its forces into Italy, and the next day the Italian Resistance movement
was born, in the shape of the National Liberation Committee (CLN).
34
In the wake of the 8 September armistice, Italy split in two, north and south. German
troops occupied northern Italy, rescued Mussolini from a mountain hotel where he had been
imprisoned, and reinstated him in Salò, a little town on the banks of Lake Garda. Here, he
established a new Fascist government, the Italian Social Republic (RSI, also known as the
Republic of Salò), operating alongside the German troops. The RSI retained administrative
power, including control over the police, while Germany held military power. The “north”
referred to more than just the top part of the country, as the initial German occupation stretched
as far south as Naples. As the Allies attacked from the south, the occupied north shrank. In
September 1943, the front line stalled just south of Rome, advancing to just north of Florence in
June 1944 before finally reaching the northern border in spring 1945.
The German-Occupied North
Italians in the occupied north struggled to make sense of the sudden change. Should they support
the reborn Fascist government and the German occupier? Resist them? Or—as most Italians
eventually opted—do neither? Immediately after Badoglio announced the armistice, 200,000
German troops fanned through the peninsula, disarmed over a million Italian soldiers, and sent
650,000 of them to prison camps in Germany.
35
A minority of those remaining opted to join
partisan bands (later overseen by the CLN), another minority joined the newly-constituted RSI
forces and fought alongside the Germans, and the majority simply disbanded and tried to get
home. In the months to come, the same pattern would emerge among civilians. Of a population
of roughly 20,000,000 under German-RSI join control, at most 250,000 (1.25 percent) joined the
Resistance, and even that was only towards the end of the war, when it was clear the Allies were
winning; for most of the occupation, the Resistance numbered about 100,000. Only slightly more
fought for the RSI: 50,000-150,000 responded to call-ups to the RSI’s new army, 20,000 joined
the German army, and about 30,000 enlisted in specialized militias and Fascist-sponsored
gangs.
36
Women made the same choices: some 55,000 women participated in the Resistance,
while a similar number volunteered to help the RSI. Some 40,000 volunteered for the Fascist
Republican Women’s Groups, which sent packages to RSI servicemen and visited wounded
soldiers in hospital. Nearly 7,000 more joined the Female Auxiliary Service, a military unit
which produced propaganda, performed office and menial labor, and trained in firearms.
37
The
rest of the Italian population in the north, the overwhelming majority, took no organized action
whatsoever. Unlike the postwar myth claiming that most Italians resisted the RSI, historians have
shown that the more dominant behavior was avoidance.
Resistance fighters scathingly criticized those—the majority—who did not join them,
accusing them of attendismo—a “wait and see” attitude of sitting on the fence until it became
clear which side would win. Yet resisting came at a high cost, not just for partisans but for their
families and communities. The Germans pursued a policy of collective punishment; for every
soldier killed, they shot at least ten Italians in reprisal. Dozens of massacres occurred in Italy,
sometimes entire villages. On 12 August 1944, troops under SS command attacked the village of
Sant’Anna di Stazzema in Tuscany, purportedly because a partisan there had wounded a German
soldier. After killing some with hand grenades and guns, they set fire to the entire village. In
total, 560 people were murdered, including 116 children and eight pregnant women, one in
active labor. The soldiers killed her, pulled the live baby from her womb, and killed the baby
too.
38
In total, between September 1943 and May 1945, some 44,720 partisans were killed
fighting and 9,980 more individuals were murdered in reprisals.
39
Northern Italy entered a bloody civil war, with RSI-aligned Italians killing Italian
supporters of the Resistance. Examples abound of Fascist brutality against partisans or anyone
remotely suspected of helping them. RSI officials shot partisans even when they surrendered,
took hostages from the civilian population to draw out partisans and then killed the hostages too,
tortured prisoners, and murdered the relatives of draft-dodgers. One in ten massacres in Italy was
carried out by Italians, not Germans, and even when Germans took the lead, they relied on Italian
collaborators. The RSI introduced the practice of public executions by hanging and close-range
shooting, leaving the bodies on display for days on end.
40
Women volunteers also participated in
violent acts, including interrogations of captured partisans, torture, and executions.
41
More
heavily indoctrinated units, like the Italian SS and the Black Brigades, became notorious for their
brutality. They looted, robbed, and raped, to the point that even the Germans found their cruelty
distasteful. Worst of all were ruthless and fanatical groups like Decima Mas, La Muti, and the
Koch Band. These were self-proclaimed action squads sponsored by the regime, who terrorized
anyone they suspected of opposition.
42
The partisans responded, adding yet more violence to the war-ravaged peninsula. They,
too, executed captives and condemned to death anyone who helped the enemy, although they did
not kill civilians in reprisal. Partisans exacted punishments on their own comrades, shooting
individuals who deserted their units or refused orders. One commander decreed, “I explicitly
authorize the killing on the spot of anyone who flees.” In another case, a partisan recalled that “a
boy stole wheat from the band and sold it. Zama, his officer, got him to strip completely, except
for his shoes and underpants, and had him tied to a stake for several hours in the snow.”
43
Fighters on both sides believed they represented the true Italy. Those supporting the RSI
posited that the only way to restore Italy’s honor, which, they argued, had been shamed by the
armistice, was to fight alongside the Germans and uphold Fascism to the end.
44
Anti-Fascists, of
course, believed that they, not the Fascists, would save Italy from its enemies. Historian Claudio
Pavone suggests the Resistance had three motives: to wage civil war against the Fascist RSI,
national war against Germans, and class war against the bourgeoisie.
45
At times, the three motifs
overlapped, as evident in a propaganda flyer from summer 1944 lambasting Germans, Fascists,
and the oppressors of the working class: “Germans, get out of Italy … Get out, Nazi barbarians
and their Fascist servants … enemies of the people. Let’s sabotage the production which is going
to them.”
46
Class was indeed a central feature in the conflict between Italians. Those who
mobilized to fight for the RSI tended to be middle class, including white-collar workers, artisans,
and small-business owners, mostly anti-communist and anti-socialist. Conversely, the Resistance
had a strong leftist bent to it, with the Italian Communist Party sponsoring the largest number
(some 40 percent) of partisan bands.
47
For some activists, there were still other reasons for
resisting. Women, especially, joined the Resistance out of anger at the worsening conditions in
the occupied north. In the words of a female factory worker, “the low salary, the lack of food, the
black market, [and] the war, constituted the motive for our rebellion.”
48
Most Italians were consumed by a daily battle simply to survive, and for that reason
joined neither camp. In 1944, inflation rose 90 percent, and wholesale prices rose 130 percent.
Much of the price inflation stemmed from the worsening food crisis. Rations fell below minimal
subsistence levels, as Germans allotted Italians only 950 calories per capita (less than Poland’s
1,070 calories, and far below Germany’s 1,750).
49
Rationed bread proved near inedible. “The
bread functions as a laxative,” wrote one witness. “You shouldn’t eat it unless you want to lose
weight.”
50
Again, Italians turned to the black market, leading food prices to spike. At a time
when factory workers earned an average wage of 200 lire per week, black market bread sold for
40 lire per kilogram, pasta for 60 lire per kilogram, oil for 300 lire per liter, and meat for an
exorbitant 230 lire per kilogram. Workers left their jobs because of exhaustion, unable to
function on little food. Other supplies were hard to come by, too; men could be seen wearing
women’s blouses and priests’ gowns, as they could not find, or afford, ordinary clothing.
Increasing numbers of Italians lost their homes in Allied air raids. In Padua, for example, bombs
damaged 90 percent of the buildings.
51
Most Italians survived in the grey zone between anti-Fascist resistance and pro-Fascist
collaboration. Tens of thousands of rural Italians helped hide and protect Allied prisoners of war
who had fled their camps following the armistice. Of 50,000 such escapers, 18,000 avoided
recapture, thanks to Italian peasants and priests who mobilized to help them at great risk to
themselves.
52
Some historians have called this operation a sort of “unarmed resistance,”
53
but the
peasants involved did not always conceive of their actions as anti-Fascist; often, they proffered
their help in return for farm labor. Another in-between choice some Italians made was draft
dodging. In October 1943, and again in February 1944, when the RSI summoned thousands of
young men into military service, only about half responded, and some of these later deserted and
went into hiding.
54
Again, the choice to dodge the draft or desert did not necessarily reflect anti-
Fascism, but derived from war-weariness or a need to help run the family farm. In similar vein,
seemingly pro-Fascist or pro-German behavior sometimes stemmed from desperation, as in the
case of Italian women who had sex with German soldiers to avoid starvation and save their
families. The partisans fumed at such conduct, and in one case ordered the execution of two girls
for flirting with German servicemen.
55
As Italians struggled to navigate life under occupation, they made choices that defied
simple categorizations of “Fascist” or “anti-Fascist.” The manager of FIAT, for instance,
supported the Resistance and the Allies, but also made a big profit selling to Germans. On a farm
in the Friuli region comprised of three separate households, two families provided evening meals
for partisans and New Zealand POWs, while the third family hosted German troops. Each family
knew, and accepted, what the other was doing. One man in Bologna joined the Fascist police to
get a job and a ration card; his loyalties, however, lay on the other side, where his girlfriend
fought for the Resistance.
56
Italians in the north suffered immeasurably from violence and hunger. But, as earlier,
Italians were also perpetrators of crimes towards others, especially Jews. The RSI carried out a
relentless and efficient manhunt to deliver Jews to the Germans, who loaded them on cattle cars
to Auschwitz. The Italian police—wholly independent under German rule—played a central role
in rounding up Jews and seizing their property. The entire range of Italian authorities took part,
including low- and mid-level officials. In Rome, a local police commissioner personally searched
for a six-year-old child, Emma Calò, who had been hidden by the concierge of her building after
her parents’ arrest. He hunted her down tirelessly and finally arrested her, tearing her away from
the concierge’s skirts. She perished in Auschwitz two months later. While RSI officials led the
attack on Jews, civilians also took part. Italians betrayed their Jewish neighbors for profit or
petty jealousies, or out of fervent antisemitism. Conversely, some Italians helped to save Jews,
contributing to their relatively high survival rate (78 percent) compared to other occupied
countries. About 24,000 Jews survived owing to the food and shelter they received from
peasants, clergy, or friends. But Italians played an undeniable role in the Holocaust of Italy’s
Jews.
57
The Allied-Occupied South
The British Eighth Army’s landing on mainland Italy in September 1943 launched the start of an
Allied occupation. The front moved slowly, both because Axis manpower almost matched that of
the Allies, and because the Allies dallied in accepting help from the Resistance. On 13 October
1943, the King and Badoglio declared war on Germany, and a day later were recognized as co-
belligerents—not yet allies, which would involve a peace settlement—and asked to fight against
the Germans. By war’s end, 254,000 Italians had enlisted under British and American command,
and a further 67,000 joined the reconstituted Italian Royal Army. An Allied Military
Government, later called the Allied Control Commission, oversaw the south. In February and
July 1944, the Allies handed control to the Italian government, retaining only Naples until
December 1945.
58
The term used for the Allied takeover of Italy, “liberation,” gives the misleading
impression of a happy ending to the war and a general rejoicing at the Allies’ arrival. In fact,
many Italians resented the foreign troops. In November 1943, when the Allied Military
Government called on Italians to enlist, only one in four men responded, and numerous
demonstrations across the south protested the call-up. Some still identified with the Axis. “From
now on we must love the British and Americans at once,” wrote a captain commanding a
company at the front in the days immediately following the armistice. “But I can’t do that. They
destroyed so many of our homes, killed so many of our people.”
59
Others refused to mobilize out
of anger at the refusal of the Allies to return Italian POWs, the requirement that draftees buy
their own gear, or war weariness. Those who did enlist voiced frustration at being given mere
support roles, such as guard duties and menial labor, rather than combat. Some men joined the
Royal Army instead, but they too harbored a grudge against the much better fed and equipped
Allied troops.
60
The Allies’ arrival did not immediately alleviate the Italians’ hunger and poverty. The
German army pursued a scorched-earth retreat, taking all the food they could find, bombing
water reservoirs, sabotaging the gas and electrical system, releasing convicts from jail, and
laying thousands of mines on agricultural farmland.
61
In Naples, one witness described horrific
conditions at the time of liberation. “There was no water,” he wrote, “no electric light, no
foodstuffs of any kind, no means of public transport. Rubble obstructed the streets. Unburied
dead bodies, devastated factories, people without jobs …, bombed-out houses.”
62
Entering Italy
in October 1943, British war correspondent Alan Moorehead found a population near starvation.
“Hunger governed all,” he would later recall. “The animal struggle for existence governed
everything. Food. That was the only thing that mattered.”
63
The Allies tried to solve the food crisis and inflation, but unintentionally ended up
aggravating both. They began by retaining the ammasso system of stockpiling staple foods for
sale at fixed prices. To dissuade farmers from selling directly to consumers, the Allies paid
farmers more for their grain. To prevent consumers from hoarding, the Military Government
cancelled the rations altogether for everything but bread, pasta, olive oil, and sugar. None of
these policies helped; one Allied officer counted 62 different ways of evading the ammassi.
Indeed, the presence of the troops—one million soldiers by the war’s end—only worsened
matters, because their enormous spending power enabled them to pay high prices and because
food from their well-stocked warehouses found its way, usually via looters, to the streets, where
it sold to the highest bidder. There was a black market for everything, including railway tickets,
counterfeit ration cards, forged banknotes, petrol, cigarettes, and boots.
64
Tense relations developed between the well-supplied troops and the starving local
population, who took to black-market trade and stealing Allied supplies. Criminal activity in the
south increased by almost 50 percent between 1943 and 1945, to over a million cases. Sicily
verged on open lawlessness in summer 1944; in July alone, authorities arrested 4,900 individuals
and confiscated 890,000 kilograms of black-market grain. The Allied Military Government
enlisted carabinieri, a formation of the Italian police, to enforce law and order. But even the
police participated in the black market, out of economic necessity. The weekly pay of a married
carabiniere with two children was 325 lire, while the weekly cost of living totaled 185 lire per
person.
65
“These men are literally almost starving on the 150 grams of bread which they are
receiving a day,” a British report admitted.
66
Allied troops also engaged in criminal activity against the local population, with a special
military body recording 20,411 some crimes.
67
Soldiers were often drunk: “Outside Café Gigetto
I encountered four or five English soldiers, blind drunk and annoying the passersby,” reported an
officer in Pompei. “Incidents of this kind occur daily …, particularly during the afternoon [with
soldiers] even stealing into private houses and provoking indescribable panic amongst the
household.” Deserters carried out the worst offenses, including homicide, assault, and rape. In
the words of concerned Allied personnel, “any soldier that goes AWOL from his organization
winds up in our territory. As soon as he runs out of money he engages in theft, robbery,
counterfeiting or some other illegal activity.”
68
Women, always more vulnerable than men during wartime, suffered the most from the
Allied occupation. Evidence suggests Allied servicemen raped at least 1,157 women. The
overwhelming majority of these rapes were committed by Goums, Moroccan servicemen under
the aegis of the French armies, who had scant supervision and operated outside the formal
military structure. The rest of the assaults were attributed to American, British, and Greek
soldiers. In some cases, offenders received severe punishments. After American soldiers in Sicily
raped a woman while holding her family members hostage, the US army executed the offenders.
Not all sex between Allied servicemen and Italian women resulted from assault, but most of it
was inherently abusive. Women’s desperation and servicemen’s money fostered widespread
prostitution. As in the north, women sold their bodies to protect themselves and their families
from starvation. A survey of almost 2,700 American troops in Italy in 1945 found that 80 percent
had had sex while in Italy, mostly paid.
69
In Naples in 1944, one officer estimated that some
42,000 women regularly or occasionally engaged in prostitution, while another report raised the
alarming concern that 43 percent of these suffered from venereal disease.
70
That parents pimped
out their daughters to servicemen in return for a meal suggests the extent of Italians’ misery and
the readiness of occupiers to exploit it.
Some of the tensions between Allies and Italians stemmed from the latter’s deep-seated
racism towards people of color. The occupiers included Americans (white and black), Britons,
New Zealanders, Canadians, Brazilians, South Africans (white and black), Rhodesians, Sikhs
from India, Afghans, Nepalese, and French forces including both men from the metropole and
troops from Senegal, Morocco, and Algeria.
71
Italians had a long history of racist colonialism in
Africa, heightened in the war years by rabid propaganda showing blacks as evil cannibals intent
on destroying Western civilization.
72
Such sentiments surfaced in encounters with dark-skinned
servicemen. In 1944 Sorrento, locals came to blows with one Private E. Hippolyte, a native of
Mauritius (then part of the British Empire), who served in the British army and spoke French and
Italian. At a military trial, Hippolyte claimed that two Italians in the street had jeered at him,
saying, “Look, there is a soldier there like an animal that eats flesh.”
73
He responded by slapping
one of them, a fight broke out, and in self-defense he knifed and killed Salvatore Romano.
Romano’s friends countered that he had attacked them with no provocation. The British military
court dismissed the murder charge, but ruled Hippolyte guilty of manslaughter and sentenced
him to 15 years of penal servitude. This case brought to the fore Italians’ entrenched assumptions
about blacks, and, judging by the (white) judge’s decision to discount Hippolyte’s claims, the
limits of servicemen’s prerogative. Italians may have been the occupied underdog, but their
whiteness guaranteed them a degree of privilege over black servicemen.
The occupied south witnessed a faint echo of the civil war raging in the north, as tensions
surfaced between Italians on opposite sides of the political map. At the government level,
Badoglio and the King excluded anti-Fascist parties from joining them in power for as long as
possible; they may have loathed Mussolini, but as conservatives, they also disliked the left. The
anti-Fascists, for their part, refused to recognize the King’s government, calling for his
abdication in January 1944. The two sides finally agreed to cooperate at the insistence of the
Allied Military Government as well as Moscow, and the Allied takeover of Rome in June 1944
catalyzed a new leftist government headed by Ivanoe Bonomi, an anti-Fascist (but not a
communist).
74
At the grassroots level, too, Italians clashed over politics. The jumble of competing
convictions in the south—pro-RSI, anti-Fascist, conservative, communist, pro-German, anti-
German, or simply a weary rejection of everything—had at times bewildering consequences. The
Royal Army became a site of conflict, as career officers tended to support the King and his
conservatism, and disliked communist and socialist volunteer recruits. Officers seethed at
soldiers sporting red scarves or a badge with the hammer and sickle or singing the
Internationale. In one instance, left-minded recruits were jailed by their commanders for
attending a commemoration of Giacomo Matteotti, the socialist killed in 1924. In another case,
communist militants threatened to use their weapons, if necessary, to shoot their own superiors.
Even among communists there was disagreement, as some joined the Royal Army to defeat
Fascism, while others opposed the draft, demanding more representative power in the
government. In the same vein, some Fascists refused to go to war against the RSI, while others
joined the Royal Army, considering this the honorable (and Fascist) thing to do. In perhaps the
greatest irony imaginable, eager draftees in May 1944 shouted “Hail Mussolini! Duce! Duce!”
when in fact the army they were joining was at war with Mussolini.
75
Eventually, the war ended. In the spring of 1945, the Allies, the Royal Army, and the
Resistance drove out the German troops, and the RSI disintegrated. In April 1945, Mussolini and
his mistress, Clara Petacci, were caught near the Swiss border by partisans, shot and killed, then
hung upside down in a gas station in Milan. The partisans pursued a bloody settling of accounts,
killing at least 9,000 Fascists in April and May. They hunted down, interrogated, and executed
Fascists, sometimes indiscriminately massacring dozens of people at once.
76
The war continued to reverberate in Italian society after it ended. In the postwar years,
thousands of imprisoned Fascists awaited trial for their crimes, though most walked free. Italians
could not agree on how to define and place blame, particularly when so many, including ex-
Fascist government ministers, could harness evidence of having helped the Allies at some point.
The British and Americans preferred minimal prosecution, fearing that purging too many
Fascists would trigger bureaucratic chaos. As one senior British army officer put it, “If we get rid
of everyone who collaborated in the Fascist administration, we are left with practically no one of
any use for carrying on.”
77
The postwar government recognized this and gradually allowed civil
servants from the Fascist era to reintegrate into the state apparatus. In addition, the Western
powers, and centrists in the Italian government, worried that purging the state of Fascists would
bolster the far left, at a time when Cold War fears had begun to trump concerns about the right.
In the final count, of some 400,000 bureaucrats investigated, fewer than 9,000 were deemed
guilty, and even they were released with only a reprimand. The courts handed down executions
and some lengthy sentences for the most visible and senior officials, but in July 1946 the
Ministry of Justice declared a blanket amnesty and all the purges ground to a halt.
78
Some truly
monstrous criminals went unpunished, such as Settimo Rosciolli, who recaptured more than
1,400 escaped POWs and killed at least 37, throwing their bodies into rivers. He went on to
become a wine merchant.
79
Ironically, although postwar Italians glorified the Resistance for liberating Italy from the
clutches of Nazism-Fascism, the left, who had led the Resistance, became increasingly
marginalized.
80
In April 1948, a center-right coalition came to power, excluding the communists
and socialists from government. The new government waged a judicial battle against former
partisans, prosecuting them for their actions in 1943-1945. Judges—all men who had served
during the Fascist period—charged partisans with murder, possessing weapons, and even
attacking German troops. Until late in the 1950s, Italian courts arrested 90,000 former partisans,
tried 19,000 of them, and found 7,000 guilty. In a sense, the civil war continued in the
courtroom.
81
What happened in Italy during World War II still generates public debates. Did the
Italians who defended the RSI exhibit patriotism, or fanatical Fascism? When Resistance fighters
killed captives, did the end justify the means? Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s four-time premier,
sparked controversy in 2002 when he urged a retelling of Second World War history to show
Fascism in a more sympathetic light and emphasize crimes of the Resistance.
82
Discomfort also
continues over Italians’ part in the Holocaust, with the right preferring to talk about Italian rescue
efforts instead of racial persecution, and the left laying all the blame on the Fascist sympathizers,
when in fact antisemitism transcended ideological lines. Furthermore, Italians tend to emphasize
their victimhood in the war by focusing on the years of German occupation, 1943-1945, while
historians in recent years highlight the early years of the war, 1940-1943, especially the brutal
occupations of the Balkans.
83
The Second World War ended long ago, but the battles over its
history, and how to tell it, live on.
1
B. Mussolini, “Declaration of War,” 10 June 1940, in R. De Felice, Mussolini Il Duce: Parte II,
Torino: Einaudi, 1981, pp. 841-842.
2
C. Pavone, A Civil War, London: Verso, 2011, p. 495.
3
On construction of these myths, see R. Ben-Ghiat, “A Lesser Evil? Italian Fasism in/and the
Totalitarian Equation,” in H. Dubiel and G. Motzkin (ed.), The Lesser Evil: Moral Approaches to
Genocide Practices, New York: Routledge, 2004, pp. 137-42. F. Focardi and L. Klinkhammer,
“The Question of Fascist Italy's War Crimes,” Journal of Modern Italian Studies 9:3, 2004, pp.
336-337; P. Pezzino, “The Italian Resistance between History and Memory,” ibid., 10:4, 2005.
4
A. De Grand, Italian Fascism, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000, p. 32.
5
R. Ben-Ghiat and M. Fuller (eds.), Italian Colonialism, New York: Palgrave, 2005,
Introduction.
6
T. Koon, Believe, Obey, Fight, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1985, pp. 65, 71; P.
Dogliani, “Propaganda and Youth,” in R.J.B. Bosworth (ed.), Oxford Handbook of Fascism,
New York: Oxford, 2009, pp. 192-193.
7
P. Willson, Women in Twentieth-Century Italy, New York: Palgrave, 2010, p. 213; De Grand,
Italian Fascism, p. 88.
8
M. Ebner, Ordinary Violence in Mussolini’s Italy, New York: Cambridge, 2014, pp. 2, 62-64.
9
See for example, work by Angelo Del Boca, Giulia Barrera, Giuseppe Finaldi, and Nicola
Labanca.
10
P. Corner, The Fascist Party and Popular Opinion in Mussolini's Italy, New York: Oxford
University Press, 2012, p. 192; P. Morgan, Italian Fascism, 1915-1945, New York: Palgrave,
2004, pp. 174-75.
11
Morgan, Italian Fascism, p. 155.
12
M. Fincardi, “Anglo-American Air Attacks and the Rebirth of Public Opinion,” in C. Baldoli
et al (ed.), Bombing, States and Peoples in Western Europe, 1940-1945, London: Continuum,
2010, p. 242; L. Petrella, Staging the Fascist War, New York: Peter Lang, 2016, pp. 26, 46.
13
Quoted in P. Morgan, The Fall of Mussolini, New York: Oxford University Press, 2007, pp.
43-44; M. Fincardi, “Italian Society under Anglo-American Bombs,” Historical Journal 52:4,
2009, p. 1025.
14
Petrella, Staging, p. 53; S. Harvey, “The Italian War Effort and the Strategic Bombing of
Italy,” History 70:228, 1985, p. 37.
15
Fincardi, “Italian Society,” p. 1027.
16
Quoted in G. Gribaudi, “The True Cause of the ‘Moral Collapse’,” in Baldoli et al (ed.),
Bombing, States and Peoples, p. 226.
17
C. Baldoli, “Spring 1943: The Fiat Strikes,” History Workshop Journal 72, 2011, p. 181.
18
Fincardi, “Italian Society,” pp. 1021-22; Morgan, The Fall, p. 40.
19
Petrella, Staging, pp. 11, 171. Ecco Radio Londra, Wembley: BBC, 1945, p. 25; E. Lo Biundo,
“Radio Londra 1943-1945,” Modern Italy 23:1, 2018, pp. 43-44.
20
Fincardi, “Italian Society,” pp. 1028, 1033. Petrella, Staging, p. 170.
21
Quoted in Fincardi, “Italian Society,” pp. 1034-35.
22
Carol Helstosky, Garlic and Oil: Food and Politics in Italy, Oxford: Berg, 2006, pp. 105-06,
110; Ebner, Ordinary Violence, p. 211; Morgan, The Fall, pp. 61-62.
23
Ibid., pp. 66-70; Helstosky, Garlic and Oil, pp. 106-108.
24
Ebner, Ordinary Violence, pp. 211-212.
25
Petrella, Staging, p. 13.
26
Quoted in Morgan, The Fall, p. 48.
27
J. Arthurs, “Memory,” in J. Arthurs et al (ed.), The Politics of Everyday Life in Fascist Italy,
New York: Palgrave, 2017, p. 208.
28
Quoted in Ebner, Ordinary Violence, p. 213.
29
Fincardi, “Italian Society,” pp. 1029, 1036.
30
Baldoli, “Fiat Strikes,” pp. 183-184; Morgan, The Fall, pp. 77-78.
31
S. Klein, Italy's Jews from Emancipation to Fascism, New York: Cambridge, 2018, Ch. 3.
32
F. Focardi, “Italy’s Amnesia over War Guilt,” Mediterranean Quarterly 25:4, 2014, p. 8; D.
Rodogno, Fascism's European Empire, New York: Cambridge, 2006, Ch. 10.
33
D. Rodogno, “Italiani Brava Gente? Fascist Italy's Policy toward the Jews in the Balkans,”
European History Quarterly 35:2, 2005, pp. 222-228.
34
Introduction by S. Pugliese, in Pavone, Civil War, p. xvii; Morgan, The Fall, p. 126.
35
Ibid., pp. 101-102, 107; N. Labanca, “The Italian Wars,” in R. Overy (ed.), The Oxford
Illustrated History of World War II, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015, pp. 102-103.
36
Morgan, The Fall, pp. 165-166.
37
J. Slaughter, Women and the Italian Resistance, Denver: Arden, 1997, p. 33; F. Ciavattone,
“Fighting Women: The Case of the Italian Social Republic,” in E. Sica and R. Carrier (ed.), Italy
and the Second World War, Boston: Brill, 2018, pp. 229-233; Willson, Women, pp. 108-109.
38
P. Pezzino, Memory and Massacre: Revisiting Sant’anna Di Stazzema, New York: Palgrave,
2012, pp. xiv, 123.
39
Pavone, Civil War, p. 495.
40
Ibid., 520-22; Morgan, The Fall, p. 176.
41
Ciavattone, “Fighting Women,” p. 240.
42
L. Ganapini, “The Dark Side of Italian History,” Modern Italy 12:2, 2007, pp. 211-12; O.
Guerrazzi, “From Fascism to the Italian Civil War,” in Italy and the Second World War, p. 214.
43
Quoted in Pavone, Civil War, pp. 545, 549, 584-5.
44
Ibid., p. 515.
45
Introduction by Pugliese, in ibid., p. xi.
46
Quoted in Morgan, The Fall, p. 180.
47
Dogliani, “Propaganda,” p. 200; Morgan, The Fall, p. 179.
48
Quoted in Slaughter, Women, p. 45.
49
M. Fratianni, A Monetary History of Italy, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009, pp.
159, 166; Helstosky, Garlic and Oil, pp. 122-123.
50
Quoted in Helstosky, Garlic and Oil, p. 109.
51
Ibid., 111-112. A. Bravo, “The Rescued and the Rescuers,” in J. Zimmerman (ed.), Jews in
Italy, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005, p. 469; Morgan, The Fall, p. 132.
52
R. Absalom, “Hiding History: The Allies, the Resistance and the Others in Occupied Italy,”
Historical Journal 38:1, 2009, 111, pp. 16-26.
53
Bravo, “The Rescued,” pp. 469-470.
54
Dogliani, “Propaganda,” p. 200.
55
Pavone, Civil War, p. 652.
56
R. Absalom, “Peasant Experience under Italian Fascism,” in Oxford Handbook of Fascism, p.
147; Morgan, The Fall, pp. 174, 83.
57
S. Sullam, The Italian Executioners, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018, pp. 30, 66;
L. Picciotto, “Statistical Tables on the Holocaust in Italy,” Yad Vashem Studies XXXIII, 2005, p.
340n56.
58
R. Carrier, “The Regio Esercito in Co-Belligerency,” in Italy and the Second World War, p.
124; I. Williams, Allies and Italians under Occupation, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2013, p. 90.
59
Quoted in N. Da Lio, “The Italian Regio Esercito Co-Belligerent Soldiering,” in Italy and the
Second World War, p. 130.
60
Williams, Allies, pp. 154-158; Da Lio, “Italian Regio Esercito,” pp. 131, 139.
61
Williams, Allies, p. 121.
62
Quoted in Morgan, The Fall, p. 137.
63
Quoted in Helstosky, Garlic and Oil, p. 115.
64
Williams, Allies, pp. 118, 151, 172-175, 177.
65
Ibid., pp. 25, 118, 146, 163, 176-177.
66
Quoted in ibid., p. 177.
67
Ibid., p. 82.
68
Quoted in ibid., pp. 33-34, 66.
69
Ibid., pp. 52, 83, 196.
70
Morgan, The Fall, p. 140.
71
Ibid., p. 131.
72
See, for example, the cartoon portrayed in “L’esploratore,” Corriere dei Piccoli, 14 June 1936.
73
Quoted in Williams, Allies, p. 41.
74
S. White, Modern Italy's Founding Fathers, London: Bloomsbury, 2020, Ch. 3.
75
Quoted in Da Lio, “Italian Regio Esercito,” pp. 138, 140, 144-45, 150.
76
Morgan, The Fall, 218, 220-221.
77
Quoted in Williams, Allies, 127.
78
R. Domenico, Italian Fascists on Trial, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991.
79
R. Absalom, “Peasant Memory and the Italian Resistance,” in R.J.B. Bosworth and P. Dogliani
(ed.), Italian Fascism, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999, p. 41.
80
Morgan, The Fall, p. 7.
81
M. Ponzani, “Trials of Partisans in the Italian Republic,” Modern Italy 16:2, 2011, pp. 121-
122.
82
Introduction by Pugliese, in Pavone, Civil War, p. xvii.
83
Morgan, The Fall, pp. 231-232.
