Abstract
During Mussolini’s first period as Italy’s head of government and Fascist duce between 1922 and 1943, he pursued imperialist objectives in the Balkans and in the Mediterranean Basin by exploiting the myth of Italy’s “mutilated victory.” Moreover, to partner with the German-led defeated powers of World War I bent on tearing up the Paris Peace Conference treaties imposed on them by the victorious Western Powers, Mussolini contrived the notion of revisionismo fascista. In a fit of utter opportunism, Mussolini joined Hitler in World War II on 10 June 1940, when he thought that the Third Reich had already finished off the Western Powers. But this calculation turned out to be faulty. Instead of an easy victory over already prostrate enemies, Italy suffered defeat after defeat on all fronts against the resurgent Western Powers reinforced eventually by the USA and its Soviet ally. When the tide began to turn against the Axis, an Italian cabal deposed Mussolini from power on 25 July 1943. He landed in prison. When Italy formally surrendered to the Allies on 8 September 1943, the country suffered deep shame in the belief that the nation has just died.
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Notes
- 1.
Davide Rodogno has most effectively made his point in his Fascism’s European Empire: Italian Occupation During the Second World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
- 2.
On the Italian efforts to reach an accord with the Allies, see Elena Aga Rossi, A Nation Collapses. The Italian Surrender of September 1943 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
- 3.
Cited in Davide Conti, Gli uomini di Mussolini: Prefetti, questori e criminali di guerra dal fascismo alla Repubblica italiana (Bologna: Einaudi, 2017), p. 175.
- 4.
After the war, the commanding general of the Militia published a book in which he explained that the decision to refrain from any reaction to arrest Mussolini was to avoid unleashing a civil war. Enzo Galbiati , Il 25 luglio e la M.V.S.N. (Milan: Bernabò, 1950).
- 5.
F. W. Deakin , The Six Hundred Days of Mussolini (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1966), p. 16.
- 6.
E. Aga Rossi and M.T. Giusti, Una Guerra a parte: I militari italiani nei Balcani 1940–1945 (Bologna: il Mulino, 2011), p. 101.
- 7.
Gianni Oliva, L’Italia del silenzio 8 settembre 1943: storia del paese che non ha fatto i conti con il proprio passato (Bologna: Mondadori, 2013), p. 33; Renzo De Felice, Mussolini l’alleato, Vol. II: La guerra civile (1943–1945) (Turin: Einaudi, 1997), p. 80; Nicola Gallerano, “La mancata difesa di Roma,” in Claudio Dellavalle, ed., 8 settembre 1943. Storia e memoria (Milan: Franco Angeli, 1989), p. 22.
- 8.
Pier Luigi Villari, Il tragico settembre: 8 settembre 1943. La reazione italiana contro l’aggressione tedesca (Rome: IBN Editore, 2007), pp. 42–43.
- 9.
Aga Rossi , A Nation Collapses, p. 97.
- 10.
Ibid., p. 98.
- 11.
Cited in Deakin , The Six Hundred Days of Mussolini, p. 17.
- 12.
Ibid. On 14 August Badoglio had unilaterally proclaimed Rome to be an “open city,” a declaration to which neither the Allies nor the Germans paid the slightest attention.
- 13.
Marco Patricelli, Settembre 1943: I giorni della vergogna (Rome/Bari: Laterza, 2010), p. 128.
- 14.
Oliva, L’Italia del silenzio 8 settembre, p. 69.
- 15.
Patricelli, Settembre 1943, pp. 127–29.
- 16.
Villari, Il tragico settembre, p. 51.
- 17.
Robert Katz, The Battle for Rome: The Germans, The Allies, The Partisans, and The Pope, September 1943–1944 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003), p. 42.
- 18.
A phrase coined by Ernesto Galli della Loggia in the title of his book, La morte della patria (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1996).
- 19.
The theme “Death of the Country” was introduced by a Fascist magistrate, Salvatore Satta, who between autumn 1943 and spring 1944 wrote a book of reflections that has remained one of the most persuasive testimonies explaining the stato d’animo of Italians during these days. Salvatore Satta, De profundis (Milan: Adelphi, 1947).
- 20.
Corrado Alvaro, L’Italia rinunzia? 1944: il Meridione e il Paese di fronte alla grande catastrofe (Palermo: Sellerio, 1986), pp. 34–36. The first edition was published in 1945.
- 21.
Vincenzo Costa, L’ultimo federale, Memorie della guerra civile 1943–1945 (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1997), p. 11.
- 22.
Cited in De Felice, Mussolini l’alleato, II: 97. Malaparte wrote this jingle: “8 September is a memorable day: / face turned towards the nefarious invador, Italy sporting its old valor / to victory she guided the conqueror. / 8 September is a memorable fact, / shoulder turned away from ill-omened ally / already with knee on the ground, / we rushed to win with our enemies, / ardently that same war / that we had already lost with our friends.” Cited in Aurelio Lepre, La storia della repubblica di Mussolini: Salò: Il tempo dell’odio e della violenza (Milan: Mondadori, 1999), p. 4.
- 23.
Carlo Trabucco , La prigionia di Roma (Rome: Seli, s.d.), p. 14.
- 24.
Cited in Renzo De Felice, Rosso e Nero (Milan: Baldini & Castoldi, 1995), p. 44.
- 25.
Roy Jenkins, Churchill: A Biography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), p. 607.
- 26.
Robert Forczyk, Raid: Rescuing Mussolini Gran Sasso 1943 (Oxford: Osprey Publishing Midland House, 2010), p. 19.
- 27.
Katz, The Battle for Rome, p. 38.
- 28.
A telling illustration of this occurred in Emilia Romagna, where General Ettore De Blasio asked the Germans to maintain order. Carlo Gentile , I crimini di guerra tedeschi in Italia, 1943–1945 (Turin: Einaudi, 2015), p. 40.
- 29.
Ibid., p. 88.
- 30.
Ibid., p. 89.
- 31.
Worse was to come. On 13 October, when Badoglio declared war on Germany, his army had been reduced to a pair of divisions located in Puglia, a nether region in southern Italy that was occupied neither by Germans nor by Allies. His gesture, therefore, which hardly affected military events other than worsening the conditions of the soldiers who had fallen into the hands of the Wehrmacht, was nothing more than a holding action until he was able, with strong Allied assistance, to build up a small new army to join the fight against RSI troops and the invading Germans. But that day seemed long off.
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Burgwyn, H.J. (2018). Historical Background of the Italian Social Republic. In: Mussolini and the Salò Republic, 1943–1945. Italian and Italian American Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76189-3_1
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