When the Fascist Grand Council dismissed Mussolini as Italy’s duce and head of government and imprisoned him, it seemed that his public career had come to an inglorious end. But Hitler, in mid-September, arranged to have his old comrade rescued. Once Mussolini had arrived safely in Germany , the Führer, without too much difficulty, was able to prevail on him to become the Italian leader of a Third Reich-sponsored government. The Germans gave the newly risen Italian dictator a home in the little town of Salò on Lake Garda. His regime , which soon was to be called the Italian Social Republic (Repubblica Sociale Italiana—RSI, or, simply, the Salò Republic ), constitutes the focus of this book. In narrating the history of the RSI, the author seeks to answer many questions. What were the character and outlook of the people who gave orders and lived under the regime? Did Mussolini play German puppet , puppeteer of Italians, or Fascist weather vane? Did the RSI boil down to a group of zealous Fascist putchists kept in place by their Nazi overlords, or did the regime enjoy popular support? Did the RSI in the name of Fascism carry out policies beyond universally accepted norms? By breaking down the various institutions of the RSI, and by analyzing the ideological beliefs and action of people inside the government and out, the book will endeavor to capture the essence of the Salò experiment.
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Ten months into the Great War that broke out in August 1914, the Triple Entente Powers—Great Britain , France , and Russia —had already suffered colossal fatalities in fiercely contested trench battles against the Dual Alliance of Germany and Austria-Hungary. To turn the tide, they opened a spirited diplomatic offensive to induce neutral Italy to join their side. After hard bargaining they succeeded in prevailing on Rome to sign the Pact of London in May 1915. Italy would obtain vast lands at the expense of the enemy Habsburg and Ottoman empires at the end of the war. After enduring staggering losses in uphill climbs raked by deadly enemy fire, Italy ended on a high note with the victory at Vittoria Veneto in October 1918 against a starving Habsburg foe.
Since the Italian Peninsula emerged from the titanic struggle severely bloodied and economically destitute, the Italian delegation arrived at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 determined to exact full payment of all treaty rights, with Fiume tacked on, expecting the Western Powers to applaud the bravery of their victorious returning soldiers as they did their own.
But the Western Powers were primed to honor their treaty obligations to Italy just partially, and they offered only derision for their former ally’s military performance. Taking cover under the moralizing American president Woodrow Wilson, who introduced the principle of national self-determination of peoples into diplomatic parley, Britain and France denied Italy much of what had been promised. Instead of providing Italy unchallenged mastery of the Adriatic secured by fulfillment of Italia irredenta, the Great Powers agreed to annex the lion’s share of large areas in the Julian Alps and Dalmatia to the slapped-together polyglot Yugoslav state. And, for the most part, Italy was shut out from imperial gain at the expense of the Ottoman Empire, thanks mainly to the appearance of Mustafa Kemal in a revitalized Turkey.
Having emerged from the Paris Peace Conference sensing that the Allies had unjustly mangled the “sacred” London Pact of 1915, the poet Laureate Gabriele D’Annunzio coined the phrase “mutilated victory,” which immediately caught fire on the Italian street. Ungrateful allies had poured scorn on Italy instead of acknowledging the country’s magnificent sacrifices by a summons to join Europe’s privileged circle of imperialist powers as an equal. The “mutilated victory” was a powerful myth, the equal of the notorious German postwar Dolchstoss (stab in the back), which propelled the rise of the ultra-nationalist movements in both Italy and Germany in the 1920s.
Mussolini exploited this fury by ginning up the call for revenge. In propagating the term mutilated victory, he prepared to switch his allegiance from the winners to the losers in World War I. There were, however, two major problems: Italy had come out of the war prostrate, and “revisionism” (revision of boundaries that had been delineated at the Paris Peace Conference) was a two-edged sword. Applied across the board, Germany would have been able to claim the South Tyrol, the southern part of the fallen Habsburg Empire that contained large numbers of German-speaking people. Since this territory had been handed to Italy, it represented a violation of the nationality principle, which provided Germany a tailor-made bone to pick with its southern Alpine neighbor. Mussolini knew that he did not have the military wherewithal to conduct a selective revisionist policy straight away.
Since Mussolini was unable alone to challenge the Western powers that were upholding the provisions of the Paris Peace Conference, he hoped to gather in allies by winning over the defeated nations—Germany, Hungary, and Bulgaria—under the banner of revisionism. Since they, too, chafed at the punitive treatment the Allies had dealt them at the Paris Peace Conference, they were ripe for taking up the Duce’s overtures. France and their Little Entente partners moved quickly to thwart Mussolini’s aim of stirring up instability to enable Italian penetration in the Danubian areas and the Balkans.
But carving out spheres of influence in Eastern Europe did not stand alone for, since coming into power, Mussolini had contemplated an overseas empire. Italy would replace Britain as master of the Mediterranean and undertake a new wave of conquests in Africa. Once again, however, the Western Powers stood in his way. Since Mussolini had despaired of cajoling or intimidating them into sharing imperialist real estate, he would take what he wanted by guile or by force. Ethiopia already lay in his sights.
During the mid twenties, when the Duce saw fit to tone down his warlike rants, his favorable ratings rose in Britain . Winston Churchill praised him for having brought Communism to heel. Better yet, he was celebrated in London as a “good European.”
But exchanging toasts at formal dinners with stiff-necked diplomats had its limits. If Mussolini had momentarily to eschew the use of force in aggressively supporting the dissatisfied powers, he would provide underhanded delivery of weaponry and finances to terrorist organizations located in the resentful defeated countries of Eastern Europe that shared his revisionist impulses. The Austrian Heimwehr, terrorist groups in Yugoslavia, and the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization in Bulgaria benefited from Italy’s largess in their efforts to overthrow their own hated governments that were, not coincidentally, hostile to Fascist Italy.
When Hitler rose to power in January 1933, it appeared that the Duce would be able to progress from subversion to visible deeds through alignment with the kindred regime of the Third Reich against Italy’s erstwhile and “decadent” allies of World War I, France and England. Although Mussolini recognized the peril to Italy of a runaway Nazi German Drang nach Osten, the expansionist impulse caused him to throw caution to the winds, given that his “apprentice,” Hitler, ruled the Third Reich as the powerful leader of a kindred regime. Throughout the thirties the idea of the Axis grew from cooperative, if separate, intervention in the Spanish Civil War on the side of the dictator Francisco Franco to the actual signing of the Pact of Steel in May 1939.
When Germany launched aggression against Poland the following September, Mussolini held back, aware that Italy was nowhere near ready for war and that the country’s coastline was acutely vulnerable to attacks by the Royal Navy. Hardly needing Italian military assistance, the Panzers knifed through Allied defenses in northern France, which caused members of the government in Paris either to leave town or raise the white flag, while the besieged and pummeled British force hastened away from the Dunkirk beachheads to fight another day. With France on her knees, Mussolini deemed the time ripe for fulfilling Fascist Italy’s imperialist destiny by joining the Third Reich in a predicted imminent and easy victory. That was not to be. Poorly prepared, Italy was in no position to initiate military operations anywhere, and the Duce’s fumbling leadership did not address the obstacles he faced. In spite of his country’s woeful military state, Mussolini sallied forth to attack France on 10 June 1940. Britain’s turn came next in North Africa and Greece. Participation in Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union loomed on the horizon. But Italy suffered humiliating setbacks and losses everywhere on land and on the high seas. Still, the Duce persevered. After having been battered on one front, he would hurl troops into another, and then another, until bogged down or in retreat everywhere, which reduced the country from a supposed equal partner in the Axis fighting a “parallel” war to Germany’s military subaltern. Incapable of learning from his mistakes, Mussolini threw away the lives of his soldiers and his country’s resources in wars that had little to do with Realpolitik or national interests.
Whatever the obstacles, Mussolini was adamant in pursuing a “New Mediterranean World,” a euphemism for imperial penal colonies of oppression and economic plunder.1 This was, however, a job that could only be completed under cover of Hitler. In Mussolini’s incomplete empire, the indigenous peoples whom the It...