The bad German and the good Italian: Removing the guilt of the Second World War

By Filippo Focardi

In the Axis War on the side of Germany, Mussolini's Italy was responsible for serious war crimes, especially in Yugoslavia and Greece. This 'dark side' of the fascist war, however, is not present in the national memory built after 1945. To distinguish Italy from the former German ally and avoid a punitive peace, the monarchist and anti-fascist ruling classes elaborated a master narrative that highlighted the opposition of the Italian people to Mussolini's war and the humanitarian behavior of Italian soldiers, depicted as saviors of Jews. All responsibility for the crimes committed in the Axis war was placed on the shoulders of the Germans, who thus became a convenient alibi for the national conscience.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Aug 29, 2023
• ISBN: 9781526157126

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Introduction

Twenty years ago, in a stimulating comparative study, the British historian Tony Judt spoke of a ‘vicious legacy’ left by the Second World War throughout Europe.¹ This legacy was produced not only by the dramatic experience of total war and of the ‘clash of civilizations’ that split nations in two but also by the way in which those experiences were elaborated and transmitted through a narrative of a mythical nature. Here Judt was referring to the construction of the memory of the conflict, which in the immediate postwar years, 1945–48, was undertaken in both Western and Central-Eastern Europe alike, although the two regions were setting out on very different paths in the context of the emerging Cold War. This memory was built on two fundamental bases: on one hand, the ‘universally acknowledged claim’ that responsibility for ‘the war, its sufferings and its crimes’ lay exclusively with Germany;² on the other, the exaltation everywhere of the ‘myth of the Resistance’, framed as a struggle waged by the whole nation against the German oppressor.³ There was a deep connection between these two cornerstones of European war-memory: German guilt (‘they did it’) implied the innocence of all other countries, which, in each case, had manifested itself in unanimous opposition to Nazi Germany. There was undeniably a strong foundation of truth underlying this determination to place all the blame for the war and its consequences on Germany. Who, if not the Third Reich, had unleashed the conflict with all its dreadful crimes? It none the less helped to overshadow or to justify violent acts committed by the victors, such as the mass expulsions that changed the face of Central Europe at the end of the war, when millions of Germans and hundreds of thousands of Hungarians and Ukrainians were driven out of Poland, Czechoslovakia, and the Balkans.⁴ Similarly, the national ‘myth of Resistance’ against the Germans served, in both Eastern and Western Europe, to shroud the reality of the various forms of collaboration with the invader that had emerged in all occupied countries and to obscure the extent to which resistance everywhere assumed the shape of a brutal civil war.⁵ For Judt, the myth of a united patriotic struggle against the Germans provided a convenient screen for those – the majority of citizens – who had, in fact, resigned themselves to conforming with the Nazi occupation regime,⁶ but it was also accepted by the ‘genuine resisters’, either to assist their political legitimization (the Communists) or to satisfy the more general demand for a minimum of social cohesion and to re-establish the authority and legitimacy of the state after the upheavals of civil war.⁷

In Italy too, offloading all blame for the instigation and criminal prosecution of the war on to Germany, while simultaneously attributing an epic and national dimension to the anti-Nazi Resistance, proved the way to fashion a public memory of the conflict that affirmed the innocence of the Italian people. Within the European context described by Judt, Italy, however, is an exceptional case. It was indisputably the country where Fascism first emerged, and, from the invasion of Ethiopia in the mid-1930s onwards, it had joined Nazi Germany in its systematic effort to demolish the European order established after the First World War at Versailles and to radically redraw international power relations.⁸ For Mussolini, as for Hitler, this objective presupposed an inevitable clash with the despised great democracies – Great Britain and France – who, they both thought, were plunging irreversibly into decadence. Aiming to claim a role as a great power and to establish a ‘new Mediterranean order’, Monarchical-Fascist Italy was engaged in an almost continuous war effort from 1935 onwards, incorporating the invasion of Ethiopia (1935–36), the massive intervention on Franco’s behalf in the Spanish Civil War (1936–39), and the occupation of Albania (April 1939). Then in June 1940, following a brief parenthesis of ‘non-belligerence’, Mussolini, with the approval of the King, brought Italy into the Second World War as the principal ally of the Third Reich. Although it failed in its attempt to conduct a ‘parallel war’ of conquest in pace with its German partner, Mussolini’s Italy occupied southern France and (with German assistance) much of Greece and Yugoslavia (April 1941). It took part in the Nazi war of aggression against the Soviet Union and fought intensely for nearly three years against the British and Allied Forces in North Africa.⁹ Following the fall of Mussolini (25 July 1943), Italy, now led by Marshal Badoglio, continued to fight alongside Germany for forty-five days, albeit while surreptitiously negotiating its surrender. The proclamation of the Armistice of Cassibile on 8 September 1943 certainly led to a switch of alliances and to the beginning of Partisan Resistance, but Mussolini was soon installed at the head of a Fascist republic that controlled all of Central and Northern Italy and supported Germany until the final defeat in spring 1945.

With all that in mind, it is understandable that the ‘Italian path’ to the construction of a Second World War memory followed a unique trajectory, which may have led to similar results but differed markedly from the paths taken by European countries that suffered Nazi aggression and those taken by the so-called minor Axis allies (Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania, Finland), as a consequence of the historical role played by Fascism and of Italy’s far from secondary contribution to the war itself. For Italy, it was not only a matter of coming to terms with a history of collaboration and civil war, as described by Judt, but of accounting for a twenty-year dictatorship which had served as a model for right-wing parties both within and beyond Europe. This was a regime that had joined with Nazi Germany in subverting the European order and committing internationally disruptive acts, culminating in its participation in the Second World War as a major ally of the Third Reich and Japan. For over three years – from June 1940 to September 1943 – it had waged a war of aggression against the democratic powers and occupied numerous defenceless territories, where, particularly in the Balkans, it had been guilty of serious crimes against the civilian population.

This book aims to reconstruct the path by which a specifically Italian narrative of the Second World War was established as the keystone of national public memory (a ‘master narrative’), analysing its origins, motives, modes, and contents.¹⁰ In other words, it attempts to examine how Italy went about erecting the two ‘pillars’ of European war narrative highlighted by Judt: the attribution of all blame to the Germans and the construction of a myth of national resistance.

There can be no doubt that in Italy, too, the evocation of the ‘bad German’ was a lynchpin of war memory, closely (but not exclusively) connected to the exaltation of the Resistance by the various anti-Fascist political cultures. Jens Petersen, the German scholar who has mostly closely studied Italo-German mutual perceptions, has spoken of a ‘negative and apocalyptic stereotype of the German’ connected with Resistance historiography.¹¹ A similar point of view has been expressed by Antonio Missiroli, for whom the Resistance gave ‘the decisive imprint’ to the accusatory and suspicious depiction of Germans that prevailed after 1945.¹² Enzo Collotti, the most authoritative Italian scholar of contemporary Germany, underlines, conversely, the tenacious efforts of the ‘best exponents’ of anti-Fascism to distinguish between the German people and the Nazi regime, but even he highlights how the harsh experiences of war and Nazi occupation left a negative underlying image of the German that was reactivated in the early 1950s by fears inspired by German rearmament.¹³ Marked by the demonic features that war propaganda attributed to the ‘Nazi beast’ and the ‘barbaric invader’, this image was destined to take a long hold on the collective imagination, despite the extensive efforts made by many cultural figures after 1945 (including, prominently, Collotti himself) to rediscover and reveal the ‘other Germany’, the democratic and anti-Nazi Germany persecuted by Hitler’s regime.¹⁴

The stereotype of the ‘bad German’, prevalent throughout Europe, was not, however, the only figure to mark the public memory and social imaginary of postwar Italy.¹⁵ From the outset, the ‘bad German’ was accompanied by his mirror image: the ‘good Italian’. The sinister picture of the German soldier as a highly disciplined and bloodthirsty fighter, and as a ruthless and sadistic oppressor of the defenceless, was counterbalanced by an antithetical standardized portrait of the Italian soldier as intimately averse to war, unwilling to commit acts of violence or abuse, and ready to fraternize with and assist unarmed populations, including those in Fascist-occupied territories. The same diametrical opposition applied to the description of the German and Italian regimes and to the German and Italian peoples.¹⁶ In the prevailing representation, the evil ‘face’ of the German soldier was matched by the demonic ‘face’ of Nazi Germany, the expression of a perfect union between Hitler’s regime and the ideologically driven and fanaticized German people. Conversely, the benevolent image of the ‘good’ Italian soldier was matched by an image of the Italian people as the victim of Fascism and of Mussolini’s unpopular wars. Both the Italian people and Italian soldiers were characterized by their intrinsic good nature and by their Christian readiness to help their neighbour, as witnessed by their industrious efforts to assist Jews denied their human rights by the Fascist regime and then hunted down by their blood-crazed German allies.¹⁷

The intertwined depiction of the ‘bad German’ and ‘good Italian’ emerges as the key element in the construction of a national war memory not only in the narrative produced by the political and cultural elites but also on the level of popular and mass culture linked to illustrated magazines, cinema, television, and popular song. This depiction, in fact, seems to be the only unifying factor in a landscape of ‘fragmented memories’,¹⁸ many still ‘unreconciled’ and ‘antagonistic’,¹⁹ generated by the multifarious experiences of war lived by the Italians, especially after the turning point of 8 September 1943. The bitter neo-Fascist memories of the veterans of Salò clashed with the anti-Fascist memories of the Resistance,²⁰ which, in their turn, were furrowed by numerous micro- and macro-fractures caused by territorial differences, internal debates, and the conflicting interpretations offered by the various political and cultural forces that comprised the Resistance.²¹ Even the variety of fronts on which Italian forces pursued the Axis war effort produced very different memories in ex-combatants, depending, for example, on whether they had fought the Red Army on the Don, or Montgomery’s soldiers in North Africa, or the Greek and Yugoslav Partisans in the Balkans.²² The same is true for experiences of captivity. The ordeal of the so-called Italian Military Internees captured by the Germans following the Armistice²³ left a very different mark from that of soldiers captured by the Allies.²⁴ Their experiences were further differentiated by the decision to collaborate or not with Mussolini or the Allies, and by material conditions of captivity. In the same way, violence suffered by the civilian population left a wide range of distinctive group memories: racial and political deportees, victims of Nazi-Fascist round-ups and massacres, victims of Allied rapes and bombings, victims of the foibe killings and of the Italian exodus from Istria and Dalmatia.²⁵ There was a whole turbulent universe, then, of individual and group experiences and memories, all marked by the historical fissure of the 8 September Armistice. Against this backdrop, the myth of the ‘good Italian’ and the ‘bad German’ was the main binding force in the construction of a national war memory, serving as the cornerstone for a widely shared and exceptionally enduring national self-image.

But how did the pairing of ‘bad German’ and ‘good Italian’ come about? When did it originate? Who contributed to its creation and for what reasons? Our hypothesis is that the foundations were laid between the September 1943 Armistice and 1947, in a period, then, which includes the first two postwar years, during which the peace treaty with the Allies was prepared and discussed and the Italian Republic was founded. They were laid in response to urgent political demands shared by all components of the united anti-Fascist front, by the Crown and the Badoglio government on one hand, and the various forces linked to the parties of the Comitato di Liberazione Nazionale (CLN), on the other, who, for reasons of political self-legitimization, war mobilization, and, above all, the protection of national interests, weaponized the distinction between Italy and Germany, which Allied propaganda had intensively exploited since the very beginning of the conflict. The slogans broadcast by Radio Londra and emblazoned on the leaflets dropped by British and American planes, which depicted the Axis War as unpopular with the Italian people and imposed on them by Mussolini and the Germans, were promptly redeployed.

The principal and entirely legitimate concern of the Monarchical establishment and of the anti-Fascist political elites was to avoid a punitive peace for a defeated country. Embracing a position already adopted by the first Badoglio government, all the governments of national unity, which emerged following an understanding between the CLN and the Crown in spring 1944, pursued a central policy of obtaining international recognition for Italy’s contribution to the war against Germany, initially with a view to moving from the ambiguous status of co-belligerent nation to fully fledged ally of the United Nations, then, having failed in that attempt, with the aim of at least avoiding draconian treatment from the victors. This policy took the shape of a major communication campaign at all levels (radio, press, political journalism, memoirs, documentary exhibitions, cinema, and literature), designed, on one hand, to exalt the Resistance as a victorious struggle for national independence which had seen the whole Italian people engaged in a ‘second Risorgimento’ and, on the other, to draw a clear distinction between Italy’s conduct during the war and that of ‘barbarous Nazi Germany’, which was almost exclusively blamed for the crimes committed by the Axis powers. The loathsome figure of the German soldier, responsible for all kinds of oppression and brutality, was set against the kindly and benevolent image of the Italian soldier who, despite donning the uniform of the aggressor, did his utmost to save the Jews and to assist civilian populations menaced by his German ‘comrade’. This resulted in the creation of a ‘hegemonic narrative’ that concealed, minimized, or denied the Italian people’s involvement with Fascism and the country’s responsibility for the Fascist war and its multiple crimes, especially in the Balkans. The supposed hostility of the Italian people to Mussolini’s war and the stark contrast between their merits and the atrocities committed by Nazi Germany were also stressed by the right-wing Party of the Average Man, which further helped to forge a national self-image based on the constant comparison between the cases of Italy and Germany, and on the resulting relativization of Italian war guilt. This outcome was ratified by the lack of an ‘Italian Nuremberg’, i.e., the failure to conduct the expected prosecution of Italian war criminals.

In truth, the differentiation between Italy and Germany and the interlinked depiction of the ‘bad German’ and ‘good Italian’ had some foundation in historical reality. The number of crimes and atrocities that weighed on German shoulders was incomparably greater than that which lay on the Italian national conscience. Italy had committed many crimes during the conflict but had not carried out genocidal mass-murder. Similarly, Italian troops in the occupied countries had genuinely assisted and saved thousands of Jews and Serbs threatened with death by their German allies or by the Croatian Ustaše. The stereotype thus had a basis in historical truth but none the less served to conceal the other side of the coin, i.e. the regrettable ideological commitment of a significant number of Italians to the Fascist ‘imperialist war’; the numerous war crimes against Partisans and civilians committed in occupied territories by the Blackshirts and the Royal Italian Army; participation in the German persecution of Jews not only by the Republic of Salò but, even earlier, by Italian forces in Russia and the Balkans, which had certainly numbered many ‘saviours of Jews’ but also no shortage of self-seeking Italians ready to take advantage of the persecuted or even to hand them over to their bloodthirsty German ally.

According to Ernest Renan, ‘the essence of a nation is that all individuals have many things in common, and also that they have forgotten many things’.²⁶ The double image of the ‘good Italian’ and ‘bad German’ served, in fact, to synthesize a common legacy of memories, but also implied forgetting many other episodes of national history and covering up troublesome and deplorable elements of Italy’s immediate past. It was collectively created by a number of players, all pursuing different motives. First was the Allied propaganda machine, determined to provoke the internal collapse of the Fascist dictatorship and to persuade Italy to abandon the Axis war effort. Then came the Italian monarchy and its institutional props, the armed forces and diplomatic corps, all previously implicated in the Fascist regime and its military adventures, which, following the 8 September Armistice, exploited the ‘anti-German card’ certainly for the good of the nation but also, with blatant opportunism, in order to separate their own destiny (even, as in Badoglio’s case, on a personal level) from that of the Monarchic-Fascist Italy that had suffered such a calamitous defeat. A third faction, acting with far greater moral and political credibility, was constituted by the anti-Fascist forces and the Resistance, who had been directly involved in an intense struggle against the German occupying army and their ‘old enemy’, the Blackshirts. [Translator’s note: The Blackshirts (Camicie Nere) or Voluntary Militia for National Security (Milizia Volontaria per la Sicurezza Nazionale) were a paramilitary wing of the Fascist Party that evolved into a national security force under Fascist rule. Blackshirt troops fought in every campaign conducted by Italy during the Second World War.]

Now that they were part of a government of national unity, they also wished to secure a favourable fate for Italy and, at the same time, to attain their own political legitimization, at the risk of being jolted by a ‘mutilated peace’ that would herald a new wave of reactionary nationalism. Finally, the Party of the Average Man, (self-)indulgent towards the Fascist past, was in full agreement about the need to separate Italian responsibilities from those of its German ex-ally and thus avoid a punitive peace. At the same time, it was disposed, like the King and Badoglio, to load Mussolini and other leading Fascists with full responsibility for their crimes, which consisted primarily in recklessly binding Italy to the Third Reich. The nationally self-absolving and reassuring image of the ‘good Italian’, which emerged from the convergence of these political streams, none the less also fully met the psychological needs of a country that could now look ahead and undertake the difficult task of reconstruction without being weighed down with guilt about a past that was marked by many ‘dark pages’ and disfigured by many wounds, but which could now be consigned to oblivion.

In the mid-1970s, Giorgio Amendola, one of the most important figures in the Resistance and in the Italian Communist Party, highlighted the three fundamental ‘objectives’ shared by all components of the wartime anti-Fascist alliance: (1) ‘the autonomous participation of Italy in its own liberation’; (2) the ‘election of the Constituent Assembly’; (3) ‘the signing of a peace treaty’ that ‘removed Italy from the condition of a defeated nation’.²⁷ Along with the aim of re-establishing Italian citizenship on a new democratic basis, Amendola thus underlined the military effort to secure the independence of the nation and the quest for international redemption as the principal motives of the anti-Fascist coalition. These same demands, designed to promote military mobilization against Germany, and, above all, to safeguard national interests, were also, in our view, the principal driving forces in the construction of a specific public memory of the war and of the Resistance, which also had a huge impact on the development of historical judgements on the entire Fascist period. The (mostly Italian) historians, who have examined these themes to date, have adopted various interpretative approaches which, with a few exceptions,²⁸ have discounted international factors or regarded them as secondary. That is perhaps a consequence of the excessive separation still found in Italy between the study of contemporary history and of international relations, which are entirely distinct academic disciplines. An equally probable factor, however, is the fundamental lack of interest shown by both historians and the general public in the signing of the peace treaty between Italy and the Allies, which has only recently attracted due attention.²⁹

Setting aside the numerous studies devoted to particular (but undeniably important) aspects of Italian war memory (e.g. the Resistance, imprisonment, deportation, Nazi massacres, life on the differing war-fronts, Allied bombing, the foibe, the female experience), we find that the more general overviews have focused on individuals or mechanisms involved in the construction of war memory, which are examined in terms of the internal Italian dynamics of elaboration and transcendence of the past. These include many excellent studies, some from a comparative perspective, focusing on the part played by the various political parties and cultures,³⁰ on the role of intellectuals,³¹ on the revision of the calendar of national holidays,³² on the memory transmitted by illustrated magazines,³³ and on the rhetorical codes associated with funeral services.³⁴

An interpretative thesis underpinning many of these studies is that the construction of national memory was organized along lines designed to meet the anti-Fascist parties’ urgent need for political legitimization. These parties, well aware of the degree of popular support enjoyed by the Fascist regime, of the limits of the Resistance, and the extent to which its struggle amounted to a civil war, would, according to this thesis, have avoided calling the nation to a drastic reckoning with its past, so as to avoid civil upheaval and to preserve the electoral consensus, stressing instead the idea of universal Italian opposition to Fascism and presenting themselves as the representatives of a guiltless people who had fought a victorious war of national liberation under anti-Fascist leadership. In one of the most perceptive analyses of this question, Piergiorgio Zunino speaks of the ‘foundation myth’ of the ‘Resistance as a popular revolution against the barbarians from both within and without’, and views its creation as an ‘obligatory step’ for the anti-Fascist forces.³⁵ In his judgement, the same is also true of the second, related foundation myth of republican postwar national memory, the Croceian concept of Fascism as a ‘parenthesis’, which Zunino terms a ‘necessary deception’, adopted so as not to disturb the conscience of the Italians and to set about national reconstruction in a non-traumatic way.³⁶ The thesis that there was a deliberate concealment of the extent of pro-Fascist feeling and of the degree to which the Resistance constituted a civil war acquires a strongly polemical note in the school of historical writing which, beginning with Ernesto Galli della Loggia and Renzo de Felice,³⁷ has accused the Italian Communist Party of constructing the myth of the Resistance (‘a people underground’) in order to gain credit as a national, democratic force and to conceal its close ideological and political ties with Moscow. This argument has been countered by Gianni Oliva, who has shown how the myth not only was instrumentalized by left-wing parties for reasons of political self-legitimization but was primarily exploited by moderate forces whose interest lay in masking the participation of the Italian people in the Fascist regime (and especially the extensive involvement of the political and economic elites) and in throwing all blame on to Mussolini and his closest acolytes, so as to favour a non-traumatic political transition ensured by a series of gentle purges.³⁸

Leonardo Paggi has similarly focused on the processes of forgetting, signalling the gaps in the republican collective memory constructed by the anti-Fascist coalition which could find no space for important elements of the national war experience that none the less remained stamped on local and family memory (as oral history has clearly revealed), such as the ‘divided memories’ of Nazi massacres, recollections of the foibe killings and of Allied bombing, and memories linked to the particular context of the Southern Italian experience.³⁹ The paradigm of ‘a failure to examine the national conscience’ is also espoused by Guri Schwarz in his innovative study of the ceremonies and rhetorical codes of mourning, in which, like Paggi, he shifts scholarly attention from institutions and parties on to individuals and families.⁴⁰ Schwarz stresses the weakness of the traditional cultural codes that exalted heroic death for one’s country and were initially adopted in an anti-Fascist key by the new institutions and the parties of the CLN. These were supplanted from below by new celebratory codes that commemorated the innocent victims of war, whether they died at German or at Allied hands. The subsequent shift from the cult of the hero to the cult of the martyr resulted, for Schwarz, in an ‘expiatory patriotism’ of a markedly Christian cultural character,⁴¹ in terms of which the nation’s sufferings and misfortunes during the war served as a moral redemption (or ‘resurrection’) from the sins of Fascism, which could thus be laid aside.⁴²

Some important recent studies have looked again at the paradigm of the ‘failure to examine the national conscience’ and called it into question. Mariuccia Salvati, for example, has charted the development of a critical reflection on the ‘difficult legacy of Fascism’ in the anti-Fascist press in Rome between the liberation of the capital (June 1944) and the end of fighting in Italy (April–May 1945).⁴³ For Salvati, this ‘incipient examination’ of the ‘moral and political guilt of Fascism’ was subsequently relegated to a ‘subordinate’ position following the ‘revelation of the atrocities committed by the Fascists of the Salò Republic as allies of the Germans and, at the same time, the discovery of the heroism of the Italian Resistance’. After Liberation Day (25 April 1945), this heroism served to ‘wash away or, at least, obscure’ the guilt of Fascism. In his richly detailed study of the Italian intelligentsia and the younger generation in the transition to post-Fascism, Luca La Rovere speaks of a genuine Italian debate on national ‘guilt’ beginning shortly after 25 July 1943 and continuing beyond Liberation Day.⁴⁴ For La Rovere, the ‘myth of anti-Fascism’ was initially counterbalanced by an ‘anti-myth’ which viewed the denunciation of ‘Italian society’s deep connections with the totalitarian power system’ as a necessary step for an authentic democratic regeneration of the nation.⁴⁵ This ‘examination of the national conscience’ was, however, curtailed by the anti-Fascist movement in the face of popular protests against the purging of Fascists from public posts, which indicated just how diffuse those ‘connections’ were.⁴⁶ It was only at this point that the ‘anti-myth’ of guilt collapsed, giving free rein to the comforting anti-Fascist myth of the innocence of the Italian people.

Salvati and La Rovere do not therefore deny the rapid emergence and dominance of a mechanism designed to cleanse Italy of war guilt, but they see it as the end-result of a process that was also characterized by opposing attempts to face up to the Fascist past, which were suspended in the immediate postwar period for internal political motives. The existence of such attempts is undeniable, and both writers deserve credit for bringing them to light and researching them so thoroughly. It must none the less be acknowledged that these efforts to grapple with the Fascist past, however lucid and genuine in their intentions, left no trace on the collective narrative of the war, whose construction was, as we have noted, strongly influenced from 1940 onwards by the highly efficient Allied propaganda machine, and, after the Armistice, determined by the prioritization of military mobilization and the defence of the national interest. The result of the ‘contest’ between the ‘anti-myth’ of guilt and the myth of the innocence of the Italian people was, then, determined from the outset. The voice of what La Rovere himself calls a ‘band of intellectuals’, tussling with the Fascist legacy in the ‘small press’,⁴⁷ was inevitably drowned out by a propaganda machine loudly calling the nation to take up the struggle against the German invader and proclaiming the anti-Fascist purity of the Italian people.

Like all great historical conflicts, the Second World War had a ‘constitutive’ effect not only on the international order and on the political structure of individual states⁴⁸ but also on the depiction and self-depiction of the nations involved and on the war-memories that such depictions transmitted. In Italy, as in the rest of Europe, the war left a ‘vicious legacy’, hidden behind the benevolent and self-gratifying face of the ‘good Italian’, which was thrown into relief by the macabre features of the ‘bad German’. Doubtless, the number of crimes and violent acts carried out by the Germans during the war is incomparably greater than that committed by their Italian allies. Likewise, the humanitarian merits of numerous Italians who did their utmost to rescue Jews from mortal danger are an incontestable historical fact, as are the merits of those who fought to liberate the country from Nazi-Fascism. Building and feeding a collective memory based on the contrast between the ‘bad German’ and ‘good Italian’ has, however, had the effect to date of hindering critical awareness of what the Fascist experience meant for Italy (and not only for Italy). Intentionally or not, German ‘evil’ has thus functioned as a perfect alibi, serving to defer any public examination of Fascist violence in all its manifestations: racist and antisemitic policies, expansionist projects, military occupations, repression, and war crimes. In recent years, Italian and international historians have made significant progress in bridging gaps in our knowledge of the Fascist regime and its wars and in lifting the veil on many elements that have been concealed or suppressed.⁴⁹ I hope that, by exploring the origins of this sugar-coated and highly selective Italian postwar memory, this book may help to create a more informed and responsible historical consciousness that moves beyond over-exploited myths.

Notes

1See Tony Judt, ‘The Past Is Another Country: Myth and Memory in Postwar Europe’, in The Politics of Retribution in Europe: World War II and Its Aftermath , ed. István Deák, Jan T. Gross, and Tony Judt (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), pp. 293–324 (p. 295).

2Ibid ., p. 296.

3Ibid ., p. 298.

4Ibid ., pp. 297–98. To this list should be added the about three hundred thousand ethnic Italians exiled from Istria and Dalmatia, when they became part of Tito’s Yugoslavia. On this theme, see Naufraghi della pace: il 1945, i profughi e le memorie divise d’Europa , ed. Guido Crainz, Raoul Pupo, and Silvia Salvatici (Rome: Donzelli, 2008).

5Judt, ‘The Past Is Another Country’, pp. 298–300.

6Ibid ., p. 295.

7Ibid ., pp. 299–300.

8See Enzo Collotti, Fascismo e politica di potenza: politica estera 1922–1939 (Milan: La Nuova Italia, 2000) (with the collaboration of Nicola Labanca and Teodoro Sala), and MacGregor Knox, Common Destiny: Dictatorship, Foreign Policy, and War in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Renzo De Felice also argues that victory in Ethiopia had a significant impact on Mussolini, convincing him that the moment of truth had come for Fascist Italy, and that it was time for the nation to follow its destiny and expand both across the Mediterranean and into the Balkans; see De Felice, Mussolini il duce . II, Lo Stato totalitario 1936–1940 (Turin: Einaudi, 1981), pp. 254–330.

9See Giorgio Rochat, Le guerre italiane 1935–1943: dall’impero d’Etiopia alla disfatta (Turin: Einaudi, 2005).

10 The underlying interpretative model to which we refer here is the concept of collective memory elaborated by the French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs; see his On Collective Memory , ed., trans., and introd. Lewis A. Coser (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), and The Collective Memory, trans. Francis J. Ditter, Jr and Vida Yazdi Ditter, introd. Mary Douglas (New York: Harper & Row, 1980). See also Paolo Jedlowski, ‘Memoria individuale e memoria collettiva’, in La Resistenza tra storia e memoria, ed. Nicola Gallerano (Milan: Mursia, 1999), pp. 19–30. For a recent conceptual overview, see Diego Guzzi, ‘Per una definizione di memoria pubblica: Halbwachs, Ricoeur, Assmann, Margalit’, Scienza e Politica, 44 (2011), 27–39. A further important point of reference is Jay Winter and Emmanuel Sivan, ‘Setting the Framework’, in War and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century, ed. Winter and Sivan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 6–39, which focuses on the part played by social actors in the elaboration of public memory and on the dynamics of interaction between social actors and state institutions, while still seeing institutions as playing the fundamental role in establishing frames of reference for collective memory.

11 See Jens Petersen, ‘Italia e Germania: due immagini incrociate’, in L’Italia nella seconda guerra mondiale e nella Resistenza , ed. Francesca Ferratini Tosi, Gaetano Grassi, and Massimo Legnani (Milan: Franco Angeli, 1988), p. 62.

12 See Antonio Missiroli, ‘Un rapporto ambivalente: le due Germanie viste dall’Italia: 1945–1989’, Storia e Memoria , 5.1 (1996), 99–112 (p. 99).

13 See Enzo Collotti, ‘I Tedeschi’, in I luoghi della memoria: personaggi e date dell’Italia unita , ed. Mario Isnenghi (Rome; Bari: Laterza, 1997), pp. 84–85.

14 See Filippo Focardi, ‘L’ombra del passato: i tedeschi e il nazismo nel giudizio italiano dal 1945 a oggi: un profilo critico’, Novecento , 3 (2000), 67–73.

15 The predominance of the image of the ‘bad German’ does not, of course, preclude the existence of very different memories at an individual or local level. In an oral history study of former Partisans and Italian deportees, the German historian Matthias Röhrs encountered many recollections of ‘good Germans’, i.e., deserters from the Wehrmacht who joined the Resistance. He likewise found that the degree of hatred towards the Fascists of the Salò Republic was much more intense in the memory of many Partisans than the feelings inspired by the German occupying forces; see Röhrs, ‘I Tedeschi’: das Bild der Deutschen in italienischen Kriegserinnerungen (Tübingen: Tübingen Vereinigung für Volkskunde, 2009).

16 See Filippo Focardi, ‘Il vizio del confronto: l’immagine del fascismo e del nazismo in Italia e la difficoltà di fare i conti con il proprio passato’, in Italia e Germania 1945–2000: la costruzione dell’Europa, ed. Gian Enrico Rusconi and Hans Woller (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2005), pp. 91–121.

17 See David Bidussa, Il mito del bravo italiano (Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1994). Bidussa was the first scholar to highlight how a myth of the ‘good Italian’ was constructed on the basis of a comparison with the ‘bad German’, focusing specifically on the persecution of the Jews. Claudio Fogu also discusses the myth of the ‘good Italian’ in connection with a humanitarian attitude towards the Jews, concluding that the principal factor in the perpetuation of the myth was the ‘monumentalization’ of the Resistance, which, for at least four decades, ‘suppressed’ – however unintentionally – memories of the Fascist regime and its racial laws; see Fogu, ‘Italiani brava gente: The Legacy of Fascist Historical Culture on Italian Politics of Memory’, in The Politics of Memory in Postwar Europe , ed. Richard Ned Lebow, Wulf Kansteiner, and Claudio Fogu (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), pp. 169–71.

18 See Mario Isnenghi, Le guerre degli italiani: parole, immagini, ricordi 1848–1945 (Milan: Mondadori, 1989), pp. 247–62.

19 See Gian Enrico Rusconi, Resistenza e postfascismo (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1995), p. 7.

20 See Francesco Germinario, L’altra memoria: l’Estrema destra, Salò e la Resistenza (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1999).

21 Among the many studies of this theme, see, in particular, Adriano Ballone, ‘La Resistenza’, in I luoghi della memoria : personaggi e date dell’Italia unita , ed. Mario Isnenghi (Rome; Bari: Laterza, 1997), pp. 403–38; La Resistenza tra storia e memoria , ed. Gallerano; Filippo Focardi, La guerra della memoria: la Resistenza nel dibattito politico italiano dal 1945 a oggi (Rome; Bari: Laterza, 2005); John Foot, Italy’s Divided Memory (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 147–82; Philip Cooke, The Legacy of the Italian Resistance (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).

22 See, for example, the volumes in the series C’ero anch’io (Mursia), edited by Giulio Bedeschi, which contain first-person accounts by Italian soldiers engaged on the various war fronts.

23 From the mid-1980s onwards, there has been a huge resurgence of interest in the Italian Military Internees; see, in particular, Alessandro Natta, L’altra Resistenza: i militari italiani internati in Germania (Turin: Einaudi, 1997), and Mario Avagliano and Marco Palmieri, Gli internati militari italiani: diari e lettere dai lager nazisti 1943–1945 (Turin: Einaudi, 2009).

24 See Flavio Giovanni Conti, I prigionieri di guerra italiani 1940–1945 (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1986).

25 For a bibliography on each of these themes, see the notes to the following chapters. [Translator’s note: The foibe massacres were mass-killings of ethnic Italians by Yugoslav partisans in the regions that passed from Italy to Yugoslavia at the end of the Second World War (the Julian March, Kvarner, and Dalmatia). Foibe were specifically natural sinkholes into which victims were thrown alive, but the term is often used in a broader sense to describe the ethnic cleansing of the Italian population by Yugoslav forces in general.]

26 See Ernest Renan, What Is a Nation?: And Other Political Writings , trans. and ed. M.F.N. Giglioli (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), p. 251. The quotation is from the celebrated lecture given by Renan at the Sorbonne in 1882.

27 See Giorgio Amendola, Intervista sull’antifascismo , ed. Piero Melograni, new edn (Rome; Bari: Laterza, 1994), pp. 176–77.

28 These exceptions include, for example, Pietro Scoppola, who rightly notes how the anti-Fascist governing class exploited the concept of the Resistance as a people’s war on an international level; see his 25 Aprile: Liberazione (Turin: Einaudi, 1995), p. 10. Guri Schwarz also fully acknowledges the importance of foreign policy considerations in the construction of national memory in his Ritrovare se stessi: gli ebrei nell’Italia postfascista (Rome; Bari: Laterza, 2004), pp. 129–40, and Tu mi devi seppellir: riti funebri e culto nazionale alle origini della Repubblica (Turin: Utet, 2010), pp. 266–70.

29 One marker of which is Sara Lorenzini’s L’Italia e il trattato di pace del 1947 (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2007), published on the sixtieth anniversary of the signing of the treaty. In the mid-1990s, Ernesto Galli della Loggia cited the lack of interest in the peace treaty among both professional historians and the general public as evidence for what he saw as the disappearance of a sense of nationhood in the postwar Italian Republic founded on anti-Fascism; see his La morte della