The Intricacies of Attempting a Political Purge during the Allied Occupation of Italy, 1943-1945. The Role of the Delegations of the High Commissions Against Fascism (original) (raw)
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Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 2004
Between the announcement of the armistice on 8 September 1943 and 1948, the anti-fascist ruling class developed a narrative of the 'Fascist war' that was destined to mark deeply the historical conscience of the country and the national self-image. Until now, extraneous to both of these has been the awareness of Fascist Italy's role as protagonist in a policy of aggression towards various foreign states (Ethiopia,
The Dark Side of Italian History 1943–1945
Modern Italy, 2007
In the last days of July 1943 the fascist faithful greeted the news of Mussolini's expulsion with stunned silence and absolute passivity. The demonstrations of jubilation by antifascists and by the majority of the people were impressive and went unopposed.
Journal of Contemporary History, 2021
Despite its impact on the breakdown of public order and on the rise of armed violence, the role of civilian disarmament in post-Second World War transitions is yet to be properly investigated. This article argues that the disarmament of the population was a key passage in two critical aspects of the normalization of postwar Italy: the reaffirmation of State authority and the reconstruction of control structures in response to the delegitimization of established authorities that followed their collapse in September 1943. Specifically, the article focuses on the intersection between the proliferation of war weapons, public order policing, and the recovery of Italian sovereignty in the aftermath of the Second World War. This article will demonstrate that disarmament was instrumental in reshaping Italian institutions according to the imperative of regaining control over the national territory in a context marked by foreign occupation, conflicting claims of legitimacy and the inversion of the monopoly on legitimate violence. The urgency to disarm incentivized both Italian and Allied authorities to rebuild the State control system in accordance to the pre-existing model of a centralized, authoritative administration. This led toward the preservation - in the sphere of public security - of agencies and individuals strongly compromised with the Fascist regime.
Trials of partisans in the Italian Republic. The consequences of the elections of 18 April 1948
This article suggests new interpretations of the significance of 18 April 1948 by examining the judicial prosecution of Italian partisans in the Republican era. A reap-praisal of those trials – which took place from the summer of 1945 up until the early fifties-is offered through examination of the documents of the National Committee of Democratic Solidarity, founded after the attack on Togliatti on 14 July 1948, and the judgments of the Corti d'Assise and the Military Tribunals. The papers of both Umberto Terracini and Lelio Basso, promoters of the Pro-partisans Defense Committee, show how judiciary repression had its roots not only in the failed purge of former Fascists from inside the courts, which was unsuccessful because of a desire for continuity of the bureaucratic apparatus of the State, but most of all in the ideological biases and anti-communist policies of the ruling classes of the time. In the weeks that followed the electoral success of the centre-right coalition in the 18 April 1948 general elections, and particularly after the attempt on Togliatti's life, on 14 July 1948, the Italian Republic experienced a wave of judicial repression, marked by hundreds of arrests, prosecutions and disciplinary actions against former partisans, for acts committed during the war for liberation which took place between 1943 and 1945. Certainly, in the phase of transition, post 1945 and up to the spring of 1947 (with the ousting of the Left from De Gasperi's cabinets of national unity), hundreds of partisans were charged for homicide of fascists, requisitions of weapons, and attacks and sabotage on the German invaders. During this phase, guilty verdicts against partisans by the Italian postwar courts were strongly linked with the trials against Nazi-fascist collaborators and the larger failure to purge Italy after the fall of Fascism. The main feature of the so-called 'trial of the Resistance' is that it was conducted exclusively by the same judges who had served during the Fascist period and who applied the provisions of the 1930 Fascist Penal Code. In addition, while special legislation and courts tried individuals for crimes linked with collaboration, trials against partisans were made possible because of the continued use of laws emanated during the fascist regime; laws that denied the political justification of partisan actions during the war and defined such actions as robberies, extortions, private vendetta, unlawful entry and homicide. Up until the second half of the 1950s, trials against partisans involved hundreds of thousands of accused. Judicial prosecution against communist and communist inspired partisan groups was certainly a political as well as a judiciary phenomenon. It is not only proof of the 'continuity of the State' and of the power fascists and collaborationists maintained within the state administration, but it is also symbolic of the conflict between 'reform' and 'conservation', and moderate-conservative and socialist-communist political forces within Italian society in the 1950s. Even though it was carried out within a formal democracy, the ideological conflict between the main parties (especially the Christian Democratic Party and the Communist Party) was translated into a phenomenon of intimidation and the repression of dissent and political participation. The socio-political context was that of a country which had just passed through a fascist dictatorship and maintained an open conflict characterized by questioning the real democratic nature of the adversary, in order * Email: michela.ponzani@virgilio.it.