World War II Italy History War Military History War Crimes Atrocities Occupation Ethiopia Greece Balkans
By: Lester Golden
Tags: European History, History, Italy, World War II, Military

The Ravalli story forms part of an overall pattern in Italian-occupied territories.

If you were Libyans whose severed heads were posed for photos taken by his Italian murderers under the command of General Rodolfo Graziani.

War criminal never taken down from his white horse (https://www.theguardian.com/world/gallery/2018/feb/20/addis-ababa-massacre-memorial-service-in-pictures)

Addis Ababa Massacre, 1937

One of the 4000–6000 Ethiopians, slaughtered by Italian soldiers’ rampage in Addis Ababa on February 19–21, 1937 after a resistance bomb exploded, wounding General Graziani and several other Italian military leaders. Most of those killed initially were the cripples, women, and children who attended the event Graziani presided over at the governor’s palace. The Italian military’s reprisals were no different than the Wehrmacht’s in eastern Europe.

Victims of the Addis Ababa slaughter, February 19–21, 1937 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yekatit_12)

Yugoslavia

If you were one of the tens of thousands of Yugoslavs slaughtered or herded into concentration camps by “black beast” General Mario Roatta’s troops:

“One of his soldiers wrote home on July 1 1942: “We have destroyed everything from top to bottom without sparing the innocent. We kill entire families every night, beating them to death or shooting them.” (https://www.theguardian.com/education/2001/jun/25/artsandhumanities.highereducation)

Italian soldiers posed in front of their victims and their villages in the same way that white Americans from the 1890s to the 1930s posed for pictures at lynchings:

Italian soldiers pose in front of the Slovenian village they’ve just burned (screenshot from Fascist Legacy, 1989 BBC, Ken Kirby documentary https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpjX-u4ZAdw&t=988s )

Photograph with smiling subject as a declaration of impunity and official sponsorship of mass murder:

Italian-allied Croatian fascist Ustasha posing with Serb massacre victims (Fascist Legacy documentary, 1989 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpjX-u4ZAdw&t=988s )

Again, the Italian soldiers’ behavior was indistinguishable from the Wehrmacht’s mass murders and destruction of Oradour sur Glane, in France and Warsaw in August-October 1944:

Italian soldiers posing with their Yugoslav massacre victims (Fascist Legacy documentary, 1989, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpjX-u4ZAdw&t=988s )

Republican Spain’s Bombed Civilians

If you were a civilian in Republican Spain killed by Italian bombers in 1937 and 1938:

Italian bombing of Granollers, 20 km from Barcelona, May 31, 1938 On 31 May, five Italian bombers of the Aviazione Legionaria, bombed the city of Granollers. The town, 20 miles north of Barcelona, had no military targets. The bombers dropped 40 bombs of 100 kilograms in the city center. There were between 100 and 224 civilian dead (most of them women and children). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Granollers

In a preview of the WWII bombings of Rotterdam, Italy’s Aviazione Legionaria bombed Barcelona in raids designed by Mussolini to win the war by terror:

“they used delayed-fuse bombs designed to pass through the roof and then explode inside the building and a new type of bomb which exploded with a strong lateral force, so as to destroy things and persons within a few inches of the ground. The bombings affected all the city and the bombers didn’t attempt to destroy military targets. On the night of the 18th the working class districts were badly hit. The Italian bombers dropped 44 tons of bombs, and there were more than 1,000 civilians dead.” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Barcelona)

If you were a Jew hunted by the militia of Mussolini’s puppet Republica di Salò government from September 1943 to April 1945.

Or if you were a Jewish family opportunistically robbed and murdered by your “guide” while trying to cross the Alps into Switzerland above the Alpine village of Teglio in Valtellina. This is how the richest family in the Swiss border village of Teglio, which owned the two biggest hotels and stores in town, made their fortune. How do I know? My Italian wife’s family had an apartment there and I got to know local history very well from many weekends, Christmas vacations, and summers there.

An interview with a retired Carabiniere officer I met in 1987 in Alagna Valsesia, right under Monte Rosa, confirmed this kind of story was not unusual. His school buddy was a militia officer who hunted for smuggled Jews and shared in the confiscated loot. When this childhood friend came to him after the liberation looking to be smuggled to Switzerland to escape the partisans he had been hunting with the Germans only a short time before, his reply was, “you’re the one who got yourself into this mess (“tu ti sei messo in questo bel guaio”)”. This retired Carabiniere also made the best genepy (alpine herb liqueur) I ever tasted.

Vendetta nationalism and amnesia

What explains such wholesale national amnesia? The frustrated national and imperial ambition of a late arrival to the European imperial game combined with the historical memory of Rome’s imperial glory to yield what I call vendetta nationalism. Italy still smarted from its 1896 defeat when it tried to invade and conquer Ethiopia from its Eritrean colony. Italy’s enormous sacrifice in both blood and treasure in World War I (WWI) had yielded little tangible benefit, which only worsened the country’s wounded nationalism. Italy was a young recently unified Mediterranean power within one of Europe’s oldest civilizations, one that had ruled Europe and most of the Middle East for the better part of four centuries. As a self-identified rising power bumping up against the status quo power of the British Empire in the Mediterranean, Italy was ripe for vendetta nationalism.

However, there was a huge gap between Italy’s imperial ambitions and its real economic, military, and geopolitical capabilities. This became transparently obvious in the post-WWI crisis of a constitutional order squeezed between militant fascist paramilitaries and militant socialist workers’ unions occupying factories and landed estates. A weak, state-dependent northern Italian business and middle class embedded in a still semi-feudal agrarian nation that was only sixty years old turned to the ex-socialist school teacher and journalist Mussolini’s fasci di combattimento’s march on Rome.

Vendetta nationalism played its part in the brutality of the Italianization campaign in the annexed territories of occupied Slovenia and Croatia. The bloody defeats the Greek army inflicted on Italy from October 1940 to March 1941 also triggered a brutal Italian occupation of Greece. From Mussolini on down, the Italian fascist regime’s and its military’s vendetta nationalism responded with raging brutality to any resistance that unmasked its incapacity. National amnesia is merely the flip side of this vendetta nationalism, a vendetta against historical truth that is Italians’ version of holocaust denial.

Below we’ll see how incompetence on all sides but the German one triggered a politically and geopolitically convenient conspiracy to coverup Italy’s wartime atrocities and Italians’ embrace of national amnesia.

Chi ‘a avuto, ‘a avuto, chi ‘a dato, ha dato. Scurdiamoce u passato.

(“Who took it, took it; who gave, gave. Let’s forget the past.”)

In the Napoletano dialect, this expression is used to turn the page on any question, an invitation to forgive and forget, the former being impossible without the latter. It’s an invitation to amnesia or selective memory that postwar Italy took to heart since 1943–45 was not just a war fought by others on Italian soil. From Sicily to Domaso, the village on Lake Como where Mussolini was caught and executed, the war in Italy was an Italian civil war.

This Neapolitan expression formed the heart of a tacit postwar agreement not to dig too deeply into anyone’s fascist past, lest a full accounting for war crimes cast too wide a net amongst the Italian political, bureaucratic, and business class that had fully backed fascism for twenty years. The coverup of Italian war crimes brought to life in the mid 20th century Tommasi di Lampedusa’s 19th century novel about how the powerful embed counter-revolution in revolution: “Everything must change for everything to remain the same”.

The new republic had promised in 1946 to extradite Italian war criminals to the countries Italy had invaded and occupied. Post-war Italy’s Christian Democratic Prime Minister, Alcide de Gasperi, and his Anglo-American patrons were worried about growing Communist influence and rebuffed extradition demands from Yugoslavia, Greece, Albania, Ethiopia and Libya:

“Justice requires the handing over of these people but expediency, I fear, militates against it,” wrote a Foreign Office mandarin. A typical instruction from the prime minister, Alcide De Gasperi, on January 19 1948 reads: “Try to gain time, avoid answering requests. Germans suspected of murdering Italians — including those on Cephalonia, Corelli’s island — were not pursued lest a “boomerang effect” threaten Italians wanted abroad: their files turned up decades later in a justice ministry cupboard in Rome. (https://www.theguardian.com/education/2001/jun/25/artsandhumanities.highereducation)

Italy experienced no post-liberation “epuration” (purge, purification) a la Française. General Pietro Badoglio, who ordered mustard gas attacks on Ethiopian villages and strafed Red Cross camps, died in his bed and was buried with full military honors. General Rodolfo Graziani, the butcher of Libya, massacred entire towns and ordered mass killings of the sick and elderly of Addis Ababa after he was wounded by an Ethiopian resistance bomb.

Deliberate amnesia and the Germans’ genocidal savagery provided Italians’ moral complacency and post-war coverup of Italian war crimes with very good cover. As shown above, Italy has had good cover at the movies with Captain Corelli’s Mandolin and the critically acclaimed Mediterraneo, which “showed a Greek island’s occupiers playing football, sipping ouzo and flirting with the locals on a Greek island.” (https://www.theguardian.com/education/2001/jun/25/artsandhumanities.highereducation).

So did the bravery of Italian troops in the Italian-occupied parts of the Balkans who sought to protect local Jews from the Germans after Italy’s surrender on September 8, 1943, even as thousands of those soldiers were massacred by the Germans after they surrendered or deported to concentration camps. This has diverted the Italians’ attention from how most of Italian society supinely accepted fascism and Mussolini’s racial laws until Italy’s surrender. The Germans’ brutal occupation of central and northern Italy from 1943–45 made the Italians’ postwar reacquisition of their moral chastity much easier.

Accountability, ciao

Italy’s post-war coverup of its war crimes was not limited to the early post-war period nor due to worries about its large Communist Party benefitting from real accountability. With Communism nearing its Berlin Wall fall, Italy’s state broadcaster practiced Trump-like catch and kill with uncomfortable historical truth:

“Ken Kirby’s 1989 BBC Timewatch documentary, Fascist Legacy, detailing Italian crimes in Africa and the Balkans and the allies’ involvement in the cover-up, provoked furious complaints from Italy’s ambassador in London. The Italian state broadcaster, RAI, agreed to buy the two one-hour programmes, but executives got cold feet and for 11 years it has sat in a vault in Rome, too controversial to broadcast. “It’s the only time I can remember a client shelving a programme after buying it,” says a BBC executive.”

When shown at a Florence film festival, Kirby required security, and his historical consultant, Michael Palumbo, received several death threats. The threat these images posed to the myth of Italians as “brava gente” occupiers is clear:

Yekati massacre, February 19–21, 1937 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yekatit_12)

As late as 2001, Ethiopian workers stumbled upon an Italian arms depot containing mustard gas. This case shows how a lack of accountability for past war crimes can be dangerous in the present:

“Addis Ababa asked Rome to respect an international weapons treaty by revealing the location of stockpiles and helping to clear them. Like all other requests over past decades, it was rebuffed. “All efforts on Ethiopia’s side to convince Italy to live up to its responsibilities have failed,” lamented the government.” (https://www.theguardian.com/education/2001/jun/25/artsandhumanities.highereducation

Why, fifty-eight years after Italy’s surrender, did Ethiopia still have to confront Italian stonewalling regarding Italian war crimes in 1935–36? Because the poison gas bomber, General Badoglio, who replaced Mussolini as Prime Minister after the Allies invaded Sicily, managed to secure Italy’s “honorable capitulation” in lieu of unconditional surrender and Britain’s agreement to exclude Ethiopia from the seventeen nation United Nations’ War Crimes Commission, set up by Britain on October 20, 1943 (https://www.jstor.org/stable/41931229?read-now=1&seq=10#page_scan_tab_contents). This brings us to an ancient Italian tradition when faced with defeat or a more powerful foreign occupier: switching sides.

“Fare il furbo”: the big switch

This classic Italian colloquialism means to be tricky or underhanded. It’s a talent that’s very much admired in Italy, and partially explains the long run Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s Mussolini 2.0, or Musso-mini, enjoyed at or near the summit of Italian politics. Furbizia all’italiana — Italian-style trickery — refers to the specifically Italian talent for deceiving while apparently welcoming a much more powerful adversary or foreign occupier.

Since the barbarian invasions and sack of Rome by the Huns in 406–410, it’s a talent the Romans of the imploding empire and then Italians have cultivated for over 1500 years. Call it a kind of geopolitical jujitsu of the defeated to evade consequences of previous bad choices, such as opportunistically following a Ponzi-like dictator into an unwinnable war against the world’s largest empire allied with the world’s largest industrial power — the one across the ocean with the thickest phone books and millions of Italians’ cousins.

It all came to a head in the summer of 1943 with the Allied invasion of Sicily on July 10th, the fascist Grand Council removing Mussolini from power on July 25th, and Italy’s surrender and switch to the Allied side on September 8th–9th. The Allies announced the armistice before the new Italian government could communicate news of Italy switching sides to its army units. Italy betrayed its German allies while Mussolini’s replacement, General Pietro Badoglio, King Vittorio Emanuele betrayed a leaderless Italian army and population by fleeing by car from Rome to Brindisi.

“Victor Emmanuel wanted an officer who was committed to continuing the Fascist system, which led him to choose Badoglio who had faithfully served Mussolini and committed an array of atrocities in Ethiopia….” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pietro_Badoglio#World_War_II

This desertion, combined with the Anglo-American reluctance to collaborate with anti-fascist resistance forces in Italy that included communists and socialists, allowed the Germans to pour hundreds of thousands of troops and heavy weapons into Italy during the interregnum between Mussolini’s fall and Italy’s surrender. Within a few days of the armistice announcement, the Germans’ Operation Achse (Alarich) disarmed over a million Italian troops, annihilating the Italian army and state. Only in Sardinia, Corsica, southern Apulia, and Calabria were Italian units able to hold off the Germans until Allied relief arrived (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Achse).

Better coordination with Italy’s new government, its army commanders, and the resistance would have enabled the Allies to occupy Rome and most of central and northern Italy, as occurred in Sardinia, Corsica, southern Apulia, and Calabria. Where unit cohesion remained intact due to clear orders from their commanders, Italian army units fought far better against the Germans than they had against American soldiers in Sicily, 30% of whom spoke Italian. This is not just a speculative counterfactual:

“The overthrow of the Fascist regime surprised Great Britain and the United States who were unprepared to discuss an alliance with Italy. At the time of the coup, the Allies had six complete divisions and several independent brigades in North Africa that were as yet uncommitted to the Sicilian enterprise. These could have possibly made their way to the Italian peninsula. The missed opportunity of an immediate alliance between Italy and the Anglo-Americans prevented an eventual unopposed Allied invasion which might have resulted in the swift expulsion of German troops from Italy. The influx of additional German troops could have been avoided by closing the Brenner Pass or if Badoglio had stood up to Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, Commander in Chief of the German Army in Italy. Kesselring met with Badoglio immediately after the overthrow of Mussolini and stated he wanted to increase the number of German troops in Italy to counter further Allied invasion. Badoglio replied this had nothing to do with him but was a matter for the War Office. His response gave Kesselring a free hand in the matter, and the paratroopers that Hitler initially wanted to drop over Rome came over land along with many other troops, including several elite SS formations, which occupied the entire northern peninsula and took over the railways and official buildings. It was clear this was not to help Italy but to threaten its independence. Badoglio did nothing to prevent the German invasion, nor did he take immediate initiative to work out an armistice with the Allies. His inaction prompted Raffaele Guariglia, the Foreign Secretary, and General Giuseppe Castellano of the General Staff to make separate and independent attempts to negotiate with the Allies…” (https://digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1596&context=etd) “On September 8, 1943 there were four Italian divisions and only two German divisions in Rome. The Italian position appeared strong, as the Italian soldiers could count on the support of the Italian people while the Germans could not. Nevertheless, Marshall Enrico Caviglia, senior Italian military representative in Rome, signed a truce with General Siegfried Westphal who had assured him of the safety of Rome upon the surrender of all Italian arms. The following day the Italian Motorized Armored Corps, consisting of the Piave, Ariete, Granatieri and Centauro Divisions, was ordered to fall back to Tivoli to ensure the safe conduct of the royal entourage to Pescara….The commanders of the Piave, Ariete, and Granatieri Divisions disobeyed orders and with the aid of a spontaneously formed Italian militia, inflicted heavy casualties and damage to the German forces. However, when they prepared to enter Rome they were stopped by Marshall Caviglia who felt that Rome was indefensible. Lacking instructions from the king or Badoglio, he opted for what he considered the best choice for the safety of Rome; he ordered the Italian troops to cooperate with the Germans.” (https://digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1596&context=etd)

The King’s deluded wish to preserve the fascist regime that would merely switch sides combined with the Americans’ aversion to working with resistance coalitions that included Communist and Socialist partisans contributed to this disaster. This intrigue is recounted in great detail in Italy Betrayed by Peter Tompkins, the American OSS agent (Office Strategic Services, the forerunner of the CIA) in Rome. The documentary Fighting Paisanos, about four Italian-Americans who served in the OSS and the army in the Allied invasions of Sicily, Salerno, and Anzio unintentionally reveals this truth.

Frank Monteleone, a Sicilian-American, recounted this detail about his OSS service as Allied liaison with Italian partisans:

“Some were communists, others socialists, others democrats” — which meant communists and socialists could not be trusted to be democratic (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o6tzvvIZoZg , Fighting Paisanos, documentary, Marco Curti, 2013).

From OSS boss Wild Bill Donovan to this agent on the ground in Italy, the preconceptions were the same and prevented effective coordination with anti-fascist partisans and an Italian army that was more than ready to follow the Allied lead that was largely absent at the hinge moment of September 8–11, 1943.

The shifting sands of accountability for war crimes

Even though Roosevelt said on July 28th that he wanted the recently arrested Mussolini and “his fascist gang brought to book for their crimes against humanity”, he soon backtracked. On July 30th he telegraphed Churchill:

“The question of war criminals should not be brought up by General Eisenhower in his statement of his aims for an armistice….The war criminal problem can be taken up later…all demands by the Allied nations that are not essential to the present time should be postponed with the purpose of getting Italy out of the war at the earliest possible date.” (https://www.jstor.org/stable/41931229?read-now=1&seq=5#page_scan_tab_contents)

After Mussolini’s removal, the fascist regime itself rapidly collapsed. The British Foreign Office noted Communist demonstrations in Milan and Turin on August 7th, and on August 18th wrote of “revolts which could quite possibly terminate in revolution and anarchy.” (https://www.jstor.org/stable/41931229?read-now=1&seq=5#page_scan_tab_contents)

“Immediately after the war the Allied Forces investigated war crimes, criminal acts, and abuses of power by the Nazis and Fascists, both in and outside of Italy, and collected hundreds of documents. Interviews and investigations were conducted in the region of Tuscany by the United States Fifth Army. However, soon after, in the interest of normalizing relations between Italy and West Germany, solidifying the NATO alliance, opposition to the spread of communism, and as a result of mismanagement by the Italian administration the cases were hidden in a closet for decades. L’Armadio della Vergogna, the closet of shame, became Italy‘s little secret. The Italian Nuremberg‖ trial that was briefly contemplated from August 1945 to April 1946 never materialized…” (https://digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1596&context=etd)

Italian-run concentration camp, Rab Island, Croatia (Fascist Legacy documentary, Ken Kirby/BBC

The revisionist outcome for a half-century

For nearly half a century until a famous war crimes trial, the “brava gente” on both sides myth painted a revisionist picture of Italy’s wartime history — until a prosecutor looked in an armoire

2015 conference about “The armoire of shame, let’s look inside” . ANPI is the National Association of Italian Partisans, most of whose activities are now carried out by the partisans’ children and grandchildren. (https://anpibarona.blogspot.com/2015/02/anpi-cesano-boscone-armadio-della.html )

Poster about the Remembrance Day (anniversary of the liberation date of Auschwitz) motion in Italy’s parliament about the “armoire of shame” and Nazi-fascist war crimes. http://www.andreademaria.eu/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/669d0987-bd66-4563-9ec4-41ae3ad2ddb0.jpg

and found 695 folders about Italian and German war crimes eight years before Berlusconi said Mussolini was one of the greatest statesmen of the 20th century (https://ricerca.repubblica.it/repubblica/archivio/repubblica/2002/01/23/non-direi-piu-che-mussolini-fu-il.html?refresh_ce). National amnesia and mythology about Mussolini clearly formed an integral part of the pluto-populist Musso-mini’s political success.

The armoire of shame

“In 1994, military prosecutor Antonino Intelisano, who was at the time in charge of the trial against former SS officer Erich Priebke, accidentally uncovered the content of the wooden cabinet, which had remained stored for decades, face to the wall, in an unused room in Palazzo Cesi. Its contents had seemingly been placed in the armoire temporarily, probably in the immediate post-war months, and forgotten or (perhaps purposely) overlooked. The armoire contained the memorandum titled Atrocities in Italy, stamped “secret”, which had been compiled by the British Secret Intelligence Service, whose officers had documented the victims’ accusations and painstakingly collected depositions, and consigned it to the Italian magistrates, who failed to prosecute the individuals mentioned in the files, limiting publication of details and accusations to the cases against unnamed Nazi and fascist officers.” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palazzo_Cesi-Gaddi_war_crimes_archive)

We’ve seen how the Allied fear of democratic anti-fascist revolution that included socialists and communists and the post-Mussolini government’s betrayal triggered a catastrophically incompetent armistice process. The result: rapid Italian army disintegration and Italy’s transformation from criminal aggressor enemy to a martyred victim of Nazism. For different reasons, this outcome was convenient for both right and left in Italy, though far less so for historical truth and the victims of Italian fascism in Yugoslavia, Albania, Greece, and Ethiopia.

The mountain of visual and documentary evidence recounted by the witnesses in the Fascist Legacy and the 695 folders of documents found in the Armoir of Shame prove beyond doubt that the Italian military’s behavior in the Balkan and African territories it occupied was indistinguishable from the Wehrmacht. It’s time to leave the mythmaking legends of Mediterraneo and Captain Corelli’s Mandolin on the cutting room floor.

The Netherlands is the third stop on our WWII mythology tour, after WWII east vs west and Italy. What’s the common thread tying together all the stops on our tour? A narcissistic populist nationalism that evades uncomfortable truths that threaten victimology if the nation was defeated and occupied, or an emotionally satisfying glorious victory if it was on the winning side. The latter is the keystone of national ego in the UK, the USA and the former USSR. Commemorating mythologized glorious victories defines a backward-looking, nostalgist sense of national identity that feeds into contemporary anti-globalization nationalist populism.

Common to Each Stop on our Tour: Nationalist Populism Rooted in Mythologized History

Mythologized history has contributed to blitz and Dunkirk-fed Brexit, America First Trumpism, Putin’s revanchist nationalism and the war in eastern Ukraine. Nations, like individual psychotherapy patients, can remain stuck in the Einsteinian definition of insanity — trying the same thing over and over again and expecting a better result. Nations, even more than individuals, remain possessed by scripted mythology that prevents looking in the mirror of their defeats shorn of mythologized victimology and their victories without the glorification that feeds populist paranoia and nationalist fantasy.

Reflective, collective emotional intelligence is not part of the business model of building the scaled up imaginary communities of unrelated strangers we call nations. The cost? Just ask any German or Japanese in bombed-out Berlin or Tokyo in 1946 whether indulging in ego-feeding stab in the back or Bushido fantasies was worth the price paid. Each country on our WWII Mythology Tour has paid for its own mix of hubris, delusional self-deception and evasion of uncomfortable truths, though differently. The USSR and the UK won the war and lost the peace economically and geopolitically. The Germans, Italians and Japanese lost the war and full sovereignty, but won the peace economically. Germany’s eastern European allies — Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, Croatia — lost all three. The USA won all three but confused picking low-hanging postwar geopolitical and economic fruit and cold war victory with permanent global dominance. It then revived Lindbergh’s pro-Nazi isolationist America First slogan when disillusioned with the costs of empire. Most of the stops on our WWII Mythology Tour involve nations confronting the costs of empire-building. Nazism’s Lebensraum and Italian fascism’s neo-Roman imperial fantasies involved European imperialism’s white supremacist ideology boomeranging back onto Europe, at the cost of millions of lives. As psychotropic drugs go, narcissistic nationalism is the most lethal and widely distributed on earth.

The next stop on our WWII mythology tour of national amnesia and self-deception: the Netherlands.

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References:

Italy Betrayed, Peter Tompkins, 1966

Italy’s Bloody Secret, Rory Carroll, The Guardian, June 25, 2001 https://www.theguardian.com/education/2001/jun/25/artsandhumanities.highereducation

Addis Ababa Memorial Service in Pictures, The Guardian, February 20, 2018, Yonas Tadesse https://www.theguardian.com/world/gallery/2018/feb/20/addis-ababa-massacre-memorial-service-in-pictures

Yekatit 12 refers to the massacre[1] and imprisonment of Ethiopians by the Italian occupation forces following an attempted assassination of Marshal Rodolfo Graziani (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yekatit_12 )

How Journalists Covered the Rise of Mussolini and Hitler, Smithsonian, December, 13, 2016, John Broich (https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-journalists-covered-rise-mussolini-hitler-180961407/)

Fascist Legacy (documentary), Ken Kirby/BBC, 1989 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YVk1aAU811Q)

Fighting Paisanos (documentary), Marco Curti, 2013 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o6tzvvIZoZg&t=1960s)

Italian Fascist War Crimes in Ethiopia: A History of Their Discussion, from the League of Nations to the United Nations (1936–1949), Richard Pankhurst, Northeast African Studies, New Series, Vol. 6, №1/2 (1999), pp. 83–140 (58 pages), Published by: Michigan State University Press (https://www.jstor.org/stable/41931229)

Lamarre, Lynda, “Heroes or Terrorists? War, Resistance, and Memorialization in Tuscany, 1943–1945” (2011). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 596. https://digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu/etd/596

Benevolence and Betrayal: Five Italian Jewish Families Under Fascism by Alexander Stille, 2003

Pietro Badoglio wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pietro_Badoglio#World_War_II

Corelli’s Mandolin movie, 2001, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LgTpDXy5c7s

Mediterraneo movie, 1992, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3WJvaEjAlU&t=11s