The republic of Salò (the Italian Social Republic) and the German occupation

In the meantime the Germans had rescued Mussolini from his mountain prison and restored him in the north as ruler of the “Italian Social Republic,” a last-ditch puppet Fascist regime based in Salò on Lake Garda. The republic tried to induct those born in 1923, 1924, and 1925 into its army, but only 40 percent of young men responded. Many others deserted soon after the call-up. In a congress held in Verona in November 1943, the “republic of Salò” seemed to take a leftward turn, calling for an end to the monarchy and a more worker-oriented ideology, but this program never went into practice. Some of the leading Fascists who had voted out the duce in July 1943, including Mussolini’s son-in-law, the former foreign minister Galeazzo Ciano, were tried by a Fascist court and shot. Meanwhile, Fascist officials collaborated with the German army and essentially followed Hitler’s orders as the war continued in the north and centre. Official and unofficial armed bands roamed the big cities arresting suspected partisans (members of the Resistance) and terrorizing the local population.

The German occupiers ruled through violence and the aid of the local Fascists. Throughout German-occupied Italy, Jews and oppositionists were rounded up and sent to detention camps or prisons. Many Jews were sent straight from Italy on trains to concentration and extermination camps in Poland and Germany. In all, nearly 9,000 Jews were deported under the Germans. Only 980 returned. The biggest deportation occurred in Rome in October 1943, when the Germans gathered more than 1,000 Jews from the city’s ghetto and sent them to death camps. The Jewish community had been forced early on to hand over gold and money to the German army. One concentration camp on Italian soil, near Trieste, also had an oven for burning bodies. Some 8,000 Italians (of whom 300 were Jews) were deported to Mauthausen in Austria. Only 850 came back alive.

The German army responded to partisan activity with violence and reprisals. A series of massacres of civilians and partisans accompanied the German occupation and gradual retreat up the peninsula. In March 1944, after a partisan bomb attack killed 33 members of the occupying forces in Rome, the German army shot 335 people (Jews, Communists, and others) in the Fosse Ardeatine, caves located outside the city. This massacre was one of the biggest of the war in Italy and has inspired controversy ever since. (In the 1990s a former Nazi captain, Erich Priebke, was arrested in Argentina and, after two dramatic trials, was convicted in Rome for his role in the massacre.) Elsewhere the German army carried out frequent brutal and random massacres of civilians as they retreated northward, above all in Tuscany and Emilia, where German troops destroyed an entire village of some 1,800 people at Marzabotto in 1944. In addition, the Germans deported hundreds of thousands of young men to work as forced labourers in Germany and elsewhere. Fiat workers struck against these deportations in March 1944. Many of those deported died en route.

Mussolini faded from view and appeared less and less in public, making his last speech in Milan in December 1944. As defeat became more and more likely, he made plans for his escape and tried to negotiate a deal with the Allies. In April 1945 Mussolini and his government fled to Milan, and later, disguised as a German soldier, he attempted to cross the border to Switzerland. Discovered by Communist partisans, he was shot in a small town on Lake Como. His body was taken to Milan and displayed for a time in Piazzale Loreto, along with the bodies of several other Fascist ministers and leaders, hung by their feet at a service station in front of huge festive crowds. These events have generated controversy and debate ever since. Other leading Fascists were executed across Italy during the days of liberation. Mussolini’s remains, after being interred in various places, were finally buried in 1957 at his birthplace in Predappio, in the Romagna.