Journal of Modern Italian Studies

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Defeated? An analysis of Fascist memoirist

literature and its success

Andrea Martini

To cite this article: Andrea Martini (2020): Defeated? An analysis of Fascist memoirist literature
and its success, Journal of Modern Italian Studies, DOI: 10.1080/1354571X.2020.1750795

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/1354571X.2020.1750795

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JOURNAL OF MODERN ITALIAN STUDIES
https://doi.org/10.1080/1354571X.2020.1750795

Defeated? An analysis of Fascist memoirist literature

and its success
Andrea Martini
Verona, Italy

ABSTRACT
In this article the author analyses the Fascists’ ability, after the end of the war, to
present a memory of the recent past which achieved its aims at least among a
significant number of Italians. The success of the Fascist memoirist literature
was helped by its tendency to replicate arguments made in post-war courts by
people charged with collaborationism. Another important factor was the poli-
tical authorities’ decision to bring the period of the purges to a premature end.
This turning point in Italy’s transition neutered the initial verdicts and legit-
imized the Fascists’ version of events.
RIASSUNTO
In questo articolo l’autore si sofferma sulle capacità dei fascisti di elaborare alla
fine della guerra una memoria del recente passato capace di raccogliere un
consenso significativo tra gli italiani. In particolare, il saggio intende dimostrare
come l’affermazione della memorialistica fascista sia stata favorita dalla sua
tendenza a replicare le tesi pronunciate in tribunale dai collaborazionisti sotto-
posti a processo nel dopoguerra e dalla decisione dei governi che si succedet-
tero di chiudere il più in fretta possibile la stagione dell’epurazione. Questa
inversione di rotta vanificò i verdetti iniziali, legittimando la versione dei
fascisti.

KEYWORDS neo-Fascism; Fascist legacy; Italian Social Republic (R.S.I.); purge; transitional justice

PAROLE CHIAVE Neofascismo; Memorialistica fascista; RSI; Epurazione; Giustizia di transizione

A victorious lost cause

In Italy, despite the outcome of the Second World War – specifically the fall of
the Italian Social Republic (R.S.I) and the death of Benito Mussolini – the
ideology of Fascism did not disappear. If it had done so, it would not be
possible to explain the success enjoyed by Ho difeso la patria (1947), a text in
which the former Minister of Defence at the time of the R.S.I., Rodolfo
Graziani, sought to show Italians how, following the 8 September armistice,
he and many other Fascists had paid a heavy price in the interests of the
nation. The prestigious Milanese publisher Garzanti, which secured the rights
to the book, published five editions in few months and subsequently gave
voice to other figures of the Fascist years, such as Giovanni Dolfin and Filippo
© 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
2 A. MARTINI

Anfuso, respectively in 1949 and 1950. It would also not be possible to

comprehend how the weekly magazine Rivolta ideale – which was explicitly
linked to the neo-Fascist sphere – could, in the 1950s, increase its circulation
to around 150,000 copies (Pardini 2008; Focardi 2005, 21). Even periodicals
like Oggi and Gente and newspapers like Il Tempo, which were all moderate
and certainly not Fascist, during the 1940s and 1950s resolutely represented
the former regime in honeyed terms and characterized Mussolini as someone
sincerely committed to improving the fortunes of Italy (Baldassini 2008). In
short, in 1945 Fascism had emerged politically and militarily defeated, but, as
Angelo Ventrone has suggested (2017, 133–154), its cause and ideology were
far from beaten.
A key factor in its survival was the Fascists’ ability to formulate certain
persuasive ‘rhetorical techniques’ that leveraged the founding myth of the
lost war, downplaying the contradictions of the past and depicting them-
selves first as victims of partisan violence and then of the distortions of the
democratic judiciary (Calleja and Pinto 2017, 13). It mattered little that the
exclusion of the radical right had been more ‘presumed’ than real (Bertagna
2013, p.6), since its components did not hesitate to represent themselves as
‘exiles at home’ (as one of its exponents, Alberto Giovannini, editor of the
weekly Rosso e Nero, put it),1 or as ‘poor devils’ (Almirante 1973, 131–132),
without any ‘right of citizenship in Europe’ (Anfuso 1950, 11) and ‘isolated
from the others’ (Pettinato 1949, 67).
Other elements have, however, contributed to a view of Fascism as a
‘victorious lost cause’, similar to that of the Confederates, the Bourbons,
Catalans and Russia’s Revolutionary Socialist Party (Calleja and Pinto 2017,
9–17). The political situation resulting from the war, for instance, was decisive:
most of the parties, including the Communists, were well disposed to wel-
coming the Fascists into their ranks with the aim of acquiring greater electoral
power, while the Church itself hoped that a peaceful climate would spread
among Italians and heal the country’s wartime wounds. The international
context was also crucial, and the advent of the Cold War meant that in Italy, as
throughout Western Europe, the Fascists were no longer seen as the main
enemy to repress. Indeed, they could help contain the new challenge, the
Communist advance (Parlato 2017, 44).
This article, however, intends to demonstrate how the success of the ‘other
memory’ – as Francesco Germinario (1999) called the Fascist memoirist
literature in order to contrast it with that of the anti-Fascist culture –
depended on two other elements: the ability to devise a version of the facts
similar to that produced by the ‘fighters for Salò’2 (Gagliani 2001, 627)
brought to trial after the war, and the possibility of profiting from a purge
that was extremely contradictory and, in the main, weak. The purge is
currently the object of renewed interest on the part of Italian historiography,
to the point that there are now local and national studies reconstructing in
 JOURNAL OF MODERN ITALIAN STUDIES 3

detail the trial processes of Fascists and so-called collaborationists (Martini

2019; Verardo 2018; Nubola, Pezzino and Rovatti 2019) as well as the political
dynamics that influenced the results. These have led to the creation of a freely
searchable database of a wide range of information, such as, for example, the
names of defendants, presiding magistrates and injured parties.3
Even so, I believe that Italian historians have not yet paid sufficient atten-
tion to the potential narrative nature that characterized the courtrooms, in
particular during the transition phases, as demonstrated by the convincing
studies of Mark J. Osiel (1997, 2005) and Ruti Teitel (2001). A similar gap exists
on the issue of how these narratives ended up conditioning, at least in part,
the construction of a public memory (or public memories, in the plural)
around wartime events and Fascism. And yet even in Italy, as will be
explained in detail, the courts involved in the trials of Fascists and Nazi
collaborators tried to become vectors of a ‘homeland history’ (Woller [1996]
1997, 421), but they failed because the purging process was delegitimized
and weakened after only a few months by the action of at least some political
forces which for various reasons lacked the motivation to deal with the recent
past. All this, as we shall show, ended up benefiting the Fascist cause.
Joining together the issue of the origins of a Fascist counter-narrative and
the events of the purge is a risky operation, but one that is essential for
understanding what allowed the Fascist cause to enjoy some credit among
Italians despite what had happened during the years of the regime and the war.
To do this, it is necessary to cross-reference the procedural depositions and the
memoirs of some collaborationists brought to trial with the literature produced
by the neo-Fascists in the immediate post-war period, following a research
pathway which, as far as I know, has not been well trodden by historiography.
This involves comparing two sets of extremely different sources.
The depositions were intended to improve the trial position of the
accused, to justify his actions, and their rhetorical approach was aimed at
winning the favour of the court president and the jurors, being, moreover,
written with the help of lawyers and sometimes even dictated by them.
Conversely, in the memoirs and autobiographies, despite there still being
the need to omit certain details to avoid judicial problems (a fear that
dissipated with the passing of time), the Fascists’ story appears to be more
sincere, albeit not without some artificiality resulting from the authors’
desires to satisfy the tastes and expectations of their readers. Nonetheless,
despite the different nature of these two types of sources, the self-representa-
tion of the Fascists does not change, as if – as I have just said – the fighters for
Salò had wanted to use their works to take ownership of the motions and
theses set out in court by those who had been tried after the war.
A further clarification must be made concerning the number of trial
depositions and memoirs consulted. I have focused my attention on the
memoirist literature produced in the 1940s and 1950s – reviewed, to the
4 A. MARTINI

best of my knowledge, in their entirety – but I have excluded those of the

following decades. It was, anyhow, between 1945 and around 1955 that the
bulk of Fascist literature was produced, albeit with some important excep-
tions (one thinks of Carlo Mazzantini’s famous work of 1986, A cercar la bella
morte, which took up themes that the author had already probed in the
immediate post-war in the story Un soldato e una canzone, which is consid-
ered in this article). Furthermore, the aim of the essay is not so much to
observe how the Fascist political culture developed (and changed) during the
second half of the twentieth century. While it would be interesting to eval-
uate the continuity and discontinuity of the Fascist narrative, doing so would
go beyond the confines of this study which instead aims to understand the
rhetorical means by which the Fascists managed to put down new roots in
the aftermath of 1945 and to observe how the extremely contradictory purge
facilitated the positive outcome of that ‘lost cause’. However, I have not been
able to examine all the records deposited in the Prosecutor’s office by
imprisoned collaborators (partly because the number of Fascists tried after
the war was in the tens of thousands), but I have nevertheless tried to collect
as great a variegated and unpublished sample as possible, passing over the
leading figures of the R.S.I. in preference for more ordinary subjects with
different social histories and profiles: common men and women, as
Christopher Browning (2004) would have said, all linked by their faith in
Fascism.

The accused Fascists’ version of events

Subjected to rigorous interrogation, the Fascists were called to give their own
version of events, one which would later be appraised in the trial and, in some
cases, in requests for clemency sent to the President of the Republic. Most of
the time these were brief statements made in answer to questions posed by
the judicial authorities, and, as previously noted, they were constantly
mediated by lawyers. Even so, the statements give us a broad idea of how
the fighters for Salò argued their case and viewed their conduct.
Let us take as an example Domenico Focà, one of the thousands of people
who after the 8 September armistice took the side of the R.S.I., joining the Black
Brigades (B.N.) the following summer. Wearing that uniform Focà had been a
member of at least two platoons which, in the Veneto between November 1944
and January 1945 killed eight people, partisans, anti-Fascists and rebels.4 After the
war, he was arrested and sent to Venice’s Santa Maria Maggiore prison. His trial
took place after such a considerable delay that on 19 October 1946 the defendant
sent an account to the provisional head of state in which he gave his version of
events.5 In the spring of 1943 Focà had just been recalled to the navy with the
rank of sergeant when a bomb hit his home in Naples, forcing him to move with
his family to the north of Italy. Having settled in the Veneto, after the
 JOURNAL OF MODERN ITALIAN STUDIES 5

establishment of the R.S.I. he was urged by the Fascist authorities to join the army.
At first he chose not to answer the call, but in around March 1944 the dire
economic conditions he was in drove him to enrol in the local branch of the
Republican Fascist Party (P.F.R.). That decision guaranteed him certain benefits as
a disaster victim, as well as a shopkeeper’s licence. Thanks to Fascism, it seemed
he would be able to leave behind the suffering of the recent past. His enrolment
in the P.F.R. occurred just before the establishment of the B.N. and the subsequent
militarization of the Party, which became a veritable ‘military organism’, and he,
‘for the benefits received’, thought he was left with no option but to take part in it.
According to Focà’s reconstruction, he was induced to join the Social
Republic by a series of material contingencies. Yet his statement nevertheless
indicated some empathy for Fascism. It is true that the former R.S.I. soldier
declared himself to be non-political, stressing that his membership of the B.N.
had been prompted by ‘moral coercion’, but the impression is that this claim
stuck to the widely practised strategy adopted by prisoners accused of
collaborationism: that is, to depoliticize their conduct. By inference, Focà
appeared to admit that a strong emotional tie had bound him to Fascism,
which had supported him in the difficult months when he had been forced to
live as a disaster victim. It was precisely the mantle of a welfare organization
in which Republic of Salò cloaked itself that drove him to espouse the cause.
While in prison another defendant, Umberto Pepi, also returned several
times to the reasons that led him to support the R.S.I. In an account written in
May 1945, a few days after the start of the trial that would sentence him to
capital punishment,6 he confessed that he had been ‘one of the first to join
the P.F.R.’7 It was a decision that he did not intend to deny:

I have always fervently maintained that to save the Fatherland from the abyss of
defeat, [it was] necessary to forget about any discrepancy or political error of
men . . . and make a granite block of bodies and ideas in the overriding interest
of our national honour and lineage.

He declared that to obviate the possibility of the country suffering military

defeat it was essential to support the R.S.I: ‘If Upper Italy had not had a Fascist
government, the heel of Germany would have made itself felt all the more.’
Pepi’s thesis is not surprising, for it was in fact one of the arguments most
commonly used by those on trial as well as in all the post-war memoirs,
starting with Graziani’s book Ho difeso la patria (see Colao 2015).
Pepi further stated that during the twenty years of Fascism he had not
shrunk from criticizing it, especially with regard to policies ‘in the social field’,
to the extent of falling victim to a ‘persecution’, about which however he did
not provide details. In any case, with the establishment of the R.S.I. any form
of suspicion against him fell away, otherwise his ascent could not be
explained: he was made head of the union economics office, then head of
the political office of the Fascist federation, and finally an officer in the B.N. It
6 A. MARTINI

is clear that Pepi was retrospectively attempting to improve his position, not
so much by denying the political nature of his decisions – it would have been
almost impossible to do so – but by endeavouring to overlay them with
patriotic vindication. Nevertheless, Pepi’s profile was that of a convinced
Fascist, eager to suppress partisan activity by any means, as shall be made
clear later on.
For his part, Italo Paltrinieri never wrote a real memoir during his incarcera-
tion between 9 May and 28 June 1945, the date on which the body respon-
sible for trying him, the Modena Extraordinary Court of Assize (C.A.S.),
acquitted him of the accusation of collaborationism for lack of evidence.8
Nevertheless, the accused, in the course of several interrogations and in a
letter addressed to the procurator’s office, had the opportunity to recreate
the path that had led him to join the R.S.I. and to be part of the National
Republican Guard (G.N.R.). He specified that he had initially been uninterested
in the country’s political affairs, until in December 1943 he had received a
formal request to join the Republic of Salò, at which point he could not see
how, as ‘a former member of the militia,’ he could refuse.
The statement is perplexing: Paltrinieri might have thought it useful to join
the P.F.R. in order to receive economic assistance, but he was under no
obligation to join the G.N.R. It is much more likely that he shared the values
of the R.S.I., not least because he was a long-time Fascist who had enlisted in
the Voluntary Militia for National Security in 1921. Indeed, in a letter sent to
the Public Prosecutor, he admitted that he had felt a certain ‘enthusiasm’
towards the ‘resurrected Fascist republic’,9 although that enthusiasm faded
over time: with the passing of the days, he struggled to recognize himself in
the values of the R.S.I., because of the men involved in it who – according to
him – represented ‘the dregs and not the cream of the party’. At that point, he
decided to abandon politics and make contact with the local branch of the
National Liberation Committee (C.L.N.) in an attempt to lend a hand to the
partisans in the area or, more likely, in the hope of acquiring – as many other
Fascists sought to do – some links to the Resistance movement that might
prove beneficial when the conflict was over.
Having been called to account for their actions, Focà, Pepi and Paltrinieri,
and with them many others, depoliticized their conduct and hastened to
declare themselves innocent, in keeping with a narrative canon of which
Guglielmo Giannini’s magazine, L’Uomo qualunque (and the movement of
the same name), had been the mouthpiece for some months.10

The removal of violence

Focà declared that he had done no more than follow the instructions of his
superiors and that he had never been known for particular commitment or
zeal,11 and yet after the war he had to answer the accusation of having been
 JOURNAL OF MODERN ITALIAN STUDIES 7

part of two execution platoons that had slain eight individuals. He defended
himself by saying that he had merely obeyed orders:

As a soldier I could not refuse. Nor could I . . . determine that the trial had been
illegal, that the general officers and superiors were wrong, that the prefect was
wrong, that the various provincial, military and political commanders were
wrong, that the magistrates were wrong.

This ‘tirelessly repeated refrain’ (Browning 2004, 177) was the defensive
strategy most deployed by thousands of ordinary men and women brought
to trial in Italy and elsewhere on charges of collaborationism.
As Carlo Greppi (2016, 86) has recalled: ‘I was only signing, I was a soldier
not a policeman, I was only carrying out arrests, I only did my duty’ were the
most recurrent claims of collaborators who hoped that the judges would be
convinced that they were not dealing with oppressors, but rather with victims
of a highly complex system. Nevertheless, a passage of Focà’s testimony
reveals that he had taken part in military operations not only because he
had received orders from above, but also because he was driven by hatred of
the partisans: he denied ever having taken part in ‘raids’, ‘beatings’ and ‘the
killing of patriots’, unless ‘by patriots one . . . means common delinquents and
murderers and other lawbreakers’, a statement that betrays his political
sympathies and the violent spirit that animated him.
In Pepi’s case, too, it is enough to read carefully the statements he made to
the judicial authorities to see how he contradicted himself, presumably in
spite of his defence attorney trying to ensure he kept to a consistent line. For
example, he claimed as a personal achievement the peaceful atmosphere
that prevailed in Venice in the aftermath of 8 September 1943 (‘for as long as
the politics of the city depended on me’, the life of the town was not
disturbed ‘neither by spilling of blood nor by episodes worthy of mention’)
not realizing that by doing so he belied his original claim of having played
only a marginal role in the R.S.I.12 He also found himself in difficulty when he
was required to declare his non-involvement in the killing of two partisans in
the province of Pordenone in September 1944. During an operation carried
out by the Fascists to intercept draft dodgers and deserters, two youths were
stopped at a checkpoint, and one was gunned down while attempting to
escape, while the second one was placed against the wall and shot.13 Pepi
first declared that he had commanded the platoon that slew the two young
men, but later said that he had merely encouraged the soldiers to follow the
orders of a German colonel who ordered the shooting.14 Even greater diffi-
culties emerged when Pepi was forced to answer accusations of torturing
people questioned in Cà Littoria, the headquarters of the Venetian Fascist
federation. In the trial phase, Pepi stated that he had witnessed interrogations
in which prisoners were administered mustard oil as a method of torture and
admitted that he had never objected to it. This version clashed with what he
8 A. MARTINI

had earlier claimed in the police headquarters when he had shifted all
responsibility onto Cà Littoria’s doctor and claimed that, while personally
resolved never to resort to the practice, he had been unable to prevent others
from using it. However, in a subsequent interrogation he acknowledged that
he had used the technique at least once and thus, by denying all accusations,
he betrayed himself several times and ended up sealing his fate.
Like Pepi, Carolina Knoll, born in Merano, a small town close to Bozen, tried
everything to convince the court of her innocence (Nubola 2016, 152–168).
She, together with her brother Ugo and father Augusto, all supporters of the
Nazis, was accused of having taken part in the Massacre of Merano on 30 April
1945 – the day of the liberation of the South Tyrolean town (Perez 2000, 149–
165) – which left eight people dead and around twenty injured.15 The Knoll
family had been involved specifically in the incidents on via Diaz: a celebra-
tory procession of citizens was heading towards the town centre when a
group of German soldiers armed with pistols shot at them, killing five people.
The other demonstrators fled, seeking shelter in nearby homes. But they had
to reckon with the zeal of the Knolls, particularly Carolina who incited a
member of the Schutzstaffel (S.S.) to shoot one of them. During her trial,
Carolina adhered to the version she gave when first interrogated, that is, that
she had witnessed a German soldier kill the demonstrator point-blank before
she could prevent the crime.16 Even while awaiting judgement, when inter-
viewed by an Alto Adige newspaper reporter, she showed no remorse (Nubola
2016, 149–151).
At this point it is necessary to consider whether the process of suppressing
all mention of violence, which we find in all these cases, is echoed in the
Fascist literature of those same years and those immediately following. Is it
true, as Luciano Allegra suggests, that violence is the ‘great absentee’ of the
Fascist memoirs of the 1940s and 1950s (Allegra 2010, 308)? There is no
shortage of texts to examine, given that the Fascists quickly produced a
counter-history composed of autobiographies, memoirs and novels, some
of which were published by important publishing houses such as Garzanti
(Graziani 1947; Dolfin 1949; Anfuso 1950). Naturally, these texts present
different traits, even if one accepts Raffaele Liucci’s (1996, 58) affirmation
that the works in which fiction prevails over reality are distinguished by their
greater ‘vitality’ and ‘sincerity’. Thus in Donne e mitra (1950) by Enrico de
Boccard, one of the main exponents of neo-Fascist literature, the reader finds
himself immersed in battle scenarios from the opening pages of the book and
confronts violence of both sides. While the aim of accentuating the fratricidal
dimension of the conflict and of establishing an equivalence between the two
fronts appears clear, it must be duly noted that the writer had no intention of
downplaying the use of force by the Fascists. The chapter Morti sulla piazza,
for instance, tells of the occupation of a small town at the hands of a partisan
gang and then describes how, after the R.S.I. soldiers are freed following a
 JOURNAL OF MODERN ITALIAN STUDIES 9

hard-fought shootout, the partisan survivors were riddled with bullets on the
steps of the town hall (38).
Death also dominates Augusto Ceracchini’s Bandiera proibita (1951), which
blends fiction with autobiography. The author, who recounts his exploits as a
soldier of the Tagliamento Legion in romanticized form, dwells on the dozens
of battles he had to face and in which he did not hesitate to shoot at the
partisans. The same approach characterizes most of the stories collected by
Pietro Caporilli in 1949 for the Edizioni ardita publishers. I racconti della guerra
tradita arose out of a project directed by the neo-Fascist weekly Asso di
bastoni which offered a prize for the best stories set in the years between
1940 and 1945. Some of these were published in the periodical, while others
were included in Caporilli’s volume. There was also no shortage of stories
emerging as a veritable hymn to Fascism and the nation, such as Rina Borelli
Montanari’s . . . E fu come una canzone, which tells the story of a young Fascist
paratrooper who, after being captured by the British and sentenced to death,
says that he had no regrets ‘because I was a soldier and I did it for my
homeland’ (1949, 28), although the more frequent stories are those in
which there is an unabashed portrayal of violence.
Emblematic of this is a work by the young Mazzantini Un soldato e una
canzone, a story that takes place in Slovenia and centres on a gunfight
between Fascist soldiers and partisans barricaded in a house. The narrator
follows the actions of Gianni, an R.S.I. soldier who wants to kill as many rebels
as possible:

Three men come towards him, their weapons at the ready. They have no time to
take aim as the machine gunner’s hand squeezes the trigger. A burst. They
grasp their bellies, their faces, as if to staunch the gushing of blood, they curl up,
and are on the ground.

When another partisan arrives, the Fascist does not hesitate to shoot again: ‘a
burst of fire. The man rolls down the stairs as if split in two, spouting out
blood and gasps of air’. Then there is silence, the adversaries are all dead,
while drops of blood fall from Gianni’s helmet and one of them lands ‘on the
white-hot weapon and hisses’ (1949, 169).
By and large, then, Allegra’s thesis needs some scaling down: gunfights,
death and violence were key features of neo-Fascist novels; characteristics,
moreover, which were not lacking in the literature of the resistance, if one
considers for example Beppe Fenoglio’s Partigiano Johnny (1968). In the case
of the neo-Fascists, however, the violence was accompanied by other themes,
such as love of the homeland, a sense of honour coupled with a desire not to
betray the German ally, which has already been found in the analysis of some
court cases. Nevertheless, alongside these texts, there was a literary produc-
tion that was much more reticent about describing the brutal nature of war
and of Fascism: this comprised a vast number of memoirs – written mainly,
10 A. MARTINI

but not only, by figures who held political positions of some importance in
the R.S.I. – as well as some pioneering attempts to write a history of the Social
Republic, albeit one based on a most erratic use of sources. In these works, as
Germinario has written (2006, 29), the most interesting aspects are those
which are absent: violence is silenced or muted and personal responsibility is
denied. Admissions of guilt are rare while references to homeland and
honour abound.
Take the book by Anfuso, Roma Berlino Salò, in which the former ambas-
sador, referring to the B.N., stressed how they took that name from the colour
of their shirts and not from the ‘purposes’ that inspired them. Members of the
B.N. limited themselves to ‘saving their skin’ and were no longer thirsty for the
blood of their partisan adversaries (1950, 557). In the epilogue of his novel,
entitled Itinerario tragico, a sort of autobiographic account, Giorgio Pini,
editor of Il Resto del Carlino (the main newspaper of Bologna) at the time of
the R.S.I, as well as undersecretary of the Interior Ministry and member of the
Fascist extraordinary court of the summer of 1944, described the men of the
Republic of Salò as ‘faithful to the Lord’ and to Italy and victims of a ‘fraternal
massacre’ (1950, 310).
When we move on to personal responsibility, this approach does not
change. Pini, when accused of having presided over several sessions of the
Fascist extraordinary provincial court of Florence, declared that he had always
listened to ‘the voice of . . . conscience’. ‘One thing was certain from the
beginning,’ he insisted, ‘no force in the world would have made me impose
death sentences’ (1950, 97–98). The memoirs of the Minister of the Armed
Forces in the R.S.I., Graziani, were of a similar type. He made every effort to
‘minimise the evil that so violently struck Italy and the Italian people’, using
himself as a ‘shield’ and making sure that the soldiers interned in Germany
lived in the best possible conditions (1947, 381).
Particularly interesting is the case of Stanis Ruinas and his book Pioggia
sulla repubblica (1946). A ‘fervent supporter of the social interventionism of
the Fascist regime’ (Liucci 1996, 56), historians have attributed to this
Sardinian journalist a peculiar position because of his post-war rapproche-
ment with the Communists and, more generally, for the critical approach that
he took towards Fascism, starting with his memoirs. He did not hesitate to call
certain members of the R.S.I. ‘the flower of rogues and chancers’ and to make
ironic comments about the transformation of Fascism into a sort of ‘Grand
Duchy of Tuscany’ by dint of the considerable power held by the Fascist
Tuscan front, especialy Alessandro Pavolini (Ruinas 1946, 5, 26). Yet even
Ruinas was quick to exonerate himself, removing every stain on his conduct.
According to him, his decision to support the R.S.I. was based on a desire to
prevent the German ‘beast’ from taking a ‘huge bite’ out of Italy and had been
a matter of honour: ‘withdrawing from the struggle after three years of
suffering and joining the opposite side of the barricade’, he wrote, ‘meant
 JOURNAL OF MODERN ITALIAN STUDIES 11

earning the scorn of the Allies, who at the final reckoning would have denied
us even Judas’s thirty pieces of silver’ (1946, 12). His entire time in the ranks of
the Social Republic, he asserted, was aimed at avoiding civil war and promot-
ing ‘an action for the harmony of minds’ (1946, 19). Like him, the fighters for
Salò ‘were, for the most part, good soldiers, good fathers, citizens with clean
hands, prudent administrators’ (1946, 46): there is no trace of any Fascist
criminality and violence on any page of his book.
Consequently, the sole partial exception appears to be the text by Ugo
Manunta, La caduta degli angeli (1947). A contributor to newspapers like L’ora
and Secolo sera, as well as undersecretary of the Labour Ministry during the R.
S.I., he provided one of the first reconstructions of events as well as the one
most disposed to recognize the limits of Fascism. To his mind, rather than
‘restraining . . . the Germanic invasion and giving Italians the right to govern
themselves’, the most reactionary wing of Fascism lent weight to the Nazis
(1947, 214). The P.F.R., he added, ‘should never have taken responsibility for
the repression of political movements which, while against the war, were
primarily against the war of the Germans’ (1947, 215–216). He considered
unacceptable the fact that the German forces had been given undiscriminat-
ing support by the G.N.R. and B.N. His self-criticism is inescapable, but it
should be contextualized: Manunta, like Ruinas, belonged to the most refor-
mist wing of Fascism, which called for the socialization of the national
economy in line with the Manifesto of Verona and was destined to play a
minority role in the ranks of the P.F.R. (Ganapini 1999, 367–452). Thus, one
gains the impression that the journalist wrote this book to settle a series of
outstanding accounts with his opponents.
In a study dedicated to the neo-Fascist press which, like the literary
production, had a somewhat noteworthy vivacity in the post-war period,
Elisabetta Cassina Wolff underlined how among the survivors of Salò there
flourished significant divergences when it came to assessing the twenty years
of the Fascist dictatorship and the R.S.I. Rejecting the thesis of Germinario,
who had spoken of a publication directed exclusively at self-justification and
self-satisfaction, the scholar stressed the presence of certain critical positions,
except on the question of anti-Semitism, which remained an absolute taboo
in Fascist circles (2012, 62–63). As regards the civil war specifically, she
claimed that two different positions prevailed among the Fascists: that of
Giorgio Pini and that of Piero Operti. The former, which appeared in the
magazine Fracassa in September 1949, affirmed that ‘the responsibility of the
civil war which tore Italy apart . . . belongs completely to those who capitu-
lated and moved to the side of the enemy’, while that of Operti extolled the
heroism of both sides and hoped that they would be placed on the same level
in the memory of the nation. It should be said that Operti was not a Fascist,
but his approach found support among many of those fighting on the side of
Salò, as the memoirs testify.
12 A. MARTINI

In his novel Purgatorio Pettinato wrote nostalgically about the recent past
and had one of his main characters say that there was little difference
between the partisans and the Fascists: ‘red or black, partisans or republicans
the thousands of “politicos” that filled the prisons to the rafters were all
victims of a common failure, destined to pay together for the errors of their
leaders’ (1949, 119). Ruinas (1946, 91–92) also underlined how both fronts
believed ‘that they were carrying out a heroic and holy mission’ and Marcello
Zanfagna, a Fascist journalist during the time of the R.S.I. and author of a
memoirist book, L’ultima bandiera, published in 1956 but written during his
imprisonment in Poggioreale between May and November 1945, thought
along the same lines. The author referred to ‘the soldiers who fought on the
other barricade’ as ‘brothers’ and called for a speedy pacification ([1956]
2002, 11).
However, as has been demonstrated, this attempt by some veterans of
Salò to establish an equivalence between the two sides was accompanied by
widespread denial of Fascist violence. And this begs the question of why this
important element was removed. Did the veterans do it out of fear of a
Prosecutor opening a procedural file on them? Did the political context of
the late 1940s and the 1950s induce the survivors of Salò to omit certain
details so as not to compromise themselves too much? Such hypotheses
cannot be ruled out, but it must be remembered that in that period it was not
so much the collaborators and long-time Fascists who were indicted for their
conduct during the civil war, but rather the ex-partisans, into whom the
Prosecutors began hundreds of investigations while closing those against
the fighters for Salò (Ponzani 2011). I therefore contend that the omissions
which distinguish neo-Fascist literature were aimed mainly at creating the
image of ‘exiles at home’ that was so dear to the Fascists. Having obscured or
greatly downplayed the violent nature of their conduct, the Salò combatants
preferred to emphasize the ‘carnival of blood’ that broke out on 25 April 1945
and the alleged persecution suffered by the Republican institutions during
the purge (Zanfagna [1956] 2002, 153), since from a political point of view this
was more likely to help them re-enter the public debate.

Victims of Italian justice

Clementina Pomarici was a convinced Fascist, and at the time of the R.S.I. was
the trustee of the female groups in Venice and the director of the Auxillary
Service. She was also a member of the Centuria of the fascio crociato, a P.F.R.
financed organization set up to penetrate the network of anti-Fascists.
Because of these activities after the war she was accused of collaborationism
(Cairoli 2013, 171–176). At her trial, held on 9 June 1945 in a crowded court-
room, she was accused of having denounced and aided the arrest of various
partisans. The Venice C.A.S. did not hesitate to sentence her to thirty years
 JOURNAL OF MODERN ITALIAN STUDIES 13

imprisonment despite her protestations of innocence, which continued in the

subsequent months. In her memoir, written in August 1945 and appended to
the appeal to the Court of Cassation prepared by her court-appointed lawyer,
Carlo Buttaro, she denounced the Prosecutor for not having given her the
time she needed to hire a trustworthy lawyer to advise her and to ‘look for
these witnesses who would have made all the accusations against her fall
down one by one’.17 She also complained about the intimidating atmosphere
in the courtroom, which conditioned the depositions of the few texts written
in support of her version. She had no doubt that the setting had been ‘artfully
staged by the press’, and the lawyer, moreover, at the end of the hearing had
confessed to receiving telephone threats warning him not to exert himself in
her defence. In her account Pomarici also denounced the manner of her arrest
and the conditions in which she had been kept. She explained that she had
been detained on the morning of 28 April by four armed men who had taken
her directly to the barracks, relieving her of all her savings, and during the
night she had been slapped and threatened by ‘groups of Communists’ who
continued to harass her with the ‘consent of those who were supposed to
guard me’.
Pomarici was not the only one to consider herself a victim of the justice
system. As Nubola (2016, 187) has underlined, when requesting clemency,
the supplicants tended to call themselves ‘political prisoners’. Even the Fascist
Spirito Novena expressed his indignation at the treatment he had received.
Having first served as commissioner of the P.F.R. in Bagnolo (province of
Cuneo), and then as commander of a garrison of the B.N.,18 Novena had ‘sown
terror and panic for over a year’ with the support of his squad of Fascists,
being responsible for the death of ‘many partisans’ and ‘countless robberies
and lootings and the burning down of . . . houses’.19 The group was known for
its brutal ferocity and ‘lack of any sense of pity’. He stood accused of being
involved in forty-seven incidents, including murders, pillage, torture and
extortion.
The evidence against Pomarici persuaded the judges in Turin to find him
guilty and to impose the death penalty. According to the court, the defence’s
claim that Novena had been a simple soldier who had to ‘follow the orders of
his superiors’ could not be heard. Novena immediately appealed to the Court
of Cassation with the legal support of the Italian Female Movement (M.I.F.). It
was to the address of this organization, which gave many Fascists economic
support, helping them to gain their freedom and in some cases to move
abroad (Guarasci 1987; Bertagna 2013), that the accused expressed his ire
against the institutions. In a questionnaire sent to him by the M.I.F., Novena
declared that his lawyer, Carlo Zini, assigned to him by the office running the
trial in Turin, had done nothing to prevent his conviction. On the eve of the
inaugural hearing, Novena wrote, he even ‘[came] to visit me in prison and
the only words he said to me [were]: “if I had been in action instead of a
14 A. MARTINI

prisoner in Germany, I would have shot you. So learn how to behave”’.20 It is

difficult to verify the validity of this accusation, but historiography has
attested to the reluctance of some lawyers to defend collaborators, perhaps
because of ideological reasons, as presumably was the case with Zini, or
perhaps because of fear of repercussions, such as those that concerned
Pomarici’s lawyer, Buttaro.21 Novena also did not spare the newspapers
from criticism, declaring them guilty of giving a biased portrayal of him,
and he remarked how the courtroom, packed with an audience made up
mainly of partisans, prevented him from making his case in the most appro-
priate way (‘every attempt I made to defend myself’, he wrote, ‘was drowned
out by their shouting’).22
Even Italo Natili, while languishing in prison, vented his anger at the
representatives of the M.I.F. During the war he had served as commander
of the garrison of the sixth heavy artillery regiment of Modena, and in the
aftermath of 8 September had presented himself to the provincial military
command of the R.S.I.23 In around November 1943, he had been asked to join
the college of judges in the local Fascist extraordinary court established to try
partisans, draft dodgers and deserters, and he had accepted. According to the
Modena Prosecutor’s Office, which sent him to trial after the war, Natili had
taken part in the special court on three occasions and in the sitting of
February 1944, as president, had sentenced to death two anti-Fascists who
had gone out of their way to rescue some Allied soldiers.24 The verdict of the
Modena C.A.S., which sentenced him to be imprisoned for thirty years, was
followed by a ruling of the Reggio Emilia Assize, which confirmed the verdict
but reduced the sentence by ten years.25 The amnesty of 22 June 1946 then
reduced it to a third.
Despite the reductions of his sentence, Natili continued to claim that he
was a victim of the justice system: ‘The task of participating in the establish-
ment of a military war tribunal’. he wrote to the M.I.F. in July 1949, ‘is one of
the normal duties of an army officer’, and if he were still forced to languish in
prison, he continued, it was for lack of the ‘necessary means to pay for the
low-grade justice . . . of the very democratic magistrature’.26 Natili believed
himself to be a ‘small fry’ who could not afford a famous lawyer capable of
smoothing his road to freedom, and yet, notwithstanding his recriminations,
there is also no doubt that even in his case the justice system was rather
indulgent, setting him free about a year after he complained to the M.I.F. Be
that as it may, Natili’s arguments make clear how widespread was the con-
viction of many Fascists that the magistrates were sparing the top-ranking
leaders of Salò, the so-called ‘big fish’, only to persecute the ‘small’ ones.27
Focà, for example, in his memoir underlined how his superiors had already
gained their freedom while he, a simple obeyer of orders, was still in prison.28
The collaborators’ rants and complaints about the justice system consti-
tute an extremely important political fact. In particular, the confessions of
 JOURNAL OF MODERN ITALIAN STUDIES 15

Natili and Novena directed at the M.I.F. suggest that the tendency to depict
themselves as victims was more than just another strategy deployed by the
accused in the hope of improving their position (complaining about their
treatment in prison, as well as about the intimidating atmosphere in court
could increase their chances of quashing the first instance sentence or of
receiving a pardon), but rather it revealed their state of mind: the Fascists
really were convinced that they were being persecuted, an idea that reso-
nated loudly in the memoirs produced in the 1940s and 1950s.
Thesedescribed the days of April and May 1945 as a real carnage: for
Zanfagna rivers of blood flowed over the streets of Milan ([1956] 2002, 155),
the same rivers that, according to Fulvia Giuliani (1952, 57), a journalist with
strong Fascist convictions, poured into other cities without sparing the
members of the Women’s Auxiliary Service (‘blood of girls, of teenagers
who were inspired by one Idea alone: the Idea of the greatness of the
Fatherland’). Pini wrote about a real ‘Calvary’ in his Itinerario tragico (1950,
308), while in his novel Purgatorio Pettinato included a list of the alleged ways
in which the ‘manhunt’ played out: in ‘mass shootings’, men and women
thrown out of windows or ‘into rivers or canals’ (1949, 120–121).
These descriptions of various kinds of carnage and violence were soon
joined by the first quantitative accounts: Graziani spoke of ‘350,000 victims . . .
slaughtered in the indiscriminate homicidal fury unleashed in northern Italy’
(1947, 409), while Giuliani referred to 8,000 auxiliaries and female Fascists
killed in Turin alone (1952, 33). These are unfounded figures, far removed
from those suggested by more solidly documented studies, which indicate
that there were 10,000 to 11,000 victims of the wave of summary justice in the
immediate post-war, but those figures nevertheless ended up giving sub-
stance to Fascist martyrology (Dondi 1999, 91–101).
In addition to emphasizing the violence that exploded during the days of
insurrection, the Fascists seized every opportunity to denounce, with the
same vehemence and bias, the period of administrative and penal sanctions.
The pamphlet written by the priest Blandino della Croce, Il Calvario dei
detenuti politici per le leggi retroattive (1951), recalled even in its title the
main criticism that the Salò fighters made of the purge, namely that it
violated the principle that the death penalty could not be imposed retro-
actively. And there reappears the image of ‘Calvary’, which, as we have seen,
featured in private post-war accounts. The whole of Graziani’s Ho difeso la
patria, is a J’accuse against Italian criminal justice, which in his view had
carried forward a ‘sectarian persecution’ of those who had simply given
expression to their spirit of patriotism (1947, 469). For his part, Zanfagna
denounced how he had been taken to the cells of Poggioreale for no other
reason than he had fought for the R.S.I., and then had to serve a full seven
months in prison before being released.
16 A. MARTINI

In the light of this analysis, the correspondence between the collaborators’

self-representation in court and in prison and what was produced in those
and the following years by memoirist literature becomes clear. Is this mere
coincidence? I would tend to exclude that possibility, since I believe, on the
contrary, that the success of the ‘other memory’ derived from the fact that
readers saw in the pages published by the former fighters for Salò certain
arguments that they themselves had resorted to during their own legal
proceedings or those that they had heard from family and friends subjected
to purge trials (of a criminal or administrative nature). It should not be
forgotten that de-fascistification impacted on tens of thousands of people.
The revival of certain themes developed in courtrooms was a selective
process. For example, while that of victimhood, the patriotic declination of
choice, and, at least in part, the removal of violence were indeed elements
recycled in the Fascist memoirs, the same cannot be said of the uneven
sentences handed down to collaborators at the trials: the particular fury
directed at the ‘little fry’, denounced by many, in contrast to the favourable
treatment accorded to the higher-ups, finds no space in the ‘other memory’,
This might have eroded part of the consensus supporting right-wing publish-
ing initiatives and, consequently, towards the neo-Fascist universe, causing
some to become disinterested in political life or to find a home in other
parties, but these omissions were probably a result of a desire to produce a
more homogeneous and, from a rhetorical point of view, a more favourable
picture. However, another factor contributed to the success of the ‘other
memory’, namely the uncertain response of the state during the transition.

The destinies of the Fascists and the purge

Among the cases of the collaborators subjected to trial after the war that we
have so far considered, the only one to be acquitted in the first instance was
Paltrinieri, whose judges did not find sufficient evidence to prove that he had
aided the German occupants: having fought for a few months with the G.N.R.
made him a Fascist, but not a culprit. The others, on the other hand, were all
found guilty, demonstrating how the courts, under the watchful eyes of the
Allies and the Italian government, wished to respond to the call for justice
coming from a part of public opinion. Paying the price of this was the
commander of the political office and leading member of the Venetian B.N.,
Pepi, who was sentenced to death, and executed (Borghi and Reberschegg
1999, 107). Some others, however, fared much better, seeing their prison
doors opened well before the end of the sentence handed down in the first
instance. Pomarici, for example, had been sentenced to thirty years imprison-
ment but was freed in July 1946. Novena saw his death penalty commuted to
a life sentence by the Court of Appeal of the Piedmontese capital in
September 1948 and subsequently benefited from a series of amnesties
 JOURNAL OF MODERN ITALIAN STUDIES 17

that saw him released from prison relatively quickly. Even Focà, after an initial
sentence of twenty-seven years in prison imposed by the C.A.S. in Florence in
December 1947, enjoyed a series of reductions that returned him to freedom
in the 1950s. Natili obtained a conditional discharge in 1949. Knoll was the
only one to serve a long prison sentence, remaining in prison until the 1960s
(Nubola 2016, 150).
The release of so many Fascists was the result of an evolution in the
political context. While for Franzinelli (2006) the turning point coincided
with the emanation of the Togliatti amnesty – an affirmation that historio-
graphy has supported to a great degree – I would be more inclined to
backdate this concession to at least the autumn of 1945, as suggested by
Hans Woller ([1996] 1997, 437). It is true that as early as the end of 1944, in
other words while the war was still being waged, the parties had been
divided on the purge – suffice it to recall that the first Bonomi government
fell precisely because the moderate forces were unwilling to comply with the
rules on de-fascistification – but there is no doubt that after the conflict,
thanks in part to pressure from the Allies, the second Bonomi government
and, above all, the subsequent Parri government, had revisited the question
and established the extraordinary bodies known as known as C.A.S. These in
the first months handed down hundreds of death sentences (thirty-nine in
Reggio Emilia, twenty-one in Pavia, eighteen in Treviso and Lodi, for
instance),29 many of which were carried out. It was in October and
November 1945 that something got stuck: the conservative front launched
a major press campaign against the purge and most of the progressive forces
did not oppose it.
The weekly Oggi, edited by Edilio Rusconi, invited its readers to say what
they really thought of de-fascistification, and then highlighted the long series
of negative opinions that the editors received (Baldassini 2008, 159–164). On
4 November the newspaper Il Tempo published a letter from the former Prime
Minister Ivanoe Bonomi in which he expressed grave concerns about the new
laws that the executive was preparing. At the same time, in the columns of
the newspaper of the Christian Democracy (D.C), Il Popolo, Guido Gonella
declared that the nation would never recover owing to the criminal and
administrative sanctions against Fascists and collaborators. The consideration
of the D.C. and of all the other right-wing forces found further legitimacy in
the approach gradually adopted by the Church: on 4 October the Apostolic
Nunzio Francesco Duca Borgoncini addressed a letter to the then Foreign
Minister, Alcide De Gasperi in which he confessed his concerns for ‘the violent
passions’ that were stirring up the courts (Woller [1996] 1997, 477). Igino
Giordani, a Christian Democrat close to ecclesiastical circles as a librarian in
the Vatican Apostolic Library, stated on 14 November in the pages of Il
Quotidiano, the newspaper of the lay association Azione Cattolica, that it
was ‘a fact’ that ‘the extraordinary courts have damaged and still damage
18 A. MARTINI

the legal and moral conscience of right-thinking people’ (Bizzarri 1982, p.38).
Criticisms also rained down from the pages of Civiltà cattolica. The jurist
Salvatore Lener in the second half of 1945 sided openly with those who
opposed the purge measures which, according to him, hindered a ‘national
pacification’ (1945, 220–221).
While in the autumn of 1945, order, education, calm and pacification were
the chief aspirations of the moderate forces as well as many jurists, a less
radical attitude towards de-Fascistification than that of the past could also be
found among the progressive parties. The Italian Communist Party, choosing
to adopt an ‘outstretched hand’ strategy by accepting former members of the
Fascist party into its ranks, agreed to moderate the course of the purge (La
Rovere 2008, 233). The same applied to the Socialist Party: its leaders, as Lucio
D’Angelo recalled (1982, 111), were convinced that time had irredeemably
compromised the purge, which in the immediate post-war period had a
reason for being but six months after the war-end risked ‘tearing the country
apart’. The only party to remain firm in its positions was the Action Party,
which became ever more isolated politically and was soon in the grip of an
internal crisis that led to its end.
With the fall of the Parri government the will to carry out a radical purge
had definitely waned and the new Prime Minister, De Gasperi, who was aware
of the change of mood, acknowledged the ‘gradual retreat’ and showed he
was attentive to both the international and national contexts (Woller [1996]
1997, 437). He recognized the magnitude of support that Fascism had
received from many Italians, and therefore understood that while continuing
the purge would have aroused the sympathy of large sections of the public it
would also generate the dissatisfaction of an equal if not greater number of
citizens. In addition, there was a new enemy on the horizon: Communism,
which, in his opinion, had to be countered steadfastly, even at the cost of
setting aside the ‘anti-Fascist paradigm’ in favour of the anti-Communist one
(Santomassimo 2003, 147–171). The Togliatti amnesty was thus the chosen
instrument for accelerating the peace-making process rather than for launch-
ing it, as Franzinelli (2006) has instead argued. The measure was born with the
intention of reprieving both those men who had fought in the ranks of the
R.S.I. without dishonouring themselves with serious crimes and the partisans
who in the immediate post-war period had taken part in cases of private
showdowns against Fascists and collaborationists. The text of the law, how-
ever, was so rich in critical issues as to bring about the release of thousands of
Fascists as well as the anticipated end of many other trials, by virtue above all
of the Court of Cassation, which gave it an expansive interpretation to the
point of disregarding crimes committed by collaborators.
The hasty turn towards pacification not only brought the release of most of
the Salò combatants, but also ended up disempowering the narrative elabo-
rated by the courts. In the course of the first trials, in fact, even the Italian
 JOURNAL OF MODERN ITALIAN STUDIES 19

courts charged with prosecuting collaborators had proved to be real vectors

of ‘homeland history’ (Woller [1996] 1997, 421). This is not something unique
to the Italian assizes, but rather a characteristic trait of every court entrusted
with a central role in the midst of a political schism, as scholars of transitional
justice have argued (Osiel 1997, 2005; Teitel 2001; Felman 2002). Thus, at first,
the resistance and sacrifice of many partisans were praised in the speeches of
the Prosecutors or by presidents of the C.A.S. and during the trial phase and in
the judgments, whose salient passages were reported in the newspapers, no
opportunity was lost to remark on the violence perpetrated by the Nazi-
Fascists. But when the conviction that it was time to close accounts with the
past as quickly as possible prevailed in the majority of political forces, the
courts aligned themselves with this new political climate and themselves
ended up representing collaborationism with an increasingly ‘human’ face
and supporting the version given in the courtroom by the accused (Luzzatto
[2013] 2014, 177; Scarpari 2015, 151–168).
In conclusion, it can be said that the survival and development of Fascist
culture after 1945 did not depend exclusively on the effectiveness of the
rhetorical structures devised by the nostalgics of Salò and Mussolini, a factor
on which historiography has thus far insisted. Rather, it also relied on two
other factors: the ability of the Fascists to assimilate and echo the arguments
made in prison and in court by the thousands of collaborators brought to
trial, and the progressive change of narrative that took place in the courts,
which reflected that of politics. How much influence this last point in parti-
cular had is of course hard to ascertain, but without doubt when the courts,
instead of challenging the theses put forward by the Salò fighters, ended up
incubating them, the Fascists had won an important early victory. At that
juncture all they had to do was relaunch their own version of history, backed
up by such as the publishing house Garzanti and by operations carried
forward by periodicals and newspapers which intuited that portraying
Fascism in an indulgent way would earn the approval of readers. They were
not wrong. Many, I believe, had lived through the period of the purge and
passed through it more or less unscathed. So it was that a ‘nostalgic memory’
of Fascism and of Mussolini was destined to spread through Italian society
and to endure.

Notes
1. Giovannini, “Il nostro passato e il nostro avvenire.” Rosso e nero, 27 July, 1946.
The article is quoted by Cassina Wolff (2012, 23). The term ‘exiles at home’ was
then made more famous by Tarchi (1995).
2. Dianella Gagliani distinguishes between ‘fighters for Salò’ and ‘fighters of Salò’,
including among the former ‘those who . . . chose Salò and fought for it’. See
Gagliani (2001).
20 A. MARTINI

3. See Corti d’Assise straordinarie. Atlante stragi nazifasciste (accessed July 29 2019).
http://www.straginazifasciste.it/?cas.
4. See Atlante stragi nazifasciste (accessed February 25 2019). www.straginazifas
ciste.it/?page_id=38&id_strage=4120 and www.straginazifasciste.it/?page_id=
38&id_strage=3651.
5. For this and the following quotations see ASCS, MIF, b. 56, f. 1338 “Domenico
Focà,” Domenico Focà’s Deposition to the President of the Italian Republic (sic).
There is some uncertainty over the surname of the accused: some documents
refer to him as “Focà,” others as “Foca.”
6. ASVE, Venice CAS, b. 1, f. “Umberto Pepi,” Verdict, June 2, 1945.
7. For this and the next quotation, see ASVE, Venice CAS, b. 1., f. “Umberto Pepi,”
Deposition, May 29, 1945.
8. ASMO, Modena CAS, f. 5 “Italo Paltrinieri,” Verdict, June 28, 1945.
9. ASMO, Modena CAS, f. n. 5, “Italo Paltrinieri,” Interrogation of the defendant,
June 28, 1945.
10. There is no lack of cases in which, at the end of the conflict, claims were made to
the judicial authorities that the R.S.I. had been involved. Norma Tincani, for
example, declared that she had shared fully the Fascist values even in the 1943–
45 period. See Martini, 2016. However, this is a small percentage of cases in the
wider collaborationist galaxy.
11. For this and the next quotations see ASCS, MIF, b. 56, f. 1338 “Domenico Focà,”
Domenico Foca’s Deposition.
12. ASVE, Venice CAS, b. 1., f. “Umberto Pepi,” Deposition, May 29, 1945.
13. See Atlante stragi nazifasciste (accessed February 22, 2019). http://www.stragi
nazifasciste.it/?page_id=38&id_strage=1824.
14. ASVE, Venice CAS, b. 1., f. “Umberto Pepi,” Deposition, May 29, 1945.
15. Cfr. ASBZ, Bozen CAS, f. “Processo 1945–1947: Merano,” Verdict, July 3, 1946.
16. ASBZ, Bozen CAS, f. “Processo 1945–1947: Merano,” Interrogation, May 9, 1945.
17. For this and the next quotations see ASVE, Venice CAS, f. “Clementina Pomarici,”
Deposition, August 6, 1945.
18. ASTO, Turin CAS, e. 249, 1946, f. 26.
19. ASTO, Turin CAS, Verdict of the I Section of the Special Court of Assizes, March
21, 1946. See De Luna, G. 2015. La Resistenza perfetta. Milan: Feltrinelli.
20. ASCS, MIF, b. 64, f. 2215, MIF Questionnaire.
21. See Tacchi, 2015.
22. ASCS, MIF, b. 64, f. 2215, MIF Questionnaire.
23. ASBO, Court of Assize, Verdicts Modena CAS, Verdict, June 27, 1945.
24. See Atlante stragi nazifasciste (accessed February 1, 2019). http://www.stragina
zifasciste.it/?page_id=38&id_strage=3041.
25. Cfr. ACS, MGG, Direzione generali, Ufficio Affari penali, Grazie e Casellario,
Collaborationists 1944–1952, b. 55, f. 2052 “Italo Natili.”
26. ACCS, MIF, b. 64, f. 2171, Letter to Mif, July 15, 1949.
27. See the case studies examined by Nubola (2013).
28. ASCS, MIF, b. 56, f. 1338 “Domenico Focà,” Domenico Focà’s Deposition.
29. Vd. Martini (2019).
 JOURNAL OF MODERN ITALIAN STUDIES 21

Notes on contributor
Andrea Martini received his PhD in International Studies at the University L’Orientale
of Naples in 2017. His doctoral research analysed the Italian transition from fascism to
democracy. Currently he is a postdoctoral research at the University of Padua. His
research has focused on the transitional justice, on neo-Fascists parties and, more
recently, on the Italian feminism. He published Dopo Mussolini. I processi ai fascisti e ai
collaborazionisti (1944–1953) (Viella 2019).

Abbreviations
ACS: Archivio Centrale dello Stato (State Central Archive)
ASCS: Archivio di Stato di Cosenza (State Archive of Cosenza)
MIF: Movimento italiano femminile (Italian Female Movement)
ASVE: Archivio di Stato di Venezia (State Archive of Venice)
CAS: Corte d’Assise straordinaria (Special Court of Assize)
ASMO : Archivio di Stato di Modena (State Archive of Modena)
ASBZ: Archivio di Stato di Bolzano (State Archive of Bozen)
ASTO: Archivio di Stato di Torino – Sezioni riunite (State Archive of Turin)
ASBO: Archivio di Stato di Bologna (State Archive of Bologna)
MGG: Ministero di Grazia e Giustizia (Minister of Grace and Justice)

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