Abstract
At the end of World War II, Germany and Japan were undoubtedly the defeated powers of the Axis and they were put on trial in Nuremberg and Tokyo respectively. Italy, by contrast, had vague and multiple identities and underwent a complex and heterogeneous transitional process. The criminal prosecution of war crimes was based on a double path, which varied depending on the nationality of the perpetrators: Italian or German. This starting point paved the way for future memory paths: the increased hiding of Fascist crimes in the shadow of the ones committed by the Nazis. This article describes how Italy has been dealing with Fascist and Nazi crimes and with its own national responsibilities. It focuses in particular on the activism of the judiciary, between the 40s and the 50s, in favour of Fascist criminals, especially in the application of the so called Togliatti Amnesty. The article also aims to show how the judicial prosecution influenced the collective memory of those crimes within Italian society.
Highlights
This article will focus on the Italian transition from the Fascist regime, which lasted from 1922 to 1943, to the democratic Republic, which was proclaimed in 1946 and established in 1948
The Italian responsibilities before and during the war were quickly forgotten and hidden behind those committed by the Nazis
The trials of Nazi officers before Italian military courts had numbered less than twenty in 1960, when the General Military Prosecutor arbitrarily decided on the provisional dismissal of the proceedings due to internal and international pressure. This standstill ended in 1994, with the discovery of the so called armoire of shame: 47 an archive of 695 files documenting war crimes. This controversial discovery led to the opening of two Commissions of Inquiry48 and resulted in a new judicial phase, with trials in absentia against Germans accused by the military courts 50 years after the alleged facts of the bomb attack in Via Rasella and of the Ardeatine Caves Massacre between 1999 and 2007
Summary
This article will focus on the Italian transition from the Fascist regime, which lasted from 1922 ( officially evolving into a dictatorship in 1925) to 1943, to the democratic Republic, which was proclaimed in 1946 and established in 1948. From an historical point of view, see Hans Woller, Die Abrechnung mit dem Wroclaw Review of Law, Administration & Economics [Vol 5:1 trials against the Fascist criminals This role cannot be considered as a mere application of the law, on many occasions it resulted in an obvious attempt to grant impunity for the highest hierarchs of the former regime. As will be described in the second part of the article, the (certainly not positive) outcomes of the criminal prosecution of Fascist crimes, combined with other political and social factors, had a very important effect on the creation of a collective memory of those events In this collective memory, the Italian responsibilities before and during the war (crimes against political opponents, colonialists and racial crimes, the role of Italian citizens in the anti-Semitic propaganda, in the deportation of Jews, their contribution to the crimes committed by the Nazis against the Italian civil population) were quickly forgotten and hidden behind those committed by the Nazis
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