The Italian resistance between history and memory

Abstract

Since the 1960s the Resistance has held pride of place in public ceremonial, political debate and to a point also in historcial writing in Italy. The emphasis on its popular and national character transformed the Resistance into the struggle of the whole country to rid Italy of the German invaders and the small number of Italian fascists who remained their allies, but in ways that took no account of the complexity of people's reactions and the different ways in which Italians experienced the years immediately after the fall of fascism. In the last decade, however, numerous accounts have been published that contradict the images of the Resistance that for 30 years have constituted the ‘official’ memory of the Italian Republic. As a result, the Resistance offers a classic example of the ‘public use of history’, in which historical interpretation has served primarily to justify party political, instutitional and idelogical ends. It is now clear, however, that the supposed unity against fascism was more the result of agreement that there were limits beyond which political differences could not be pressed rather than of a deeper political unity that might have provided the basis for the political and institutional reform of the Italian Republic. The contrasting memories and interpretations of that period that have recently re-emerged for the same reason make it more difficult to project a new Italian democracy for the future.     

WHITHER “WHAT IF” HISTORY?

Richard Evans's new book, Altered Pasts, offers a perceptive but flawed critique of the field of counterfactual history. The author provides a useful historical survey of the field's recent rise to prominence and intelligently analyzes its respective strengths and weaknesses. His overall assessment of the field is quite skeptical, however. Evans cites many reasons for his skepticism, but his overall critique can be summarized in three words: plausibility, politicization, and popularity. Evans faults works of counterfactual history for their frequently implausible narratives, their promotion of political agendas, and their distressing degree of popularity. In advancing his critique, Evans makes many valid observations that call attention to important deficiencies in the field. But his view is a partial one that neglects countervailing evidence and never penetrates to the heart of why the field has left the margins for the mainstream. Evans's study provides a useful introduction to an understudied topic, but further research—ideally of a less partisan nature—is required for us to better understand counterfactual history's increasing appeal.     

Under the Danish Cross: flagging Danishness in the years around World War II

This article explores the significance of the Danish flag in the formation of national identities during World War II and the immediate post-war period. During this dark and tumultuous period of Danish history, the flag was claimed by different groups with very different agendas, which in turn engendered differing conceptions of Denmark and Danishness. Three different themes are investigated in the article. The first regards the flag as a symbol of national continuity and endurance. From this angle, the flag functioned as a living, corporeal piece of history, which signalled that old Denmark would prevail, in spite of the crisis at hand. The second theme investigates the coupling of the flag with democracy during the 1943 elections. This event was hailed by the government as a major national celebration, with nationwide flagging for the democratic values of Denmark. At the same time, the elections were criticized as ‘un-national’, both by home-grown Nazis and the resistance movement. The third section dwells on the notion of martyrdom for the flag. This form of Danishness was not connected to peace-loving democracy, but woven into a martial discourse of sacrifice, honour and masculine heroism. Public worship of martyrdom was particularly intense in the early post-war era, when the flag was used to link ordinary Danes to the fallen heroes of the resistance movement. Thus, it was not the democratic spirit of 1943 that was celebrated after Liberation, but the martyrdom of fallen male resistance fighters, whose blood was evoked as the foundation of the re-born nation. The national memory of post-war Denmark, thereby, was based on the notion of a united people, who had stood firm and even been willing to die for the honour of their ancient flag.     

Beyond Annexationism: The Central Powers’ Ostpolitik as Structural Transformation, 1917–18

This article explores the eastern policy of Germany and Austria-Hungary during the latter half of the First World War (1917–18). It attempts to go beyond the traditional annexationist–non-annexationist dichotomy prevalent in the literature and approach the issue from the perspective of structural transformation of the international system. It argues that the Central Powers endeavoured to accommodate imperial collapse in Eastern Europe and prevent its further spread by replacing the obsolete system of imperial dynasticism with a new arrangement based on autonomous and semi-autonomous states. German and Austrian leaders often disagreed on implementation and formed temporary understandings across the civilian–military divide. This policy ultimately proved counterproductive, as it failed to contain the westward spread of national and social revolution. Austro-German support for nominally independent states in Eastern Europe, national in form but Central European in cultural and political outlook, inadvertently contributed to further imperial collapse, as the increasingly restless nationalities of Austria-Hungary began to challenge the legitimacy of imperial dynasticism in Central Europe. The Central Powers’ Ostpolitik in 1917–18 became a transformative historical event due to the fact that it facilitated the structural transformation of international relations in Central and Eastern Europe from imperial dynasticism to a system of nation-states.     

Children of Dutch Nazi collaborators

This article looks into what happened to the children of Dutch Nazi collaborators after the liberation of the Netherlands in May 1945. The author first outlines the historical context in which these children lived and the manner in which they recounted and recorded their memories much later. In combination with new archival research on social-welfare policy and ‘re-education’ of former National Socialist youth, this puts the discourse that dominated the Dutch debate, that is, the discourse of the ‘innocent child’ harshly punished by society, in a different light. The framework of the innocent child being punished by a cruel society obscured our view of experiences that did not fit this mould. Furthermore, it made the values and norms that were current during the reconstruction period disappear from the picture: the bad memories of children of collaborators partly originate in policy that was considered normal in those days. This, however, should not obscure the impact of the vulnerable social position which these children experienced after the war.     

The German Approach to Counterinsurgency in the Second World War

From the German attack on Poland, the political aims of National Socialist ideology replaced other considerations in the field of counterinsurgency. This tendency escalated during the following years, with the invasion of the Soviet Union as the key turning point. The fighting at the front and against insurgents became interconnected with the destruction of the European Jews, and the radicalisation of the German approach provoked further resistance from underground movements throughout Europe. In the form of a literature review that presents the current state of research on six operational areas (Poland, France, Yugoslavia, Greece, Italy, and the Soviet Union), this article argues that German counterinsurgency policy between 1939 and 1945 combined military necessity, ideology, and mentality in a way that facilitated genocide.     

‘The Sustenance of Salisbury’ in the era of Decolonization: The Portuguese Politics of Neutrality and the Rhodesian Oil Embargo, 1965–7

This article investigates Denmark's international legal status during the Second World War. In exploring this theme it brings together two emergent research perspectives on twentieth-century international political history: (1) a growing interest in small states as actors and active interpreters of international political events in times of crisis and war; and (2) a focus on international law as an independent and so far underexplored research theme. From this double perspective the article highlights and analyses the unprecedented and unparalleled character of the legal relationship between Denmark and Germany after the German occupation of Denmark in April 1940. In doing so it places particular focus on how this situation was viewed and conceptualised by Danish politicians and legal experts. Thus it explores the complex entanglement of politics and law that characterised Danish attempts to bring about and consolidate the particular peaceful and ‘normal’ relationship with Germany as well as efforts to change this relationship and make Denmark a belligerent state. By analysing the four concepts of neutrality, non-belligerence, peaceful occupation, and war the article shows how these legal concepts served as political instruments that were pushed forward by competing and changing understandings of Denmark's international position and interests during the war. But it also shows how these legal conceptualisations were fundamentally structured by the general international legal and political developments of the war (the deterioration of neutrality and the emergence of long-term military occupation and guerrilla warfare throughout Europe). And it demonstrates how they gradually took on a life of their own and came to frame and shape perceptions of Denmark's international position - both among Danish politicians and bureaucrats during the Second World War and among historians to this day.     

二战前后英国工党外交政策的转变

第二次世界大战前后,由于国际格局的变迁,英国工党的外交政策发生了很大变化。理想主义是战前工党外交政策的主调,在国际问题的处理上它信奉集体安全政策,主张发挥国际联盟的作用,反对重整军备。经过第二次世界大战,工党逐渐接受了丘吉尔战时政府的现实主义外交原则,战后初期工党执政后,在外交政策方面摒弃了过去的理想主义,把现实的国家利益作为外交政策的重点。工党政府推动美国参加欧洲防务,借助美国的力量建立起欧洲均势,满足了国家安全的现实需要。在非殖民化问题上,工党政府同样从现实主义出发,撤出了印度和巴勒斯坦。从战前的理想主义到战后的现实主义,工党外交理念的变化在某种程度上反映了这一时期英国外交的演变过程。     

Social Relations and War Remembrance: Second World War Atrocities in Rural Tuscan Villages

This article addresses the issue of how long‐term memory of extreme conditions is socially transformed. It focuses on elements of the social structure and pre‐war habitus that might help understanding of the divided memory of massacres that were perpetrated by the Nazis in three rural Tuscan villages between 1943 and 1944. Within the “mnemonic communities”, discrepancies arise since some of the villagers paradoxically blame the partisans instead of the Nazis. An attempt is made to trace current representations of historical events in the framework of traditional social institutions and political life of these small villages in time of crisis. Battles over memory are seen as a twofold process—that is, as part of “internal”, intra‐village relations as well as a form of reaction toward the “external” world of which they feel victims. The article argues that long‐term memory of past political violence is strictly bound up with local power relations.     

Sins of memory: reflections on the lack of an Italian Nuremberg and the administration of international justice after 1945

This article reconstructs the history of the major trial that the Allies planned to institute against the entire military command of the Nazi armies operating in Italy from 1943 to 1945. The trial was prepared on the same juridical and technical bases as the Nuremberg Tribunal, but it never took place. The reason was that it would have jeopardized the re-integration of the Federal Republic in the European community, and would also have risked placing the Italian government in the embarrassing position of having the Italian army prosecuted for crimes committed in the countries occupied by the Rome?–?Berlin axis. For those reasons, the trial was abandoned and instead only legal proceedings were taken only for some marginal cases, creating the impression that these were simply isolated cases of individual responsibility. The enigma of this missing trial and an explanation of the limits of international justice can only be understood in terms of the political situation in post-war Europe, the relations between Italy and the Allies and the double game played by the Italian government. These events served, however, to give rise to highly selective memories of totalitarianism and the war.     

The Wages of Collaboration: the German food crisis 1939–1945 and the supplies from Denmark

The problem of limited food supplies left its mark on Germany and the Nazi regime during World War II. The Germans faced diminishing food rations and to a great extent had to rely on supplies from occupied Europe. To a small state like Denmark, with its precarious geo-political position, this turned out to be crucial. Thanks to its advanced agricultural production and fisheries and a generous German price policy, Germany was able to extract a maximum of food from Denmark without damaging the structure of Danish agricultural production. Deliveries culminated in 1943–1945, as Denmark supplied German big cities with 14% of their consumption of meat and pork and more than 20% of the Wehrmacht’s consumption, while Danish butter constituted nearly 9% of consumption in big cities and as much as one third of the Wehrmacht’s consumption during the same period. On this account, Denmark obtained a certain political freedom of action. In internal reports, German authorities in Copenhagen and in the Foreign Ministry repeatedly pointed to the fact that any attempt at changing the occupation regime in Denmark would rid Denmark of its democratically based government and jeopardize the abundant food supplies to Germany. The article argues that Danish food supplies to Germany provided the main reason why democratic Denmark was allowed to maintain its political system despite the German occupation.     

The Need for a Multivocal Approach to Researching and Managing Guam's World War II Underwater Cultural Heritage

Since 2006, four maritime archaeology field schools, desktop and field surveys have been carried out in Guam. In 2012 a site associated with the United States Navy's Construction Battalion (US Seabees) was investigated. This paper summarizes the historical background of Guam and the known sites of maritime archaeological interest, particularly those dating to World War II. The problems of public interpretation of the cultural material of colonial powers are considered, and, using the Seabee site as an example, ways in which Guam's indigenous Chamorro people can be included in this history are presented.     

Pushed into Pragmatism: British Approaches to Science in Post-War Occupied Germany

One of the most important dilemmas facing the British authorities when they occupied their zone of Germany at the end of the Second World War was what to do with German science. The contributions made by scientists and engineers to the Nazi war machine, in fields such as rocketry and submarines, meant that German science was both revered and feared, and was therefore closely linked to concerns about a post-war military resurgence in Germany. This article aims to chart the changing approaches which the British occupation officials adopted towards German science in this period. While the initial intention was to prevent Germany from ever waging war again, through demilitarisation, denazification and dismantling, the focus changed as British enmity shifted from a former adversary, Germany, to a former ally, the Soviet Union. Policy reflected this shift as technology transfer and the reconstruction of domestic German science won greater favour. This article aims to show that, in the face of growing hostility from the USSR and in the deeply suspicious climate of the early Cold War, Britain was forced to abandon its moral mission towards German science and adopt a far more pragmatic strategy instead.     

The 2004 Deepwrecks Project: Analysis of World War II Era Shipwrecks in the Gulf of Mexico

In July and August 2004, C & C Technologies, Inc. of Lafayette, LA, USA partnered with scientists and film makers from across the United States and Canada to assess and document archaeological and biological aspects of six World War II shipwrecks in the Gulf of Mexico. The depth of the shipwrecks ranged from 285–6,444 ft (87–1,964 m) below sea level. All six shipwrecks were found during oil and gas related surveys. The United States Department of the Interior, Mineral Management Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Office of Ocean Exploration under the auspices of the National Oceanographic Partnership Program sponsored this multidisciplinary study.     

The Excavation of a World War II Army Camp at Mortonhall,Edinburgh

Abstract

Archive material relating to Mortonhall, Edinburgh, indicates that there was a World War I army camp within the grounds of the estate, which was occupied by the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders. However, excavations carried out by CFA Archaeology Ltd during Scottish Water’s Edinburgh Drinking Water Project revealed physical remains which relate to a later World War II army camp. This appears to have been initially occupied by the 16th Battalion of the Durham Light Infantry in 1940, who were billeted in tents, with the permanent camp being constructed by private contractors from 1942. Archive material suggests that the camp largely consisted of Nissen huts. This evidence is supported by the limited archaeological excavations which uncovered a number of concrete hut bases of the size pertaining to the standard dimensions of Nissen huts. However, there was also evidence of different architectural styles with a number of the buildings having been constructed from brick and asbestos. Reports that Mortonhall was a POW camp were probably unfounded, but it seems to have functioned as a camp for displaced Eastern Europeans. The exact date of closure is unknown, but the size of the camp was clearly being scaled down by the 1950s.     

Renzo De Felice,the resistance and the historian' task

Abstract

The Cesare Barbieri Endowment for Italian Culture sponsored a two‐day conference in April 1998: ‘Behind enemy lines in World War II, the Resistance and the OSS in Italy’. On this occasion William Corvo of Middletown, Connecticut, donated the wartime papers of his father, Max Corvo. Max Corvo played a principal role in Organization of Strategic Services operations in Sicily and Italy during the war, linking the OSS and the Italian Resistance. Veterans of both the OSS and the Italian Resistance attended the symposium. We present here some of the papers that focused on the principal theme of the meeting: ‘The Resistance, war of liberation or civil war?’. Authors are: Borden Painter, Department of History at Trinity College; Vittorio Gozzer, partisan veteran and liaison for the conference with Italian partisan organizations; James Miller, historian at the State Department; Roy Domenico, Department of History at the University of Scranton; David Ward, Department of Italian at Wellesley College; Steven White, Department of History at Mount St Mary's College (Maryland); Spencer Di Scala, Department of History at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Borden Painter and John Alcorn organized the conference for the Barbieri Endowment.     

Pagan: the archaeology of a WWII battle never fought in the Northern Mariana Islands

Archaeological and historical investigation of WWII battles fought in the Micronesian archipelago of the Mariana Islands has generally concentrated on the fierce struggles for Saipan, Tinian, and Guam. Smaller islands that were neutralised during the U.S. thrust to establish air bases for the bombing campaign over Japan beginning in 1944 have received less attention, but were a strategic link in the Absolute National Defence Sphere. This paper examines the archaeological evidence of Japanese military planning for the defence of the island of Pagan situated north of Saipan, a battle that was never fought. The strategy based on an analysis of fixed weaponry emplacement appears to have been conceived in terms of engagement evolving from a ‘defence-at-the-waters-edge’ tactic in the southern Mariana Islands towards a ‘defence-in-depth’ posture faced in Iwo Jima and Okinawa.     

Fiasco: The Anglo-Franco-Soviet Alliance That Never Was and the Unpublished British White Paper, 1939–1940

This article is about the Anglo-Franco-Soviet negotiations in 1939 for an alliance against Nazi Germany and about how the British government later tried to represent those negotiations to public opinion. The first part of the essay presents the Soviet point of view on the negotiations and how the British and French governments, though mainly the British, reacted to Soviet alliance proposals. It is a fresh representation of the Soviet perspective from published and unpublished Russian language sources.

The second part of the essay focuses on how the British sought to represent the abortive negotiations through a white paper, placing the blame for failure on the Soviet Union. France opposed publication because, however carefully prepared, the white paper showed that the Soviet side had made serious alliance proposals with precise, reciprocal undertakings which the British government was reticent to entertain. The French were all the more annoyed because the white paper omitted to underline that they had been more receptive to Soviet proposals.

The trilingual, multi-archival evidence presented in the first part of the essay effectively supports the French perception of the white paper and more generally of the failed tripartite negotiations.     

The technoscientists: a Swedish construction of basic research in World War II

The paper examines a group of engineers and scientists in Sweden in the 1930s and 1940s that worked to gain political support for what they called ‘technoscientific research’. Following their own terminology and the ideas of close relations between engineers, scientists, industries, and politics it implied, I call these actors ‘technoscientists’. Critical to their approach was the strategical use of the concept of ‘basic research’, constructed by the technoscientists to associate knowledge production with economic development and demarcate an area of responsibility for public support of industrial research. The technoscientists promoted this strategy by linking basic research to the technical exigencies caused by World War II and by integrating it with politics of welfare, defense, and trade. The technoscientists were thus important political reformers that laid the foundations of public support of science and technology before the 1950s and 1960s when science policy emerged as an institutionalized political practice in Sweden.     

Representations of the Outbreak of World War II in Polish Film, 1945–67: From Partial Recognition to a Component of National Memory

In September 1939, Poland was invaded by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, starting World War II. The war’s end in 1945 marked not the true liberation of the country, but the beginning of a period of Soviet domination that ended only in 1989. As a result, for forty-five years of Polish history, the alliance made by the Hitler with Stalin in 1939 and its tragic consequences for Poland were taboo across society. Polish filmmakers presenting the beginning of World War II were constrained by realities of the Communist state and its own historical narratives. These films reflect what happened to their country in 1939 and highlight the political changes that occurred within Poland under Communist rule, as well as the impact of shifts in the regime itself. The most significant period in this regard was 1945–67, when the outbreak of war was first presented following the end of Stalinism, emerging as a component of national memory both generally and for the Communist authorities.