German-occupied Europe in the Second World War by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, History, Western Europe, France
ISBN: 9781351385886
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2019-03-04T05:00:00+00:00

Part III

Economic matters

7 The German occupation of Italy, 1943–45

Conflicting authorities and contrasting strategies in the management of resources and supplies

Alessandro Salvador and Jacopo Calussi

Introduction

The main goal of German occupation policies was the economic exploitation of foreign countries under control. Despite this objective, however, the elements of the German administration – military and civilian authorities and the autonomous structure of the SS – rarely cooperated and coordinated their decisions. They rather acted independently from, and even in competition with one another. Power struggles sometimes prevented the German authorities from reaching the exploitation goals and even represented a burden to their long-term war goals.1

The short-lived Italian occupation, between September 1943 and April 1945, offers a chance to analyse how power struggles also affected relations with the collaborationist government and how ideological goals and local context often contrasted with the pragmatic aims of economic exploitation.

Over the last decades, research about the Repubblica Sociale Italiana (RSI), the fascist government supported by the German occupiers after the armistice and the occupation of September 8th, 1943, has found that this government experienced a “second youth”. The prevalent idea that the RSI was merely an empty box to justify the German occupation and completely subjugated to foreign power has slowly been replaced by studies that consider the actual structures established by the fascist authorities.

Starting in the 1990s, historians considered more seriously the will of the fascists to exercise their authority and the strategies used to implement this goal. Those studies focused not only on the governmental activity of Mussolini and his ministers, but also on local structures of power and local authorities’ attitude towards the occupiers and the population.2 Preliminary results support the idea that the Italian collaborationist government pursued its own ideological aims that were sometimes in contrast with the goals of the occupiers.3 The first results of our own studies confirm the validity of a new historiographical notion, which is to refuse the strict category of “collaborationist”, in favour of the more neutral word of “cooperation”.4

This contribution will consider this approach and the most recent interpretations of the role of the RSI to analyse the behaviour and role of the German military commands in the Italian provinces and draw some conclusions about the effects of the contrast between ideology and pragmatism during the German occupation of Italy.

Our focus is on the management of resources, specifically food production and distribution and the fight against the black market. This focus has been chosen in consideration of the fact that the scarcity of food strongly affected the morale and behaviour of the population and thus the achievement of production goals needed to pursue German war aims.

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