Germans as Minorities during the First World War by Panikos Panayi

Author:Panikos Panayi [Panayi, Panikos]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Modern, 20th Century, Military, General, World War I, Social Science, Ethnic Studies
ISBN: 9781409455646
Google: qX6rBAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
Published: 2014-07-28T16:14:40+00:00

Source: ACS, PCM, GE, b. 130, ‘Censimento dei beni appartenenti a sudditi nemici (dati risultanti al 20 marzo 1917)’.

Sequestrations continued in the following months. According to the Ministry of Industry and Trade, in Naples and its region, the prefect had imposed Italian administration or sequestration on 107 German firms or businesses worth more than 24 million lire, and on 26 Austro-Hungarian concerns, worth just under 2 million lire (see Table 7.2). Nationalist newspapers and public opinion thought this was not enough and continued to recount fantastic stories about huge fortunes still in the hands of enemy aliens or, worse, in those of their Italian or neutral country-citizen frontmen.65

It is difficult to say whether the prefect was able to apply the measures to all the enemy alien businesses and assets. Some Germans tried to save their businesses or their personal belongings by organizing fictitious sales or finding ways to transfer their activities or assets temporarily to neutral or Italian citizens. But few were successful. The prefecture of Naples, like all the prefectures in Italy, received dozens of anonymous letters of denunciation which it investigated.

The second wave of measures concerning private assets started in January 1918. It was based on Article 5 of the already-mentioned decree of 18 January 1918 establishing that all the possessions of enemy aliens or enemy alien institutions could be sequestrated by the Italian state. During this phase, enemy aliens, Germans in particular, lost land, houses, flats, gardens, but also furniture, jewels, silver cutlery, personal effects, books, musical instruments, paintings and other art objects, while their bank accounts and safe deposit boxes at the BCI, insurance policies and all assets, bonds and shares were either frozen or sequestrated.66

Sequestration concerned not only the all-German firms, showing that nationalization, that is Italianization, was the principal aim of the measures. From this point of view, the most successful operations were those concerning the cotton industry and the zoological station (a biology research institute). Both operations concluded with the Italianization of the two concerns long before the settlement established by the Versailles peace treaty.

The Italianization of the Stazione Zoologica Dohrn was completed by May 1918. It had been founded in 1872 by the German biologist Anton Dohrn, and was directed, after his death in 1909, by his son Reinhard. The institution, funded by the German state, had soon achieved a good international reputation. When war broke out, Dohrn fled Naples with his family and handed over the direction of the research institute to an Italian biologist, Federico Raffaele. This was not enough. The institution was first put under Italian administration (November 1915), then confiscated and transformed into an Italian institution run by the state. It was returned to its owner after the war and eventually retransformed into a non-profit organization after a long judicial process which reinstated Reinhard Dohrn as director but not as owner.67

The ‘Italianization’ of the cotton industry followed a different pattern. In Southern Italy, the cotton industry was entirely in the hands of a group of German and Swiss

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.