Hitler's Empire: Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe by Mazower Mark

Author:Mazower, Mark [Mazower, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9780141011929
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2013-03-07T00:00:00+00:00

COUNTER-INSURGENCIES

The myth of the ‘good Italian’ did not die in the mountains of Montenegro, as Governor Pirzio Biroli had hoped. After the war it flourished – at least in Italy – and the supposed contrast between the bumbling but humanitarian Italians and the lethally efficient Germans allowed many of the Italian army’s crimes to be quietly forgotten. When lone scholars drew attention to the 50–60,000 estimated victims of the 1920s concentration camps in Cyrenaica, and uncovered the mass killings of Ethiopian civilians by shooting and mustard gas, the Italian public took little notice. Films such as Mediterraneo depicted Italian occupation as wartime Club Med, an erotic idyll interrupted only by the sounds of distant bombs; Hollywood did its bit too, and Captain Corelli’s Mandolin contrasted the musical Italians in the Greek islands with the murderousness of the Wehrmacht. Roberto Benigni’s film La Vita è Bella went a step further and turned the figure of his father, who had fought in Mussolini’s army, into the ultimate victim, a Jew sent to Auschwitz. The conditions which faced the Italian soldiers sent into German captivity after September 1943 were indeed awful, and many died. But this did not alter the fact that the same soldiers had previously been fighting a dirty war of their own on the Axis side.

In Yugoslavia, in particular, the behaviour of the Italian army was often not very different from that of the Germans. General Robotti mandated that the entire Province of Ljubljana was to be considered a battlefield, and that its entire population were to be considered ‘our enemies’. Hostages were to be taken and killed in the event of attacks. The troops were to take no prisoners, and officers were ordered to ‘maintain the aggressive spirit of our soldier’. Robotti instructed his men to ‘hate, hate them more than these brigands hate us’. His superior, General Mario Roatta, set the tone: back home, Roatta held parties on his yacht ‘in the style of the ancient pagans’; but in the field, there was no more ruthless commander. His infamous ‘Circular 3C’ of March 1942 was supposed to show that Italian soldiers could fight just as harshly as their German allies. ‘Not tooth for a tooth, but a head for a tooth!’ was the watchword. Roatta confirmed the hostage policy and demanded a break with the image of Italian benevolence. It is true that the punitive destruction of entire villages was, according to him, to be undertaken rarely. Yet the tactics Roatta outlined essentially targeted the entire civilian population.54

The Italian army’s experience of fighting counter-insurgency had been chiefly drawn from the Libyan campaigns of the early 1920s and the conquest of Ethiopia in 1935–6. In both it had used internment, the selection and shooting of hostages, scorched earth policies and bombed civilian areas as a collective punishment. Neither Mussolini nor the then head of the army, General Badoglio, had tried to mitigate these policies; on the contrary, they had encouraged them for the sake of Italian prestige. With the

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