Italian Social Republic

• 1. Introduction

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  The Italian Social Republic existed for just 19 months, yet its name carries a weight that still shapes Italian politics today. Proclaimed on the 23rd of September 1943 in the chaos following Italy's armistice with the Allies, it was a state born of coercion, built on threats, and held together by German bayonets.

  Benito Mussolini, who had ruled Italy as Duce for over two decades, did not choose to lead it. He was dragged back into power. His own Grand Council had voted him out in July 1943. The king had him arrested. And then, in a mountain rescue operation at the Hotel Campo Imperatore on Gran Sasso, German forces set him free and delivered him to Adolf Hitler. The meeting that followed, at Hitler's headquarters in Rastenburg, East Prussia, would produce one of the strangest states of the Second World War.

  What was this Republic of Salo? Was it a real government or a theater of legitimacy? Did Mussolini believe in it, or was he merely a prisoner performing the role of a dictator? And what happened to the Italians caught inside it, loyal and resistant alike, during those final desperate months of the war?

• 2. The Coerced State

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  At Rastenburg, Mussolini was a broken man. He was in poor health and told Hitler he wanted to retire. Hitler said no. The alternative he offered was a full German military administration that would treat Italy no differently from any other occupied territory. Then came the threat that settled the matter: unless Mussolini agreed to form a new Fascist government, Hitler would order the destruction of Milan, Genoa, and Turin.

  Mussolini relented. He returned to Italy and, on the 15th of September 1943, announced the creation of the Republican Fascist Party from Milan. Three days later came the resumption of the war alongside Germany and Japan. He declared Rome the capital of his new state, but the city was too close to Allied lines and too prone to civil unrest for anyone to feel comfortable there. The de facto capital became Salò, a small town on Lake Garda, midway between Milan and Venice, where Mussolini lived alongside the foreign ministry.

  The name Salò was somewhat misleading from the start. Mussolini's actual residence and office were in Gargnano, further north on the same lake, and the Council of Ministers held most of its meetings there. Of the RSI's ministries, only two were located in Salò itself. The name stuck because Salò was a hub for regime journalists, and dispatches from there circulated abroad as the voice of the new state.

  What Mussolini knew privately, even as he claimed full authority in public, was that he was little more than what he himself called the Gauleiter of Lombardy. The SS monitored his communications and controlled his movements. Real power in the occupied zone rested with German General Plenipotentiary Rudolf Rahn and SS-Obergruppenführer Karl Wolff. Mussolini later said he would have preferred a concentration camp to the way the SS treated him.

• 3. The Verona Trial

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  One of the first acts of the new Republic was revenge. On the 24th of July 1943, the Grand Council of Fascism had voted, on a motion by Dino Grandi, to remove Mussolini from power. Of the 19 members who voted against him, the RSI placed those it could catch on trial in Verona.

  Only six of the 19 were actually in RSI custody at the time: Giovanni Marinelli, Carlo Pareschi, Luciano Gottardi, Tullio Cianetti, Emilio De Bono, and Mussolini's own son-in-law, Galeazzo Ciano. The trial handed down a death sentence to all of the accused but one. Cianetti alone received a life sentence. The other five, including Ciano, were executed on the 11th of January 1944 in the fort of San Procolo in Verona.

  That Mussolini signed off on the execution of his own daughter's husband was taken across Italy as a measure of how thoroughly the German occupation had corrupted the Fascist project. The remaining 13 members of the Grand Council who had voted against Mussolini were tried in absentia and sentenced to death, but they were beyond the reach of the RSI.

• 4. A State Without Sovereignty

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  The RSI claimed sovereignty over all of Italy and its colonies, but the gap between that claim and reality was vast. Germany had, in the aftermath of the September 1943 armistice, de facto incorporated several Italian territories. South Tyrol, the area the Germans designated Operationszone Alpenvorland, including Trento, Bolzano, and Belluno, was administered by Gauleiter Franz Hofer as part of Reichsgau Tirol-Vorarlberg. The coastal zone called Operationszone Adriatisches Küstenland, including Udine, Gorizia, Trieste, Pola, and Fiume, fell under Gauleiter Friedrich Rainer of Reichsgau Kärnten.

  Hitler refused to formally annex South Tyrol, preferring to let the RSI maintain the fiction of sovereignty there while German officials ran the territory. The Independent State of Croatia added to the losses. On the 10th of September 1943, Croatia declared the Treaties of Rome of the 18th of May 1941 null and void and seized the Dalmatian territory Italy had received from the partition of Yugoslavia. The RSI refused to recognize Croatian territorial claims and held the Croatian state in open contempt.

  Diplomatically, the RSI was recognized only by Germany, Japan, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Thailand, and a handful of Axis puppet states. Finland and Vichy France, despite their positions in the German orbit, declined to recognize it. Spain, Portugal, Argentina, and Switzerland maintained only unofficial or commercial contacts. The Holy See did not recognize the RSI at all. The Italian concession of Tientsin in China was ceded by the RSI to the Japanese puppet government, one of the few concrete acts of foreign policy the state was able to carry out.

• 5. The Socialisation Gambit

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  Stripped of territory and real authority, Mussolini reached for the working class. His previous government had banned trade unions and strikes. Now he claimed to have always harbored socialist sympathies and insisted that the removal of the monarchy at last freed him to pursue the full Fascist program as he originally intended. He said he had tried to nationalize property in 1939-1940 but had been blocked by wartime tactical pressures.

  The resulting economic policy, which Mussolini gave the name socialisation, ordered the nationalization of all companies with more than 100 employees. He even reached out to Nicola Bombacci, a former communist, to help project the image of Fascism as a progressive movement. He privately considered naming his new state the Italian Socialist Republic.

  In practice, almost nothing changed. German authorities excluded the Italian industrial sector from the new rules. Italian industrialists opposed the reforms regardless. Workers, many of whom had remained leftist throughout two decades of Fascist rule, saw through the gesture. On the 1st of March 1944, they responded with a massive strike. The 12th of February decree underpinning the socialisation policy did not actually provide for the transfer of capital ownership but only of management, and unions that were granted nominal seats in company leadership played no real role in planning or operations.

  Mussolini had also privately admitted to German ambassador Rudolf Rahn that the second political party he authorized on the 14th of February 1945, the Italian Socialist Republican Party under Edmondo Cione, was not meant to create genuine political pluralism. He told Rahn he authorized it only to draw working-class voters away from the National Liberation Committee.

• 6. Military Formations

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  On the 16th of October 1943, the Rastenburg Protocol between Nazi Germany and the RSI allowed Marshal Rodolfo Graziani to raise four RSI divisions totaling 52,000 men. Finding those men was another matter. Most of the Italian Army had already been interned by German forces. Many military-aged Italian men had been conscripted into forced labour in Germany. The RSI grew so desperate for soldiers that it granted convicts freedom in exchange for enlistment and imposed a death sentence on anyone who resisted conscription.

  Smaller units were operationally active throughout the RSI's existence. The Black Brigades under Alessandro Pavolini and the Decima Flottiglia MAS under Junio Valerio Borghese, known as the Black Prince, carried out anti-partisan operations that the Germans were content to let proceed. Borghese himself held no real allegiance to Mussolini and reportedly said he would imprison him if given the chance.

  In March 1944, the bulk of the 1st Italian volunteers Storm Brigade was sent to the Anzio beachhead, where it fought alongside German forces, took heavy losses, and received favorable assessments. Heinrich Himmler declared the unit fully integrated into the Waffen SS.

  The National Republican Air Force, the Aeronautica Nazionale Repubblicana, was organized into three fighter groups, one torpedo bomber group, and one bomber group. After German fighter units withdrew to defend the Reich itself in 1944, the ANR was left heavily outnumbered to face Allied air operations over Northern Italy. During 1944 and 1945, the ANR shot down 262 Allied aircraft while losing 158 of its own.

  At sea, the RSI's navy reached only about a twentieth of the size of the Italian Co-belligerent Navy that had joined the Allies. The bulk of the Royal Italian Navy had sailed to Malta under the terms of the September 1943 armistice. The RSI's naval forces consisted largely of motor torpedo boats and CB-class midget submarines, ten of which operated in the Adriatic and five in the Black Sea.

  By late April 1945, the remaining RSI troops were boxed in at Collecchio alongside two Wehrmacht divisions and forced to surrender to the 1st Brazilian Division. Graziani formally surrendered on the 29th of April at Caserta, though since the Allies had never recognized the RSI his signature was not required at the ceremony.

• 7. Collapse and Legacy

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  Around the 25th of April 1945, a general partisan uprising combined with the final Allied offensive swept the RSI from power. Italy now marks that date as Liberation Day, festa della liberazione. Mussolini, attempting to flee with an entourage, was captured and killed by Italian partisans on the 28th of April 1945.

  The RSI never adopted a constitution. A constituent assembly had been announced on the 13th of October 1943, cancelled by Mussolini on the 14th of November of the same year, and deferred to after the war. The war ended before the war could end, and the assembly never met.

  The RSI's shadow extended far into post-war Italian politics. Most of the 8,000 Italian Jews who died in the Holocaust in Italy were killed during the 20 months of the Salo regime. Among the prominent figures later associated with the post-war Italian far right who passed through the RSI were Filippo Anfuso, Junio Valerio Borghese, Licio Gelli, and Giorgio Almirante, several of whom were involved in founding the neo-Fascist Italian Social Movement.

  The Republic of Salo also acquired a cultural afterlife. Pier Paolo Pasolini's 1975 film Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom used the regime as an allegorical setting for an adaptation of the Marquis de Sade. Roberto Benigni set his 1997 film Life is Beautiful in the same period. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the Futurist writer who had helped shape Fascist philosophy and remained a Mussolini loyalist to the end, died of a heart attack in Bellagio in December 1944, still inside the RSI's territory, still serving as its propagandist.