Why in Germany, public opinion is ashamed of having been Nazis (despite some rare exceptions), while from Italy, public opinion is often nostalgic for those years and even in our country there are political forces , not irrelevant, admittedly sympathetic to fascist politics, while not declaring themselves openly fascist because fortunately the constitution prevents it?
Why is Fascism not universally perceived in Italy as a stain in our past, something to be ashamed of and to keep one's distance from, ostracizing those ideas, proposals and elements of fascist politics?
Put more simply, because the heirs of Hitler, Himmler and other Nazi hierarchs are ashamed of their ancestors, while in Italy the heirs of Mussolini and other fascist hierarchs are proud of their ancestors and in some cases, they exalt their memory, looking for in every way to highlight the "good things" done by fascism ... as if having reclaimed a swamp could justify murders, beatings, deportations and massacres ...
The answer to these questions is not easy, but I want to try to answer them anyway.
The reason is political, but I am not talking about today's politics, I am referring instead to post-war politics, because it is in those years, between 1945 and 1948, that the problem of nostalgic fascism has its roots.
After the war, after the Second World War, Germany and the Germans had to become aware of their past, of what had happened, of what had been done and of what the German population had allowed the Nazis to do. While in Germany Nazism was officially condemned, both politically and legally, and the German population somehow "footed the bill" of the Nazi experience, in Italy all this did not happen and the Italian population was in a certain sense acquitted. Also thanks to the civil war (1943-1945) and the operations of "resistance" to fascism on the one hand, and the lack of political will to talk about civil war for decades, instead making one perceive the conflict that took place in the peninsula between 1943 and 1945 like a war between Italians and foreigners (Americans or Germans), thus creating, on the political level of the time, a real gap between "Italians" and "Fascists".
In 1945, Germany became aware that the Germans had supported and wanted Nazism, and those who did not want it had simply turned away or ran away, giving the de facto perception that, all Germans were Nazis and had to repent of what they had done. In Italy, however, this does not happen, the Italians, due to the civil war, despite not having lifted a finger for about twenty years, suddenly they are no longer fascists, and therefore there was no reason to be ashamed of the actions of the fascists, only the Fascists were guilty… forgetting perhaps too easily that for over twenty years Fascism had regulated every aspect of Italian life, and that, with very few exceptions, almost no one before 43 had strongly opposed it. The Italians, just like the Germans, had chosen fascism, but, once fascism was gone, they simply turned away, just as for twenty years they had turned away while fascism reigned in the country.
Put simply, at the time, in the immediate postwar period, political discourse in Germany was based on the concept that in Germany, the Germans had voluntarily chosen Nazism, and therefore were accomplices of Nazism. Otherwise, in Italy, the setting was that the Italians suffered fascism, which started from a coup d'etat, and therefore were not accomplices of it, and they had nothing to be ashamed of ... they had simply bowed their heads to the man with the truncheon and the castor oil.
This type of approach allowed Italy and Italians, on the one hand, to "clean up consciences" of the Italians, who de facto never had to deal with fascism and its crimes, it was not the Italians who assassinated Matteotti, it was the fascists, it was not the Italians who kept silent when the fascists went to take Gobetti, but the the mouth had been closed, it was not the Italians who had accepted the racial laws, they had been imposed by the fascists. But not only this, this operation of "cleansing of consciences" , he also moved into the courtrooms and military tribunals, empty halls where Italian war criminals and fascists had to be tried, but de facto, this did not happen, there were no trials or convictions, and this is because, on the basis of the principle of reciprocity, Italy agreed to try its criminals, but only if the French, Yugoslavs and Americans, winners of the war, had tried their criminals, and the winners of the Second World War would never have done this, never would they would be bowed, as winners, to the demands of the defeated, and therefore, Italy, obtaining the ability to autonomously try its criminals, de facto never tried them.
The failure of Italian Nuremberg , to use a term coined in the early 2000s by several Italian historians who dealt with the story, is largely responsible for the fact that Italians have never come to terms with fascism and that fascism has never been completely consigned to history .
After the war, all the participants in the Second World War compiled huge lists of war criminals, and after years of negotiations and rejected requests, they finally agreed to resort to the principle of reciprocity, so as to put an end, once and for all, to the second World War. Each country agreed to take charge of the trials of its criminals, accused by other nations, so did Italy too, whose trials were somehow started, the files were opened, the preliminary investigations began, but then something happened and everything came filed and forgotten in what Franco Giustolisi around the mid-90s, he defined the "closet of shame" .
Si tratta di un armadio rimasto chiuso per oltre quarant'anni, in cui, nel 1994 vennero trovati gli incartamenti dei processi mai computi ai criminali di guerra italiani.
One wonders why, beyond the principle of reciprocity, Italy did not complete those processes, and the answer to this question comes directly from the material found in that wardrobe.
Analyzing the documents, now freely available to anyone and kept in the offices of the former military court of La Spezia, it emerges that at the time, at the end of the forties, now a few years after the end of the Second World War, in Italy the precise political will of the then Italian ruling class was manifested “forget fascism” , to leave it behind, but without ever really dealing with it, without ever really and concretely facing it, and not facing it, fascism remained there, settling and fermenting.
Today, with hindsight, we can say that ignoring those files and avoiding those trials was a very serious mistake, and wanting to look for those responsible, it is not difficult to identify them. Among the material that emerged from the cabinet of shame there is in fact also a note by a young Giulio Andreotti, at the time just an undersecretary of a ministry without poets, in which it is invited to ignore the question of trials, to avoid any political problems either domestic and international.
These were years in which some Italian cities, such as Trieste, were under the control not of the Italian state but of international forces, and there was political pressure from Yugoslavia for the areas liberated by the Yugoslavs during the war to become Yugoslav territories, and the the only way to prevent this from happening was to find an agreement between Italy and Yugoslavia.
Italy therefore decided, in order to maintain the integrity and unity of its territories, not to require Yugoslavia to try its criminals, including those responsible for the slaughters of the Foibe, who in the new asset of Tito's government held positions of relief and central positions.
Italy, or rather its political leadership, chose not to try the fascists for political and geopolitical reasons.
It must be said that, already between 45 and 48, on the pages of the unit, these political choices were harshly criticized, the unit was, until the early fifties, the only newspaper in Italy that continued to openly ask for criminals to be tried Italians, but his voice went unheard. Mainly because, for an important slice of public opinion, these requests masked the political will of the Italian Communists to continue the war or in any case to help the Yugoslav Communists to the detriment of Italy.
In any case, ignored or not, already at the time, on the pages of the unit and in the ranks of the PCI (and largely also of the PSI) it was theorized (and with hindsight, we can say that it was foreseen and their forecast was very prudent) that ignoring Italian criminals and not seriously addressing the problem of fascism, pretending that it never existed, would have the dangerous effect, in a not too remote future, of reviving the flower of fascism and bringing to light that dangerous political interpretation of reality.
In short, it was clearly said that, if Italy had not condemned the fascists, in the future they could return, playing the victims, since they are not "guilty" , given that no fascist had been condemned by a fair court, and that, only the condemned fascists had been condemned by the popular courts of the CLN, could blame the choices of anti-fascist Italy, and, by associating anti-fascism with communism, discussion of the entire republican structure and its institutional balances, since, in this interpretative key, the fascists were not condemned for their war crimes and against humanity, but, apparently, only for political reasons, making those condemnations apparently unfair .
Sources:
C. Pavone, A Civil War.
M.Battini, Sins of memory.
L.Paggi, The people of the dead.
Michele Battini, Sins of memory. Failure of Italian Nuremberg.
Jon Elster, Closing the Accounts. Justice in political transitions.
Jacques Sémelin, Purify and destroy. Political uses of massacres and genocides
Joanna Bourke, The seductions of war. Myths and stories of soldiers in battle.
Carlo Gentile, German war crimes in Italy.
Einaudi. Danilo Zolo, The justice of the winners.