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CHAPTER 1
The Ideological Context of Genocide
By the time civil war broke out in Italy in the fall of 1943, Fascism had been vilifying the Jews for five years. Starting with the 1938 enactment of antisemitic laws, it had gradually excluded Jews from numerous areas of Italian society, teaching Italians to consider the Jewish race inferior. Although antisemitism had occasionally been invoked by Mussolini and Fascism in the first half of the 1920s, it was only as Italian society became more totalitarian from the mid-1930s onward that anti-Jewish tendencies appeared more systematically. Antisemitism emerged in the extremist fringes of the movement — in the pages of Roberto Farinacci's newspaper Il Regime fascista, for example — as well as in the form of episodes involving national cultural institutions or local administrations within the regime. The conquest of Ethiopia in 1936 had added fuel to the fire of the collective racist imagination, which, starting in 1937, manifested itself through measures of "racial prophylaxis" intended to prevent unions between Italian colonizers and colonized Africans. In that year, the Fascist regime had started down the path of state racism and antisemitism, and the summer of 1938 saw the publication of a manifesto by the so-called "racial scientists" that proclaimed the superiority of the Italian race. It was followed that autumn by the enactment of laws expelling Jews from schools and public administration and severely limiting the professional practices, business activities, and property ownership of Jews. These provisions included a racist "purge" of the publishing industry and libraries, which prohibited the publication and even the loan of works by Jewish authors. It also included measures conceived by a relentless and absurd bureaucracy intended to socially humiliate the Jews, such as excluding them from certain beaches. Yet another measure prevented Jews from participating in associations for the protection of animals. In this way, the Italian society forming under the new totalitarian system of Fascism, pervaded by the Fascist ideal of a "new man," was a society founded — to borrow an expression from a different context — on racial "apartheid" in the colonies and on antisemitism at home. This regime was not conceived as a temporary digression but rather as the new and enduring face of modern Italy, designed to last. This antisemitic and racist change in direction began to transform the way Italian society portrayed itself, shaping a culture based on racial separation and bombarding public opinion via the media, propaganda, and high culture, thus producing generations of Italians who were force-fed racist ideas by their schools and by the propaganda machine. These ideas settled atop an existing stratum of age-old religious prejudices inspired by Catholic anti-Judaism that was present in the most diverse areas of Italian society, even in the most secular spheres. With the exception of the brief interruption of General Pietro Badoglio's forty-five days in power following the toppling of Mussolini in July 1943 (during which the racist measures were still not lifted), the officially sanctioned antisemitism of 1938 provided a continuous legal, political, cultural, and ideological context in which the most radical measures of the anti-Jewish policy of the Social Republic of Salò would make their appearance. While the antisemitism of 1938 cannot be directly linked to the genocidal shift of 1943–45, it is safe to say that it provided the background necessary for such a shift to take hold.
The fall of Mussolini, the end of the regime, and the about-face in military alliances in the summer of 1943 (the Italians left the Germans and joined forces with the Allies) triggered accusations of betrayal and elevated the figure of the traitor in the popular imagination. A fixation with traitors would take on a key role in the revived Fascism of September 1943. Moreover, the concept of betrayal and traitors overlapped with the conspiracy theories typical of the antisemitic tradition. The flames of war, especially fratricidal war, were fanned by fears of the enemy within, and the figure of the Jew, now identified by the genocidal shift as enemy and target, had already been singled out for centuries in Europe as the "stranger within." Mussolini's renewed alliance with Nazism at the very time in which it was promoting its project of mass destruction caused the Fascism of Salò, in its ideological radicalization, to once again focus on the antisemitism it had embraced in 1938 as a renewed political resource and as one of the self-defining fundamentals of the new Fascist Social Republic. Article 7 of the Manifesto of Verona, which set out the principles and aims of the Republic of Salò, therefore defined the Jews as foreigners and enemies, paving the way for their persecution, for their imprisonment, and for their deportation.
Scholars of civil wars have remarked that "every conflict of this type triggers a mechanism causing those who were supposedly 'one of us' to become strangers whom it is legitimate, necessary, and urgent to harm even to the point of annihilation." "The dehumanization of the adversary," moreover, "becomes necessary to preserving the sense of self." On the other hand, in civil war "there are greater feelings of equality or shared past, languages and places, and more frequent transitions, camouflaging, duplicity, and changing of sides than among soldiers in a foreign army. But, indeed, the most foreign of all is the foreigner within." At the same time civil war sociology has drawn attention to the link between civil war and intimacy. Unlike interstate conflicts, this type of war is characterized by proximity, commonality, and affinity. As we shall see, informing plays a crucial role in this context as a "micro-foundation of intimate violence." This also forces us to reflect on the relationship between intimacy and genocide that developed in the context of the civil war from 1943 to 1945. Genocide does not necessarily occur — on the contrary occurs less frequently — in distant, foreign lands than in our own society, among the kindred, among the familiar, even among next-door neighbors. In fact, those closest to us are usually the first to become informers or even executioners.
The observations made by anthropologist Mary Douglas apply even more profoundly. She notes that apprehension regarding purity and danger in unstable situations enables the construction or reconstruction of a symbolicorder. In Salò, too, segregation and elimination were used to deal with the anxiety created by extreme conditions and instability, and to create or reestablish the appearance of order. "Ideas about separating, purifying, demarcating and punishing transgressions have as their main function to impose system on an inherently untidy experience," notes Douglas. "It is only by exaggerating the difference between within and without, about and below, male and female, with and against, that a semblance of order is created." And the "initial recognition of anomaly leads to anxiety and from there to suppression or avoidance." If we were to paraphrase Douglas, we might say that under "disorderly" and "dangerous" conditions society needs to be "purified" through the imposition of an "exaggerated" "order" based on "separation," on being either "with" or "against." In the racist vision, the presumed otherness represents the contaminating anomaly that causes anxiety and, by way of reaction, avoidance or — in the genocidal situation — elimination. The ideal of the RSI was structured on notions of "us" versus "them" and distinguished the "pure" from the "impure," thus leading to their annihilation. It laid the ideological and propagandistic groundwork necessary to prepare, justify, and support the conflict of civil war and participation in the Shoah.
The anti-Jewish theories and propaganda of the reincarnated Fascist State will here be illustrated through three figures representing different levels of action and responsibility during 1943–45: Giovanni Preziosi, an ideologist and theorist during Italy's twenty-year Fascist period, then a man of the government, an aspiring legislator, and propagandist in the RSI; the bureaucrat and executioner Giovanni Martelloni, "expert" writer on the "Jewish question" and head of the Office of Jewish Affairs in Florence; and the distinguished radiologist Giocondo Protti, who became an antisemitic lecturer and hack.
Let us begin by opening the pages of the publications of Salò — daily newspapers, magazines, and books — and reviving the voices therein. "By the way, where can one buy Bolscevismo, Plutocrazia e Massoneria [Bolshevism, plutocracy and freemasonry] by Giovanni Preziosi, published and distributed by Mondadori? And where can one find the Protocols of the Elders of Zion sold exclusively in Italy by Baldini and Castoldi?" These words concluded a short article dated March 18, 1944, titled "Il ritorno di Preziosi" (The return of Preziosi), which appeared in the first issue of Avanguardia Europea, the weekly magazine published by Italian SS volunteers. The article referred to a long, cordial meeting that Preziosi had recently had with Mussolini and announced the creation of the General Inspectorate of Race, personally directed by Preziosi with the aim of carrying out a "drastic and systematic purge of the national character," inspired by the theory that "the tragic situation in which the Fatherland found itself was exclusively due to masonic and Judaic plots." The Social Republic was therefore responsible for reinstating Preziosi, defrocked priest, journalist, and agitator. Even before Fascism's rise to power, he had produced the first Italian translation of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (1921), republished in 1937 and 1938, and again in 1944–45, in three editions, one by the Ministry of Culture. Preziosi had also edited the magazine La Vita Italiana — another product revived by the RSI — which had, throughout the twenty years of Fascism, peddled the themes of the international Jewish conspiracy and the traditionalist esoteric racism advanced by its main theorist, Julius Evola, to which Preziosi added a specific "biological-mystic" component. After the fall of Fascism in July 1943, the former priest and racist propagandist had fled to Germany, where he was received by Hitler himself in his headquarters and where, in September 1943, with German support, he began broadcasting his own radio propaganda show live from Munich to Italy. Preziosi renewed his contacts with Mussolini in early December 1943, sending him a number of articles that he had published in the Völkischer Beobachter (the Nazi newspaper edited by Alfred Rosenberg), explaining to the Germans how Freemasons and Jews had caused the fall of Fascism and supporting a "profound purge of the Freemasons" as well as a "comprehensive solution to the Jewish question." At the end of January 1944, Preziosi submitted a memorandum to Il Duce in which he reiterated his unwavering dedication to the steady denunciation of the pernicious role of Freemasonry and Judaism, reminding Mussolini, who was at that time engaged in setting up the Republic of Salò, of a prophetically sinister phrase in Hitler's Mein Kampf: "Our first task is not to create a national State constitution, but to eliminate the Jews. [...] The main difficulty lies, not in forming the new state of things, but in making space for them." In March 1944, the General Inspectorate of Race began its activities, directed by Preziosi with the support of a twenty-one-person staff. The Inspectorate was responsible for identifying "racial status," providing information on Freemasonry, the "plutocracy," and hidden political forces; promoting and studying "racial questions," especially the Jewish question; supervising the confiscation of Jewish property; and diffusing antisemitic propaganda in Italian schools and in the review titled Razza e civiltà, which had returned to publication and had become the Inspectorate's mouthpiece. At the same time Preziosi also developed a series of proposals intended to harshen antisemitic legislation by extending persecutory provisions to "mixed bloods" and "half-breeds," whether foreign or Italian, and creating new "genealogical files" for the individual certification of one's "Italian blood." Many aspects of the organization of the Inspectorate and of the political and legislative proposals developed by Preziosi evoked the Nazi model, often making explicit reference to it. Moreover, at the time of his proposal to introduce a "comprehensive solution to the Jewish problem," Preziosi was undoubtedly aware of the solution adopted by the Germans, and, at the very latest by the fall of 1943, during his stay in Germany, he would have had occasion to learn its details firsthand. In his memorandum to Mussolini, he also wrote:
The first task to be tackled is not the so-called "national concord" that [philosopher Giovanni] Gentile and others keep blathering on about, but the total elimination of the Jews, starting with those, and they are no small number, revealed in the census of August 1938, which has never been made public. Then we need to track down those who are more or less baptized or aryanized. Then we need to exclude mixed-bloods, husbands of Jewesses, and anyone with a drop of Jewish blood in their veins from the ganglion of national life, from the army, from the magistracy, from the teaching profession, and from both the central and peripheral hierarchies of the Party. The same applies to anyone belonging to the Freemasons.
Considered together, these new legislative proposals and renewed political imperatives amounted to nothing less than a warrant for genocide, conceived — and by that time already launched — as a joint Italian-German undertaking.
In June 1944, following the Allied advance from the south, Giovanni Martelloni moved north from Florence where he had directed the prefecture's Office of Jewish Affairs to join the Inspectorate of Race. From the time of the rebirth of Fascism in the Republic of Salò, Martelloni, whose career will be described in detail in another chapter, had performed a dual role both resuming and expanding the work that he had carried out since 1941 as an antisemitic writer and journalist with scholarly aspirations and working as a persecutor of Jews. He personally carried out arrests and confiscations in Florence where the prefect had put him in charge of coordinating the anti-Jewish activities conducted by Fascists in the city and province.
Martelloni was also the author of a series of articles published in the daily newspaper Il Nuovo Giornale between January and May 1944. They were based on a hypothesized historical reconstruction of the Jewish presence in Florence, describing the Jews' arrival in the city in the fifteenth century and the beginnings of their moneylending activities. The articles mingled a pseudoscientific reconstruction based on studies and documents with prejudices and stereotypes drawing upon anti-Judaic theology as well as antisemitism. In an article published in February 1944 Martelloni explored the conversion of the Jews, defined as a "current topic," intending to demonstrate the validity of the most recent legislation that punished Jews "even if baptized, or exonerated," given that "even if they are converted, they continue to be Jewish, to reveal themselves as Jewish, and to boast of being Jewish." He ended the article by affirming that "such considerations should not be a cue for violent individual attacks upon these Jews, but for the occasion to envisage, definitively and positively — once and for all — a solution to the problem that has plagued the world for two thousand years: 'the Jewish problem.' A complex problem that no purification ritual can or could hope to resolve or alleviate. A problem that can be defined as a real and true 'danger': a cultural, spiritual, and tangible danger as proven by the war underway." In April 1944, Martelloni published the booklet La confisca dei beni ebraici (The confiscation of Jewish assets), in which he accompanied the Legislative Decree of January 4, 1944, with a historical premise and a comment on the role of the antisemitic official and expert. The booklet illustrated "the historic continuity of the defensive feeling against the danger of Jewish corruption of our national mentality, by Rome and by the Church in the modern age." It concluded by affirming the historical necessity of the recent legislation — and therefore of the persecution — because of the responsibility of the Jews for "having unleashed upon the world that terrible storm of hatred, iron, and blood that is currently raging around us."
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Italian Executioners"
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