Sins of memory: reflections on the lack of an Italian Nuremberg and the administration of international justice after 1945

From Extremism to Terrorism: The Radicalisation of the Far Right in Italy and West Germany

“…This self-denying policy of remembrance allowed many prominent fascists to continue their careers in public. 88 Consequently, the openly neo-fascist party MSI, as well as right-wing extremist groups, were accepted and tolerated provided they played by the rules of trasformismo. Thus, radicals -and those individuals within the security apparatus who helped them -were convinced that they possessed the moral right to attack 'inferior' groups.…”

‘The way we were’: the social construction of Italian security policy

“…Unlike in Germany, where the sense of shame for the atrocities committed during the Second World War brought German societal groups to embrace Western values and institutions as a whole, in Italy the espousal of the same values and institutions became not an end in itself but a tool to achieve political gains at both the national and international level. The experience of the war against Fascism fought by the Resistance and the lack of an Italian Nuremberg (Battini 2004) allowed the political elite to detach itself from the Fascist regime and to regard the diminished international relevance of Italy in the post-Second World War era as an unfortunate situation determined by contextual factors, rather than as a just punishment for its foreign policy during the conflict (Focardi and Klinkhammer 2006).…”

Debating the Meaning of Fascism in Contemporary Italy

“…In fact, in part to spare the Italians the embarrassment of a very public airing of Fascism's imperialist, racist and murderous occupation practices, the Allied authorities decided to shelve the planned 'Italian Nuremberg', that is, a major trial of the entire Nazi 'machinery of reprisals' that operated in Italy between 1943 and 1945, and was responsible for killing upwards of 100,000 Italians, mainly civilians. Yet, as Michele Battini (2004) has demonstrated, the Allies, the British in particular, renounced the idea altogether, largely in acquiescence to the pressing political objectives of Italy's postwar transition. Predominant among these objectives was the declared need to avoid inflaming the revolutionary impulse evident among segments of the population, which manifested itself in early electoral successes for Italy's Socialist and Communist parties.…”

“…11 But is it the case, as the truism would have it, that the absence of a full and thorough legal investigation and prosecution of these various crimes actually produced the so-called 'grave consequences' scholars and jurists often speak of, either in juridical or historical terms? Michele Battini (2004), for one, is convinced that the absence of an Italian Nuremberg, for instance, and the concomitant absence of procedures to investigate and prosecute Italian war criminals had the twin effect of limiting the 'juridical horizon' of international law after 1945, while at the same time contributing indirectly to a 'deformation of historical memory that was founded on the separation of Germany's responsibilities from those of other European nations' (p. 359). In the process, Battini says, 'the faults of the allied armies and the responsibilities of the European ruling class' (p. 359) for its role in Nazism-Fascism in the first place were too easily forgotten.…”