Italian War Crimes - World War II

World War II

The Italian war crimes of World War II are a well documented aspect of the history of Italy during the 20th century, but because the British government with the beginning of cold war saw in Pietro Badoglio a guarantee of an anti-communist post-war Italy it did not extradict him after the war. Yugoslavia, Greece and Ethiopia requested extradition of 1,200 Italian war criminals who however never saw anything like the Nuremberg trial, because the British government with the beginning of cold war saw in Pietro Badoglio a guarantee of an anti-communist post-war Italy.

The documents found in British archives by the British historian Effie Pedaliu and in Italian archives by the Italian historian Davide Conti, pointed out that the memory of the existence of the Italian concentration camps and Italian war crimes has been repressed due to the Cold War.

A similar phenomenon took place in Greece in the immediate postwar years. After two Italian film-makers were jailed in the 1950s for depicting the Italian invasion of Greece and the subsequent occupation as a "soft war", the Italian public and media were forced into the repression of collective memory, which led to historical amnesia and eventually to historical revisionism, unlike the French who, having deconstructed resistance mythology, are aware of their Vichy period, too.

The repression of memory led to historical revisionism in Italy and in 2003 the Italian media published Silvio Berlusconi's statement that the Benito Mussolini only "used to send people on vacation".