“Unraveling the Mystery: Why Italy Escaped a Post-War Reckoning for Its Atrocities”
The extent of Italian atrocities was not lost on the Allied powers, who considered Fascist criminals to be on par with their German and Japanese colleagues. As such, as early as January 1942, the representatives of 18 Allied governments held an Inter-Allied Conference on the Punishment of War Crimes, during which they signed a declaration pledging to investigate, prosecute and judge, to quote, ‘Those guilty or responsible for the commission of acts of violence inflicted upon the civilian populations, whatever their nationality.’
Including Italians, of course!
Following this up, in October 1943, Allied leadership set up the United Nations War Crimes Commission, or UNWCC, as an independent body to investigate evidence of war crimes and identify potential perpetrators. And one month later, on November 1st, 1943, the leaders of the UK, US and USSR adopted the ‘Moscow Declaration’, in which they explicitly agreed that Italian war criminals had to be brought to justice.
In the period from 1943 to 1948, the UNWCC identified over 1,200 Italian nationals suspected of having committed extensive and systematic crimes in territories occupied by the Fascist regime.
And then there were the Fascist concentration camps. The extent of the atrocities here was little known at the time, but in recent years, the efforts of researchers such as Andrea Giuseppini and Roman Herzog have brought to life some rather poignant examples.
In a nutshell, from 1922 to 1943, while Benito Mussolini was the head of government of the Kingdom of Italy, Fascist authorities administered a total of 135 concentration camps, 85 forced labour camps, 651 prisons holding both common criminals and political prisoners, as well as 107 prisoner of war camps.
