Quoting Carlo Moos in World Fascism: A Historical Encyclopedia, page 585:
The [so‐called] Italian Social Republic (RSI), or Salò Republic (named after the seat of the régime on Lake Garda in northern Italy), arose as a consequence of the [Kingdom of Italy’s] withdrawal from World War II on 8 September 1943 and the occupation of northern and central Italy by the Wehrmacht.
Mussolini had been dismissed by King Victor Emmanuel III on 25 July 1943 after the Grand Council of Fascism voted to unseat him; he was transferred from one detention place to another but liberated from imprisonment on the Gran Sasso by [Axis] paratroopers on 12 September 1943.
Following a radio address by Il Duce from Munich on 18 September, a [postmonarchic] fascist government was formed in northern and central Italy, and the Fascist Party was revived along with the militia, which was later brought over with the Carabinieri into the Republican National Guard.
The Salò régime continued the battle against the Allies on the side of the [Axis] in competition with the royal government under Badoglio in the south. But relations with the Germans and their governor, Ambassador Rahn, and with the army commanders Rommel, Kesselring, and Vietinghoff, as well as the SS under Wolff, were always difficult. Mussolini was unable to reassert his authority successfully, for not only the south, freed by the advancing Allies, but also a part of Italy controlled by [Berlin] remained wholly or more or less completely beyond his grasp.
The Alpenvorland and “Adriatic Coast” zones were to all intents and purposes annexed by Germany and subjected to the Reich governors of the neighboring regions (Friedrich Rainer in Karinthia, Franz Hofer in Tirol‐Vorarlberg). Mussolini retained what autonomy he could in the remaining area, and a new republican army under Marshal Graziani was established, whose four divisions were initially sent to Germany for training and from the summer of 1944 were used chiefly for the battle against the anti‐Fascist partisans.
The RSI began by dealing with those members of the Grand Council who in the night of 24/25 July 1943 had voted against Mussolini and who had thereby made possible his fall, and with all who were classified in the widest sense as “traitors” to Fascism.
In January 1944 the trial of the chief conspirators was held in Verona, concluding with eleven death sentences in contumaciam, of which five were carried out immediately (on 11 January 1944). Victims included Mussolini’s own son‐in‐law Galeazzo Ciano and the quadrumvir Emilio De Bono. At least 1,500 death penalties were also handed down and implemented by specially established provincial special tribunals.
The Salò Republic manifested an intensification of violence and pursued a race policy that was deeply anti‐Semitic, declaring all Jews to belong to a hostile nation and requiring them to be herded into camps and ordering that their property and investments be confiscated.
The deportations organized subsequently by the [Greater German Reich] could never have been implemented without these preparations and without the collaboration of the organs of the Salò Republic. Altogether, more than 6,800 Jews were deported in forty‐three transports to the East (for the most part to Auschwitz), of whom only 837 survived.
Salò had to engage in an increasingly brutal struggle with the developing resistance, and that struggle became the main job of the forces of order (police, national guard, black brigades) and the armed forces of the RSI. Assessment of this has remained a matter of controversy down to the present day, but it is increasingly interpreted as a real civil war.
At the same time, relations with the [Axis] occupiers/allies worsened: agreement could not be reached as to the problem of the Italian military internees sent to [the Greater German Reich] as forced labor, while the increasingly heavy‐handed [Axis] reprisals—which degenerated into downright massacres in such cases as that of the Fosse Ardeatine on 24 March 1944—led to catastrophic consequences for the standing of Fascism in the country.
Mussolini’s last public appearance in Milan, on 16 December 1944, was astonishingly successful, but four months later he was killed by partisans on 28 April 1945 as he attempted to escape to Switzerland in the face of the advancing Allied forces. The war in northern Italy ended with the capitulation of the [Wehrmacht] on 29 April, which came into force on 2 May, about a week before the complete capitulation of the Wehrmacht.
The Salò régime was a brief but interesting and important episode in Fascism’s history. Whereas previously Fascist Italy had a significant degree of autonomy from the Third Reich (I would argue), it is much harder to convince somebody that the Salò régime in particular also possessed this, with the Greater German Reich intervening frequently and directly in its affairs, practically producing a sort of hybrid between German and Italian Fascism. (The latter phenomenon had not quite yielded to the German one as Austrofascism had in the late 1930s.)
Hence, we see the only Italian division of the SS: the 29th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (1st Italian); we can hear the Italian translation of Horst Wessel Lied: È l’ora di marciar; and we witness the Italian Fascists being as aggressive as possible in their antisemitism.
Pictured: Pio Filippani Ronconi in the uniform of a foreign volunteer of the Waffen‐SS.
The Salò régime officially had an army (Esercito Nazionale Repubblicano), a police force (Corpo di Polizia Repubblicana), an airforce (Aeronautica Nazionale Repubblicana), and technically a navy (Marina Nazionale Repubblicana). We can find hardware (e.g. the FNAB‐43, the Armaguerra OG‐43, the TZ‐45) manufactured for this régime. We can even find postage stamps for it.
All of this is probably unsurprising, but the point here is that collaborationist régimes should not be glossed over simply for being cardboard cutouts of ‘real’ governments. They can continue to hold a great deal of meaning or hope for the thousands who fight for them; a much more preferable alternative to outright colonization, and sometimes regarded merely as transitory phases before actual independence.
There is plenty more that I could add, but I am omitting it to keep this post at a manageable length… with the following exception. For an examination of the Salò régime’s pseudosocialism, including the misnomer ‘Italian Social Republic’, click here.
Quoting Mussolini and the Salò Republic, 1943–1945: The Failure of a Puppet Regime, page 30:
To underline the renewed ideological solidarity between the two régimes, Hitler strongly urged the Duce to include “Fascism” in the new Italian state’s title, but since the Fascist canon had fallen into disrepute, Mussolini, on 25 November 1943, formally ushered into existence the more neutral‐sounding Italian Social Republic. This was to be Mussolini’s final crack at holding power.
The exceedingly vague expression ‘social republic’ has been attested since at least the 1820s and was in vogue during 1848, but whether its reintroduction in 1943 was a conscious misappropriation or a mere coincidence remains uncertain.
In any case, we can see right off the bat that this was another marketing decision to make fascism less unappealing to the proletariat. Not being content with one euphemism, though, the Salò régime made some promises to proletarians to confuse or pacify them. Quoting Philip Morgan’s Italian Fascism, 1915–1945, pages 226–8:
The [Salò régime’s] programme was agreed at the unruly congress of the Partito Fascista Repubblicano (Republican Fascist Party or PFR), the reconstituted successor to the PNF, held in Verona in November 1943. It was an attempt to give a meaning and content to the [Salò régime], other than doing the [Third Reich’s] business, and to win the support of the population nominally under its jurisdiction, whose loyalties were contested by the anti‐Fascist and anti‐German Resistance movements.
It called for a constituent assembly to replace the monarchy with a [so‐called] social Republic, an elected head of state based on the U.S. model, a scarcely credible charter of citizens’ rights, a single party for the political education of the people, socialisation of the economy, treating the Jews as enemy aliens, and a foreign policy whose talk of ‘living space’ and European federation was a rehash of the former régime’s New Order wartime propaganda.
The abolition of the monarchy and socialisation were both a rejection of and an alibi for Fascism’s past. The desire for revenge and scapegoating was brutally evident in the extraordinary Special Tribunal’s trial and execution of those of the July 1943 Grand Council ‘traitors’ who could be found, including Ciano.
It was they, in league with the king and conservative bourgeois and capitalist interests, who were charged with not only bringing about Mussolini’s fall and the Allied invasion but also subverting and sidetracking the Fascist Revolution during the twenty years of the regime. Now shorn of its conservative fellow‐travelling elements and liberated from the ‘pluto‐monarchical compromises of 1922’,³ Fascism could ‘return to the origins’ and enact the national syndicalist and republican strands of the revolutionary interventionism and early Fascism of 1915–19.
This was myth‐making in the grand style, and to justify it Salò’s propaganda evoked the legacy of Giuseppe Mazzini, D’Annunzio and Fiume.
Socialisation owed as much to the ‘Third Way’ corporatist rhetoric of the 1930s and of the Fascist New Order as to national syndicalism, at least in the proposals put together by the Republic’s Ministry of Corporations. The principle of private property was still sacrosanct, but the state could regulate it in the context of a national economic plan and would take over or retain the running of essential national utilities and services.
What the measure approved by the government in February 1944 proposed was a kind of socialisation of management, not capital, to create that collaborative and productivist ‘community of producers’. The running of state and private firms was to be shared between an elected assembly of employees and shareholders, a management council of representatives of capital and labour, and an executive director elected by the assembly or chosen by the government.
Here it is at last: the smoking gun that fascism was socialism! Not that utopian capitalists needed it, since they are convinced that every political or economic system (with the sole exception of their completely unregulated free market phantasy) is socialism already, but now the evidence is undeniable! Wait until TIK and other propertarians get their hands on this knowledge. Then all that they need to do is broadcast this to every unionizer on the planet, and the entire working‐class movement will grind to a halt! Yes, reversing the tides of history is just that easy!
Oh wait a minute, what is this?
But the [régime] could decide on anything and enact little to nothing. Making ‘labour […] the foundation of the Social Republic’⁴ in this abortive ‘return to the origins’ cut across the two unavoidable realities of the Republic’s tenuous existence: [Berlin’s] control of Italy for the exploitation of its economy, and the worsening civil war between the Fascists and the Resistance. Hitler was mystified by the RSI’s social policy but thought it irrelevant and innocuous. The [Third Reich’s] authorities on the ground intervened to nullify it.
Hans Leyers, the head of the Italian arm of the German Ministry of Armaments and War Production, regarded socialisation as ‘sabotage’⁵ of the Italian industries working for the [Axis] war effort and co‐operated with the industrialists themselves to exclude or obstruct its implementation in key areas. By April 1945 perhaps 60–80 firms with about 130,000 employees had been ‘socialised’, mainly newspapers and publishers under the auspices of the Ministry of Popular Culture, which took the measure seriously.
The decree of February 1945 for the socialisation of large industries was a dead letter, not only because of [Reich]‐inspired procrastination by employers but also because most workers boycotted the council elections. Industrial workers had enough experience of the Fascist régime not to trust in this false dawn or twilight of labour reforms. The left‐wing Resistance movements certainly warned them off, as they did employers. Fascism’s attempt to redefine itself could not escape the taint of its past.
(Emphasis added.)
Further reading: The Fallen Hero: The Myth of Mussolini and Fascist Women in the Italian Social Republic (1943–5)
Click here for other events that happened today (September 18).
1931: The Empire of Japan invaded Manchuria, (arguably) beginning World War II.
1939: The Polish government of Ignacy Mościcki fled to Romania while the radio show Germany Calling began transmitting Fascist propaganda.
1940: The Axis submarine U‐48 sunk the Allied liner SS City of Benares; those massacred included 77 child refugees.
1941: Although it captured Poltava, Ukraine, the Axis modified its strategy against Leningrad, switching from assault to besiegement; tanks from the 4th Panzer Army loaded onto trains for Moscow. This shift in strategy partially resulted from Berlin’s order earlier on this date that Leningrad be razed to the ground.
1942: Heinrich Himmler ordered the SS to have full judicial control over Polish, Russian, Ukrainian, Jewish, and Romani prisoners; all prisoners of the Third Reich’s ‘justice’ system capable of work were to transfer to concentration camps for neoslavery, and food rations for Jews in the Third Reich were to diminish. Coincidentally, Theresienstadt surpassed its maximum capacity; 58,491 prisoners now resided in that camp.
Meanwhile, Axis troops began retreating back along the Kokoda Track across the Owen Stanley Range in Papua, and one dozen He 111 torpedo bombers attacked Allied convoy PQ‐18 at the entrance of the Kola Inlet, Russia, sinking Allied ship Kentucky (without killing anybody) at the cost of three aircraft. Stuka dive bombers hampered a Soviet defence by destroying forty‐one of the one hundred six Soviet tanks committed, while escorting Bf 109 fighters destroyed seventy‐seven Soviet aircraft in the immediate area.
1943: Berlin ordered the deportation of Danish Jews.
1944: The British submarine HMS Tradewind torpedoed the Axis cargo steamship Jun’yō Maru, tragically massacring 5,600 humans, mostly neoslaves and POWs. Meanwhile in France, the Battle of Arracourt commenced.