Quoting Paul Isaac Hagouel’s The Holocaust of Jewish Greeks and Jews of Thessaloniki: Italian Truncated, Selective & Hybrid Humanity, Italiani Brava Gente into the 21st Century, page 5:
Preventive censorship continues unabated, perhaps to guard the myth of Italiani brava gente. After the 1953 publication of the screenplay of L’Armata s’Agapò about the presence of the Italian army in Greece during the Second World War,⁵⁶ screenwriters Renzo Renzi and Guido Aristarco, both also film critics and essayists, were accused of insulting the armed forces (vilipendio alle forze armate, bringing disgrace to the armed forces) and sentenced to forty‐five days in prison.
They were arrested and taken to the fortress of Peschiera and, even more incredibly, on 5 October, they were put on trial in Milan, by the military court, not the ordinary judiciary. The reason was that both were former members of the Italian Army, Renzi as lieutenant, Aristarco as a sergeant major, which, in 1953 was still considered “a historical continuity of the fascist army.” The accusation against them was that of “disgracing the armed forces.”
Renzi had dared to tell the truth of the lack of honorable behavior of the Italians in Greece, including episodes ranging from the shooting of hostages to the decision to send the cavalry to commit massacre, from the colossal round of prostitution to the overbearing requisition of food. The trial ended with sentences of eight months to Renzi and four and a half months for Aristarco. Renzi was also demoted.
Click here for events that happened today (September 23).
1861: Robert Bosch, Axis industrialist, was born.
1888: Raffaele de Courten, Axis commanding officer, started his life in Milan, Lombardia.
1890: Friedrich Wilhelm Ernst Paulus, Axis field marshal (who failed miserably in his assault on Stalingrad), was rude enough to exist.
1900: Volodymyr Kubijovyč, Axis collaborator, imposed his presence on the earth.
1916: Aldo Romeo Luigi Moro, Axis university student and draftee, was born.
1921: Naoshi Kanno, Axis squadron commander, was born in a village near Edano (now Kakuda), Miyagi Prefecture.
1925: The protofascist Prince Philipp (of the House of Hesse‐Kassel) married Princess Mafalda of the House of Savoy, daughter of King Vittorio Emanuele III of Italy, at the Castello di Racconigi in Fascist Italy.
1928: Greece and Fascist Italy signed a Treaty of Friendship, Conciliation, and Judicial Settlement.
1933: The Third Reich’s head of state made an announcement in Nürnberg stressing the importance of separating the functions of the S.A. and the Reichswehr.
1938: In the evening, Neville Chamberlain and Chancellor Adolf Schicklgruber met again in Bad Godesberg. The Chancellor demanded that Czechoslovakia leave the Sudetenland area by September 28, 1938; Chamberlain expressed frustration that this Chancellor was now demanding more than what had originally been discussed; after some heated discussion, Schicklgruber returned to the original demand of October 1, 1938.
1939: The Third Reich’s police began confiscating radios from Jews as the construction work for slip III at Deutsche Werke Kiel AG completed. In Hunan Province, China, the IJA’s 6th Division crossed the Sinchiang River at dawn, followed by a similar crossing by another division at 0620 hours at Yingtian (now Miluo). Likewise, naval vessels landed the IJN’s Shanghai Special Naval Landing Force and the IJA’s 3rd Division east of the city of Changsha.
1940: Two Fascist raids approached London at 0930 hours and 1730 hours, yet few flightcraft reached it; the Fascists lost ten Bf 109 and one Bf 110 fighters (while the British lost eleven fighters). Overnight, Fascist bombers assaulted London and Liverpool. Apart from that, the IJA invaded Indochina (despite French agreement to Imperial demands during negotiations on the previous day). Lastly, the Vichy forces in West Africa imprisoned the crew of two Allied flightcraft that had landed at Dakar, and then fired upon a boat containing Allied personnel approaching to negotiate (wounding two).
1941: Axis dive bombers attacked naval facilities at Leningrad, sinking submarines P‐2 and M‐74 and damaging cruisers Maksim Gorki and Kirov. Additionally, the Axis authorities in Paris issued a decree that stated that any Frenchman concealing or assisting a British Airman would be shot, and any woman would be sent to a concentration camp.
1942: The Axis struggled to liquidate the Tutzin ghetto in western Ukraine, and Erwin Rommel departed North Africa for a six‐week rest in the Third Reich to recover from sinusitis, high blood pressure, and other ailments linked to the North African environment.
Axis submarine U‐617 attacked Allied convoy SC‐100 east of the southern tip of Greenland just after the start of the day, sinking British tanker Athelsultan at 0019 hours (fifty‐one died, ten did not) and British merchant ship Tennessee at 0142 hours (fifteen died, twenty did not). At 0026 hours, U‐211 sank Allied tanker Esso Williamsburg south of Greenland; most of the sixty aboard died, and the few survivors never reached land.
Hundreds of miles southeast of Newfoundland, U‐582 sank Norwegian merchant ship Vibran, and all forty‐eight aboard perished. At 0615 hours, U‐515 sank Norwegian ship Lindvangen off British Guyana; fifteen died, but eight survived. At 1103 hours, U‐515 struck again in the same area, damaging Allied ship Antinous. At 2334 hours, U‐125 sank British ship Bruyère 380 miles southwest of Freetown, West Africa after an eight‐hour pursuit, but nobody died.
1943: Joseph Goebbels visited his Chancellor at Rastenburg, East Prussia. The two had dinner together, during which the Chancellor shared his belief that Winston Churchill would be unwilling to consider peace offers coming from Berlin. Meanwhile, the Axis liquidated the Vilna Ghetto in Lithuania.
1944: The Axis exterminated the Jewish prisoners of the Kluga concentration camp in Estonia. In northern Italy, the microstate of San Marino declared war on the Greater German Reich after a mere platoon of Axis soldiers rounded up its three hundred‐man army. Meanwhile, Patrick Hurley asked Chiang Kaishek to accept communist assistance in the war against the Empire of Japan, but Chiang rejected the request!
1963: Karl Burk, Axis commanding officer, dropped dead.
1968: Pio of Pietrelcina, fascist cleric, expired.