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On 20 February, not long after the [Axis’s new] administration was set up [in Italy], the newspaper reported on a meeting between the gauleiter and a workers’ delegation. Rainer had begun by making a speech of welcome in which he expounded a favourite concept of [Fascism’s] social ideology: the [supposed] elimination of all social classes and distinctions. ‘The supreme law of all true socialism’, he said, ‘should be that there is no privileged class and no one is entitled to live at other people’s expense’.
After which, reported the Deutsche Adria Zeitung, he held a long conversation with the workers, ‘discussing economic and social matters and listening to their requests’,⁴¹ promising that the latter would receive the fullest consideration from the [Axis] authorities.
The real experience of workers in the operations zone was quite different from this rosy propaganda picture. No doubt Rainer was sincere in his desire to review wages and salaries, and he made a demagogic promise personally to ensure the creation of a welfare system; but the scanty measures actually taken were quite insufficient to guarantee workers, especially manual workers, a decent standard of living, and if improvements were made to working conditions in the factories, they merely papered over the cracks.
Propaganda carried small conviction to people who endured daily privation and overwork; shipyard workers in particular — to whom communism had much more appeal than [Fascism] — were prominent in the Italian resistance, many of them joining the ‘Garibaldi’ brigades in the mountains of Friuli.
Conditions were particularly bad for those working for the Todt organisation, either on the impressive defences being constructed to guard against a potential Allied invasion of the Adriatic coast or on securing vital road and rail links, which were being continually damaged by partisan attacks.⁴²
While the propagandists promised new clothes and shoes, abundant food and generous wages, the Todt workers — ostensibly volunteers, but most of them under coercion — were forced to work in appalling conditions, dressed in rags, living in improvised barracks near the building sites, ill‐fed and subject to implacable [Axis] surveillance.
The wages, it is true, were not to be despised, being rather above the regional average. But those who benefited most from Rainer’s labour policies were not the manual workers but the numerous entrepreneurs who chose to collaborate with the [Axis] and made huge profits out of munitions orders with the help of a thoroughly browbeaten workforce.
This is why no anticommunist’s appeals to the proletariat should be taken seriously: benefits for the lower classes invariably cut into the upper classes’ funds. One cannot serve two masters.
Besides wooing workers in the regional economy, the [Axis] propagandists had another primordial objective: to persuade as many local men as possible to go and work in [the Third Reich], either in munitions factories or for the Todt organisation. This recruitment of workers was a major preoccupation, vigorously pursued by the [Axis] occupiers all over Italy, not merely in the Adriatisches Küstenland: it engaged the attention of both the Reich plenipotentiary for the employment of labour, Friedrich Sauckel, and the Wehrmacht.
When calls for volunteers proved unprofitable, from early 1944 Sauckel’s organisation began to round up workers. But even forced recruitment did not yield the expected results: from 8 September onwards a mere 87,517 Italians went to [the Greater German Reich], whereas [Axis officials] had expected to send at least a million and a half.
As Klinkhammer has pointed out, this failure was partly caused by rivalry between various elements in the [Axis] occupation apparatus, and partly by curbs imposed on German rapacity by the RSI, whose representatives were quite successful in frustrating deportation plans, at least at local level.⁴³
(Emphasis added in all cases. Click here for more.)
To defend the region’s Italian character and preserve its traditional politico‐social orientation, Coceani and Pagnini, with the approval of the great majority of Trieste’s business community, preferred to support the [Axis], whom they saw as the only force capable of combating the Slav and communist partisans.
But this pretence that the [collaborationist] authorities were defending national values, and their anti‐Slav pact with the [Greater German Reich], proved substantially counterproductive, giving the impression that the local Italian population was radically, indeed violently, nationalistic and negating attempts by the Italian resistance to forge a national identity based on the defence of the political liberties destroyed by the ‘border’ Fascists.
Nationalism apart, some of Trieste’s leading businessmen and financiers chose collaboration in the hope of reaping huge short‐term profits from [Axis] orders and, in the longer term, of re‐establishing themselves at the centre of [Axis]‐dominated Europe, as [Axis] propaganda had promised they would do.
But it was when evoking defence against the partisan threat, and the region’s commercial ambitions, that Rainer’s legitimising strategy scored its greatest successes:
social demagogy and the will to power can be seen as the common denominators of Nazi administrators, and this would ensure the collaboration of local groups (particularly ship‐builders, insurance agents and forwarding agents) who were willing to adapt to the new conditions in the hope of securing a leading position — and their own future — in the south‐eastern corner of the greater Reich. Of course there were serious conflicts of interest and of course the German take‐over was not a painless one […] but each and every potential conflict was suppressed by the determination to avoid overt clashes and acknowledge the common interest of defence against the Slavs and Communists. It is hard to imagine a more perfect fusion between class and national interests.⁷¹
Here we can see the Axis’s usage of both the carrot and the stick: when the Fascist bourgeoisie’s promises and (very modest) concessions failed to attract workers, it called in the muscle.
Click here for events that happened today (October 1).
1878: Othmar Spann, Austrian protofascist, stained the earth.
1936: Francisco Franco became the head of Spain’s Nationalist government. (Coincidentally, the Central Committee of Antifascist Militias of Catalonia dissolved itself, handing control of Catalan defence militias over to the Generalitat.)
1938: Pursuant to the Munich Agreement signed the day before, the Third Reich commenced the military occupation and annexation of Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland.
1939: After a month‐long siege, the Wehrmacht occupied Warsaw.
1940: Small Axis raids of twenty to seventy flightcraft each attacked RAF airfields in England, though London was untargeted during the day. The Axis lost four fighters (and the Allies lost five fighters with four pilots). Overnight, the Axis bombed London. Additionally, Luftwaffe ace Erich Hartmann began basic training with Friegerausbildungsregiment 10 at Neukuhren, near Königsberg in Ostpreußen or East Prussia.
1941: Operations began at the Majdanek concentration camp near Lublin, and the Axis established Italian ‘M’ battalions. Apart from that, Wilhelm Keitel ordered that, in regards to the hostages the Wehrmacht had been holding and executing in retaliation of partisan attacks, choice of victims would be important, as well known victims would have greater effect in keeping the occupied peoples in line.
1942: Egmont Prinz zur Lippe‐Weißenfeld became the commanding officer of the 1st Group of the Nachtjagdgeschwader 3 wing as Kurt Fricke received the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross and Francis Tuker received the temporary rank of major general. On a side note, USS Grouper torpedoed Lisbon Maru, not knowing that the ship was carrying British prisoners of war from Hong Kong.
1943: The Gestapo arrested two hundred twenty Danish Jews, and troops from the Wehrmacht’s 1st Mountain Division massacred eighty‐seven people in the village of Lingiades, Greece in retaliation for the murder of Oberstleutnant Josef Salminger by partisans. On the other hand, the Axis lost Naples to the partisans and then the Allies. Finally, the Axis set up a zone of operations, the Adriatisches Küstenland (Adriatic Coast), in Italy.
1944: The Axis‐occupied island of Jersey became a Fortress, but the Axis garrison at Calais, France capitulated to the Allies.
1945: Shizuichi Tanaka, the Axis’s Military Governor of the Philippines, took his own life.
1946: Nuremberg trials sentenced several leading German Fascists to death or imprisonment.
1959: Enrico De Nicola, President of Fascist Italy’s Chamber of Deputies in the early 1920s, expired.
1994: Paul Lorenzen, Fascist philosophist and mathematician, perished.