Italy urged to admit its war crimes were as bad as Nazis’

FOR decades, Italians liked to think that their soldiers behaved with decency during the Second World War, in contrast to their German counterparts.

It was a comforting image that was perpetuated by popular culture, including the award-winning 1991 film Mediterraneo about a platoon of hapless soldiers stranded on a tiny Greek island. But it was a myth.

Italy now faces an appeal to acknowledge that its troops massacred civilians, burnt villages and executed prisoners during the war, in some cases on a par with the worst ravages of the Nazis.

A group of 140 Italian, Croatian and Slovenian academics and historians have launched an appeal to mark the 80th anniversary of the invasion of Yugoslavia, which involved Italian, German and Hungarian forces.

They have written to Italy’s president, prime minister and its two chambers of parliament calling for a condemnation of the atrocities perpetrated by Italian soldiers in Yugoslavia following the invasion of April 1941.

“To cancel out its defeat, and the fact that it had backed the wrong side in the war, Italy tried to build an image of itself as a victim of the war,” Eric Gobetti, one of the historians who organised the initiative, said. Atrocities perpetrated by Italian forces are well documented but hardly known to the general public.

In the province of Ljubljana alone, in modern-day Slovenia, 1,000 hostages were shot, 8,000 other Slovenes were killed, and 35,000 people were deported to concentration camps.

One Italian officer wrote at the time: “Everywhere you hear people saying that the Italians are even worse than the Germans.”

In contrast to Germany, which went through a painful coming to terms with its wartime past, Italy did not.

That was partly due to the exigencies of the Cold War period. “Italy was the weakest link in Western Europe – it was close to Communist countries and it had the strongest Communist party,” said Prof Gobetti. Anxious not to make it any more unstable, the victorious Allies treated Italy leniently.

The call for a reckoning coincides with an online exhibition on the Italian occupation of Yugoslavia entitled Put to the Torch: the Italian Occupation of Yugoslavia 1941-1943.

“Other countries, like Germany, showed much more courage in coming to terms with their dark past,” said Raoul Pupo, the curator. “We hoped that finally, after 80 years, the moment has arrived for Italy to do the same.”