The Italian Army in Slovenia

Strategies of Antipartisan Repression, 1941–1943

Kenneth A. Loparo, Kenneth A. Loparo, Kenneth A. Loparo, Kenneth A. Loparo, Kenneth A. Loparo

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137281203
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Italian History
• Index: History

This powerful study offers a vivid and often disturbing account of the Italian army's occupation of Slovenia during World War II. It moves from the decision of the Italians to annex Slovenia in 1941, through local resistance and brutal reaction against civilians, to the army's ultimate collapse following Italy's defection from the Axis.

1

The Annexion

On April 6, 1941, at six in the morning, the Axis powers, without any declaration of war, attacked Yugoslavia. In Slovenia, operations were particularly rapid. The Italian Second Army, commanded by General Vittorio Ambrosio, was involved on the “Giulia front,” that is, on the part of the border between Italy and Yugoslavia that corresponded with Slovenia. The Second Army was made up of the Fifth and Eleventh Army Corps. The Fifth Army Corps had, under it, the Sassari, Bergamo, and Lombardia divisions, while the Eleventh Army Corps, under the command of General Mario Robotti, was formed of the Re and Isonzo divisions. There were few clashes and already by April 11 the Italians had their first successes with the occupation of Logatec and Sussak. On the same day, General Mario Roatta (at the time head of the army general staff), in a lightning strike, entered Slovenia’s capital, Ljubljana, with two platoons of motorcyclists, in order to take the city before the Germans did. On April 15, the front completely collapsed, and Yugoslav troops began to surrender en masse. On April 18, at noon, the unconditional surrender signed at Belgrade the day before came into effect.¹ The Italian losses, on the Slovenian front, were fairly minor: 302 men wounded, killed, or missing, according to the 1978 book of the Ufficio Storico dello Stato Maggiore dell’Esercito,² and even less according to Marco Cuzzi’s 1998 study: 12 dead, 16 wounded, and 21 missing.³ This shows how particularly swift the campaign in Slovenia was, that the dead were few and the battles, clearly, were far from hard fought. Yugoslavia had dissolved and its army dispersed. “This end was reached in less than two weeks,” commented the official magazine Cronache della guerra, not without reason.⁴ As the Italian general Giacomo Zanussi wrote after the war, “There was no reaction: here the absence of reaction does not have a relative or approximate meaning, as one might believe, but peremptory and absolute.”⁵

After the signing of the armistice, the Italian armed forces remained in Slovenia. The occupation of what was to be Italian Slovenia was undertaken by the Eleventh Army Corps, under General Mario Robotti (see figure A.1).⁶ He could count on two large units: the Isonzo, which had already taken part in the campaign and was under the command of General Federico Romero, and the Granatieri di Sardegna, led by General Taddeo Orlando, which had substituted the Re division that had been sent to Croatia. Robotti could further depend on other corps, like the Frontier Guards,⁷ and other extra-division units. The part of Slovenia occupied by the Royal Italian Army was divided into three large zones: the western, which contained Ljubljana, was occupied by the Granatieri, the eastern, with its capital at Novo mesto, was under the Isonzo, and the area bordering the old frontier was patrolled by the Eleventh Frontier Guard group (GAF) (see figure A.2).⁸

While the occupation’s military authorities, on April 12, published its first decrees insisting that weapons be handed in,⁹ the Italian government had to decide how to manage the new territories. Its confusion about what to do comes through very clearly in an article, also from Cronache della guerra, dedicated to the “New Order” in Danubian Europe, in which the constitution of the independent state of Croatia is cited, and references are made to the demonstrations made on behalf of Italy by the people of Dalmatia and Montenegro, but which remained resolutely mum on the Slovenian situation.¹⁰ In the Vienna talks of April 21–22, the Italian foreign minister Count Galeazzo Ciano and his German counterpart Joachim von Ribbentrop¹¹ divided the ex-kingdom of Yugoslavia between them, even if it was the senior partner who got the lion’s share. Ciano heard it said that the division of Slovenia had already been defined as “irrevocable” by the Führer. The result was that all the mines and industries fell into German hands, while the Italians were left with the southern part, larger but poorer.¹² As reported by Ugo Cavallero, the supreme commander of the Italian Armed Forces, Mussolini said that “after the defeat of Yugoslavia we found ourselves with half a province in our hands, and, it should be added, the poorer half. The Germans indicated a border to us: we could do nothing but take note of it.”¹³ On May 3, Mussolini created the “Autonomous Province of Ljubljana,” inserting it directly into the borders of the Kingdom of Italy, and thereby eliminating any doubt over its political future.

Historians have been hard pressed to explain exactly why the dictator decided to incorporate into the nation a territory that was entirely lacking in interest, economically speaking, and which was also presumably hostile, in which there were only a few hundred ethnic Italians. The direct annexation of Slovenia, according to the historian Marco Cuzzi, was due to Mussolini’s desire to keep German troops as far away from Italian borders as possible, creating a sort of buffer zone.¹⁴ According to James Burgwyn, the annexation had been decided on so as to eliminate Communist and nationalist cells that supported Slovenian irredentism in the Italian territories of the Venezia Giulia. “No longer would there be a ‘Slovenian question,’” writes Burgwyn, “because Slovenia had simply ceased to exist.”¹⁵ In the opinion of another historian, Stevan Pavlowitch, the Italians “annexed it, probably because the Germans had annexed their part.”¹⁶ Rolf Wörsdörfer, however, has taken up a section from Ciano’s diary, to suggest the hypothesis that “instituting an Italian government . . . the regime of Mussolini promised itself advantages in the conflict with nearby Germany, ally and rival: in particular the Rome government hoped that a moderate occupation regime careful to collaborate with the traditional Slovenian elites could, from Ljubljana, influence the rest of the country, and above all those areas under German occupation.”¹⁷ In fact, Ciano meeting Marko Natlačen, the “ex-bano,”¹⁸ on April 19, said that he found him “miserable because of the fate that had befallen that part of Slovenia which remained under German control.”¹⁹ On April 29, after having worked with the Interior Minister Guido Buffarini Guidi on the annexation project, Mussolini’s son-in-law was able to note with satisfaction in his diary, “It is inspired by very liberal ideas. It will succeed in attracting sympathies in Germanized Slovenia, in which the gloomiest excesses have been recorded.”²⁰

In short, a series of motivations of an “internal” nature, like destroying Slovenian irredentism that had created problems for Italy since the end of the First World War, and “external” ones, like creating a contrast with the brutal occupation policies of the Germans, pushed Mussolini to annex Slovenia as an “autonomous province.” As for the official reasons, however, the Fascist press had more than a few problems in trying to justify the annexation of a people that had no reason to be forced into a foreign state, even with limited autonomy. Among the reasons used by the press were the area’s colonization by the ancient Romans, memories of the vanished Patriarchate of Aquileia, and, finally, as the Fascist boss Giuseppe Bottai’s cultural magazine Critica fascista wrote, the Slovenian people had never been a nation.²¹

The scope of the present work is not that of studying the civil policy of Fascism, but it is nonetheless necessary at least to note that Italian conduct, in this early phase, was marked by a certain moderation. The chief authority in the occupied territory was not military but civilian, a high commissioner: this role was filled by Emilio Grazioli, previously federal secretary (Federale) of the party in Trieste, and a Fascist of long standing. Grazioli had a group of armed forces under his command: the CCRR, the police, the Guardia di Finanza or finance police, and the Milizia confinaria, the border guard. Not only that, but he could also avail himself of the Royal Army in order to maintain public order, if necessary.²²

The new “province” of the Kingdom of Italy enjoyed a certain cultural and linguistic autonomy. Mussolini, on the phone to Grazioli on April 28, 1941, said that the occupiers were to have “left [the Slovenians] tranquil . . . We won’t even force them to join the Italian army; they can be volunteers if they want.”²³ The Consulta, an organization formed of prominent residents of Ljubljana that was intended to work side by side with the Italian authorities, was even received by Mussolini at palazzo Venezia in the summer of 1941. The kindly face of the Italian occupation, however, hid the intention “to Italianize the annexed territories more or less completely and for more or less the long term.”²⁴ The policy of the civil authorities was that of conquering the hearts of the Slovenians via a “moderate” treatment, and at the same time to flood the territory with Fascist institutions.²⁵ Grazioli decided to bind the wealthier classes of the new province to the Fascist regime, stressing their common anti-Bolshevik fears, and was fairly successful, in the beginning. According to Tone Ferenc, the annexation decree was “welcomed with sincere or hypocritical gratitude by the Slovenian bourgeoisie.”²⁶ It should also be borne in mind that in prewar Slovenia, conservative or even openly Fascist political parties were numerous and widespread.²⁷ The historian Marina Cattaruzza writes that what was to become Slovenian collaborationism “was rooted in the political culture that had developed in the country between the two World Wars.”²⁸ Perhaps for this reason Grazioli, once Federale of Trieste and familiar with border politics, was able to delude himself into thinking he had received a favorable welcome. According to a Fascist, but anonymous, source, Grazioli worked as “if three hundred and fifty thousand Slovenians had been waiting for us for a long time and as if, after the first embrace (for so the initial welcome was depicted, on high), they were calling for our political enlightenment and a new social organization.”²⁹ The high commissioner, however, could not ignore the fact that prewar Fascist policy in the Venezia Giulia had created very strong anti-Italian hatred and resentment. Italian irredentists and nationalists had always defined the “Slavs” as an impending threat, which needed to be fought with whatever weapons were available.³⁰ Ruggero Fauro, a Triestine irredentist and volunteer in the Italian army during the First World War, wrote in 1914,

Where the people are homogeneous, the foreigner is considered something completely different and often, particularly if he is the enemy, something monstrous and wicked. But among us, the Slav or the German often lives in our own house, and can be a good man who is polite to you, smiles at you, and caresses your children. How can anyone know that even that man is an enemy who must be hated and fought without quarter?³¹

The Fascism of the Venezia Giulia was born with the assault on the Narodny dom, the meetinghouse of the Slovenians in Trieste, which was burnt to the ground by the Fascists in July 1920, sealing, among other things, the alliance between soldiers of the Royal Army and the local Blackshirts, brought together by common hatred of the Sl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction to the American Edition
• 1   The Annexion
• 2   Ambrosio
• 3   Roatta
• 4   Summer 1942
• 5   Gambara
• 6   Memory and Oblivion
• Appendix
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index