Abstract
The construction boom in Rome and the surrounding Agro Pontino slowed and then came to a halt after Italy’s entrance into the war on June 10, 1940. Italy had signed its Pact of Steel with Germany in May 1939, which completed the diplomatic and military alliance of the Axis powers. Mussolini had boasted throughout the 1930s of Italy’s growing military strength and the “eight million bayonets” that represented the armed strength of the nation. In fact, Italy had nowhere near that number of men in the armed services, and the military rhetoric of the Duce far exceeded his limited military resources.’ In an unusual admission, Mussolini told Hitler in 1939 that he would need three years to prepare Italy for war. Hitler had other plans and would not wait for his Italian partner. Following his August agreement with Stalin, Hitler had a free hand to invade Poland on September 1, 1939. Mussolini remained on the sidelines and declared Italy a “non-belligerent.”
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Notes
Elena Agarossi, A Nation Collapses: The Italian Surrender of September 1943 ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000 ): 87–89.
Robert Katz, The Battle for Rome: The Germans, the Allies, the Partisans, and the Pope, September 1943 June 1944 ( New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003 ): 38.
Jane Scrivener, Inside Rome with the Germans ( New York: Macmillan, 1945 ): 5.
For an account of Jews during the fascist period, see Alexander Stille: Benevolence and Betrayal, Five Italian Jewish Families Under Fascism (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991 ).
For recent views on this subject, see Joshua Zimmerman, ed., The Jews of Italy under Fascist and Nazi Rule, 1922–1945 ( New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005 ).
For accounts of the fate of Rome’s Jews, see Robert Katz, Black Sabbath: A Journey Through a Crime Against Humanity ( New York: Macmillan, 1969 )
Susan Zuccotti, Under His Very Windows: The Vatican and the Holocaust in Italy ( New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2000 ): 155–156.
Stanislao G. Pugliese, Desperate Inscription: Graffiti from the Nazi Prison in Rome 1943–1944 ( Boca Raton: Bordighera Press, 2002 ): 11.
See photographs in Antonio Spinosa, Salo, Una Storia per Immagini ( Milan: Mondadori, 1992 ).
Angelo Del Boca, “The Myths, Suppressions, Denials, and Defaults of Italian Colonialism,” in Patrizia Palumbo, ed., A Place in the Sun: Africa in Italian Colonial Culture from Post-Unification to the Present ( Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003 ), 21–25
Alexander De Grand, “Cracks in the Façade: The Failure of Fascist Totalitarianism in Italy 1935–9,” European History Quarterly 21: 4 (October 1991): 526.
Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism ( New York: Knopf, 2004 ): 171.
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© 2005 Borden Painter
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Painter, B.W. (2005). War and Resistance. In: Mussolini’s Rome. Italian and Italian American Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403976918_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403976918_7
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