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A “Not Hundred Percent Anti-Fascist Policy”

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A “Not Hundred Percent Anti-Fascist Policy” A “Not Hundred Percent Anti-Fascist Policy” The Ethnic Cleansing of Italians in Istria and Trieste and the Allied Investigation Committee, 1943 - 1945 MA Thesis in History Holocaust and Genocide Studies Jorinde van der Meijden 6163726 Supervisor: Dr. Karel Berkhoff Date: 19 August 2016 2 TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENT 4 ABSTRACT 5 INTRODUCTION 6 I. THE ALLIED INVESTIGATION COMMITTEE 12 Context of the Allied investigation 13 Ideological motives for the investigation 14 Diplomatic motives for the investigation 15 Some of the findings of the investigation 16 Conclusion 18 II. THE INVESTIGATION OF YUGOSLAV CRIMES IN ISTRIA 19 The foibe on the Istrian Peninsula 23 The nature of the violence of the Yugoslav forces 25 Findings by the Investigation Committee 27 The stories of Giovanni Radeticchio, Don Beari and Giuseppe Bari 29 Conclusion 33 III. TRIESTE: FORTY DAYS OF YUGOSLAV OCCUPATION 35 The number of victims 38 The identity of the victims 39 Sites of execution and the foibe 42 The testimonies of two priests 47 The identity of the perpetrators 49 Conclusion 49 CONCLUSION 51 APPENDIX I – Map of the Venezia Giulia area (1946) 53 APPENDIX II – Facsimile of a statement by Giovanni Radeticchio 54 BIBLIOGRAPHY 56 PRIMARY SOURCES 58 3 ACKNOWLEDGEMENT This thesis would not have been possible without the advice, help and support of the academic staff at the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, family and friends. I would especially like to thank Dr. Karel Berkhoff for, very patiently, guiding me through the process of writing an MA thesis. His experience in the academic field and knowledge about structuring and organising a thesis, have helped me a lot during this process. I would also like to thank Dr. Kjell Anderson for agreeing to be the second reader of this thesis. To conclude, I would like to thank the staff at the National Archives in London for their help with and assistance in the research of the primary sources used in this thesis. 4 ABSTRACT After the armistice signed by Italy on 3 September 1943 the Yugoslav army invaded Istria, a peninsula that was granted to Italy after the First World War, and attempted to annex the area to the new Yugoslav state. During the period in which the Yugoslav authorities attempted to organise their control over the area, ending with the invasion of the German army a few months later, the Yugoslav forces intimidated, arrested, tortured and killed Italian nationals. Many of the victims were thrown, dead or alive, into natural sinkholes, called foibe (singular foiba). When the Allied forces continued their war of liberation from the south of Italy towards the north in 1943, a race for Trieste motivated both the Allied forces and the Yugoslav forces to move quickly to occupy the strategically important port city of Trieste. The Yugoslav army took full control over the city and repeated the massacres of Italians in the same style as in Istria. The Yugoslav forces created countless sites of executions, amongst them were many foibe. When the British army arrived and pushed the Yugoslav army across the so- called Morgan Line, the 13 Corps of Eighth Army of the Allied forces installed an Investigation Committee to excavate the corpses inside the foibe and elsewhere and to collect eyewitness accounts and testimonies from survivors and victims’ family members. The findings of the Investigation Committee show that the Yugoslav troops committed ethnic cleansing in Istria and Trieste in their attempts to gain those territories for Yugoslavia. 5 INTRODUCTION When I ask my Italian friends and acquaintances whether their history teachers at secondary school taught them about the history of the foibe (plural of foiba), natural pits, in which Italian soldiers and civilians were thrown by the Yugoslav troops, they answer that they vaguely know something about it. They don’t remember much about those history lessons but add that the schools in the region of Venezia Giulia (covering the areas of Gorizia, Trieste, and the whole Istrian peninsula, see Appendix I) do teach their pupils about this gruesome story. It strikes me as odd that these educated, intelligent and generally interested young Italians do not know much about the massacres committed by the Yugoslavs in the Trieste and Istria regions. The secondary sources used in this thesis are predominantly books written by Italian historians such as Raoul Pupo, Roberto Spazzali and Gianni Oliva, but also American historian Pamela Ballinger and others. Despite the factual uncertainties concerning this topic, almost all historians stick to the same context of the history of the Trieste and Istria regions, in the west and south of Venezia Giulia, respectively, during the Second World War. On July 10, 1943 the Allies arrived in Italy.1 The Allied forces consisted mostly of British troops who had an interest in the control over the Mediterranean. Although, according to the historian Paul Ginsborg, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill did not have a lot of faith in the Italians, he did have some respect for Mussolini. In the early days of fascism, Churchill had even complimented Mussolini for saving Italy from the threat of communism. This meant that there was not a lot of British pressure on the fascist groups in Italy to dissolve. Meanwhile, King Vittorio Emanuele III and Marshal Pietro Badoglio tried to negotiate about war and peace with the Allies but also wanted to retain a military dictatorship.2 The Forty-Five Days, starting with the dismissal of Mussolini on 25 July 1943, ended with the armistice between Italy and the Allied forces on 3 September 1943, which was made public five days later. From then on, Italy was a co-belligerent of the Allies. The Allies considered the Italian partisans, who were fighting Mussolini’s army and the German army and who wanted to install a leftist army, as an obstacle to Allied 1 Paul Ginsborg, A History of Contemporary Italy, society and politics 1943-1988, New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2003, p. 11. 2 Ibidem, p. 12. 6 victory. The cases of Greece and Yugoslavia became the examples for the British forces of failed interventions by the Allies: Greece ended up in a civil war between the communists and the monarchists and Yugoslavia became a repressive communist state under the leadership of Josip Broz Tito.3 Therefore, the Allied forces acted carefully when dealing with the partisan groups or Tito and his army. During the Second World War several partisan groups were present in the areas of Trieste and the Istrian peninsula. There were Italian resistance and partisan groups, organised within the Comitato di Liberazione Nazionale (CLN, the National Liberation Committee). Within this committee existed groups such as the Garibaldi, Mazzini and Friuli battalions, the Giustizia e Libertà (Justice and Freedom) and the Brigata Proletaria (Proletarian brigade). These are only a few examples of the many bigger and smaller resistance and liberation groups that were active during the Second World War in Italy. There were also the Yugoslav partisan groups that were attempting to occupy Istria and Trieste. Some were organised by the Croatian, Slovene and Yugoslav Communist Party. The Croatians established the ZAVNOH, or National Anti-Fascist Council of the People's Liberation of Croatia, while the Yugoslavs created AVNOJ, the Anti-Fascist Council of the People's Liberation of Yugoslavia. As the Allied forces went further north within Italy, after the Sicily landing, the border region between Italy and Yugoslavia became more and more important to the Yugoslav troops on the one hand and the Allied forces on the other. While Churchill never trusted the communists, the Yugoslavs wanted the territory back that they lost to Italy during the peace negotiations after the First World War, most importantly the peninsula Istria and the portal city Trieste. These areas had been given to Italy as a reward for joining the fight against Germany in the First World War and Italy subsequently made sure to ‘Italianise’ the area in the twenties and thirties. After the Italian armistice of September 3, 1943, the Yugoslav army started an offensive to take the Istrian peninsula back. When they succeeded in taking most of the area they abolished all Italian bureaucratic institutions, street names and therewith the Italian culture in Istria became marginalised.4 In 1943 a race commenced between the Allies and the Yugoslav army, as they were trying to drive the Germans back over their former northern border, to reach the city first. In the autumn of 1945 the Yugoslav army 3 Paul Ginsborg, A History of Contemporary Italy, pp. 41-42. 4 Gianni Oliva, Foibe: Le stragi negate degli italiani della Venezia Giulia e dell’Istria, Milan: Arnaldo Mondadori Editore 2002, pp. 74-75. 7 occupied Trieste for forty days but had to retreat when the Germans launched a final attack. During these forty days in the Venezia Giulia area, but also in the spring and summer of 1943 on the Istria peninsula, the Yugoslav army committed many atrocities against Italian citizens and army personnel. The violence consisted of executions, kidnappings, looting, violent maltreatment, deportation, forced marches and torture. People were also shot and thrown into the foibe (natural sinkholes), sometimes even alive. The estimates of the number of deaths ranges from a few hundred people to tens of thousands of people.5 Most researchers write about several thousand victims.6 This estimate includes all the Italian victims killed by Yugoslav forces between 1943 and 1945, as well as victims of summary executions and those Italians who died in the Yugoslav concentration camps. It is remarkable that the most prominent scholars on the topic, such as Pupo, Spazzali, Oliva and Ballinger, have not used the materials that the British Allies created by investigating the crimes committed by the Yugoslav troops in the Istria and the Trieste regions.
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