General Roatta and the repressed past of fascism

"In Italy, until July 25th, there were 45 million fascists; from the next day, 45 million anti-fascists. But I don't know if Italy has 90 million inhabitants." Thus, with sarcasm and a certain dose of cynicism, British leader Winston Churchill used to comment, in the aftermath of the fall of fascism, on the condition of Italy, a country that had entered the war in 1940 with Mussolini's cry of "Victory!" and ready, after just three years, to forget all its past, erasing any guilt in the conflict.

It is no coincidence that at the Paris Peace Conference of 1946, all responsibility for the defeat was attributed exclusively to Mussolini, the hierarchs, and Victor Emmanuel III. Once the former had been eliminated in the final days of the war and the monarchy deposed in the referendum of June 2, Italy could then regain its supposed political and moral integrity by using the Resistance, the work of a minority, as an alibi to absolve itself of the guilt of the twenty-year period.

Of course, things didn't happen in this simplistic, self-absolving way. Simply put, at the end of the conflict, opportunism, convenience, and realism dictated that the past be kept to a minimum. An example of what we're describing is offered by historian Davide Conti , who in his latest work, "General Roatta" (Salerno Editrice, 2025, pp. 248), explores one of the emblematic figures of the lack of continuity between fascism and democracy.

Head of the Military Intelligence Service (SIM) from 1934 to 1939, Maria Roatta led the Italian Volunteer Corps alongside Franco during the Spanish Civil War. Military attaché in Berlin in 1939, he was later promoted to Chief of Staff of the Royal Army. From 1942, he commanded the Italian Second Army in Croatia, ordering the suppression and deportation of Yugoslav civilians and partisans. After the fall of Fascism, he was appointed Chief of Staff by the Badoglio government. On September 8, 1943, he fled Rome with the king. First named on the list of alleged Italian criminals submitted by the Yugoslav government to the United Nations, Roatta never answered in court for his conduct in the Balkans. Tried for SIM activities, including the murder of the Rosselli brothers, he fled to Spain before his conviction. The amnesty of 1946 and his acquittal in 1948 freed him. But how was all this possible?

In reality, the "Roatta affair" was just one of many, as the entire postwar ruling class transitioned from fascism to the republic without a fight: normalization and stability were needed; dealing with the past would have raised embarrassing questions for many and opened up unpredictable scenarios. And so magistrates, intellectuals, journalists, bureaucrats, generals, prefects, police commissioners, professors... all kept their jobs. With the paradox of finding, for example, a magistrate like Gaetano Azzariti, president of the Racial Tribunal in 1938, and president of the Constitutional Court in 1957. Or a man like Marcello Guida, who in 1939 was director of the Ventotene prison where anti-fascists were held and in 1969 became police commissioner of Milan.

The "Roatta affair" was thus just one of many emblems of Italy's rapid transition from fascism to democracy, and of how the "continuity of the State" placed a heavy burden on the birth certificate of the Republic. A burden that still weighs today, because failure to reckon with the past means it never becomes history. It continues to be present, cluttering the life of our nation, as demonstrated by the recurring controversies over anti-fascism, the April 25th demonstrations, the foibe massacres, Holocaust Remembrance Day, the tragic events on the northeastern border, and the Roman salute. These are sterile controversies, but they demonstrate how immature our democracy remains.