Between National and International Mandates: Displaced Persons and Refugees in Postwar Italy

The opening sequence of Stromboli – Roberto Rossellini’s celebrated 1950 film – takes place in an anonymous Italian Displaced Persons (DPs) camp, immediately after the Second World War. Women of various nationalities talk about their present gloomy life and their hopes for the future. One of the refugees is Karin, the young Lithuanian woman played by Ingrid Bergman. When her application for resettlement in Argentina is rejected, she marries a former Sicilian prisoner of war. After the wedding, celebrated in the DP camp, the story focuses on a different subject: Karin’s inability to adapt to life on the little island of Stromboli. However Rossellini – one of the most prominent directors of Neorealism ¹ – in the movie’s initial scenes provides an accurate portrayal of Italy as the ‘land of refugees’. Internal and international displacement affected the country as a consequence of the war’s events and the redefinition of the geopolitical order that took place in the years following the war.

Rossellini’s snapshot is particularly meaningful given that during the years of postwar reconstruction, concern over the fate of refugees in Italy had rapidly waned both in public discourse and in the growing number of studies on the war and Liberation. Italian society yearned for a moral resurrection and sought to dissociate itself from the role it had played in the global conflict under the Fascists, with the result that uncomfortable memories tended to be driven into the shadows. ² In turn, this collective attempt to forget made it possible for a misleading interpretation to arise. Forgetting the recent past engendered the view that the end of the war represented a watershed. This view extensively affected past historiography. The Italian case offers a good example of the ‘psychologically and politically convenient convergence of historic renewal and collective amnesia [that] was reflected in the conventional histories of Europe after World War II’. ³ It was only in the 1990s, with end of the Cold War and the impact this had on the historiography of contemporary Europe, ⁴ that scholars began investigating the most relevant and controversial issues about the war and postwar years. ⁵ The history of refugees has only recently begun to receive attention, and the picture is still a patchy one.

The current scholarship has tended to focus on two themes: the forced migration which followed the rearrangement of the Italian–Yugoslav border, and the history of Jewish Displaced Persons. Between 1944 and the end of the 1950s around 250,000 Italians fled southern Venezia Giulia – a region corresponding to the eastern coast of the Adriatic sea, from the Gulf of Trieste to Istria and Dalmatia – which became part of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. The tragic fate of these people was neglected for a long time, but over the past decade historians have begun to delve extensively into the stories and memories of these exiles, ⁶ analysing the issue of postwar forced migration in the light of the complex history of this border region. ⁷ For its part, the research on Italy as a way station for Jewish Displaced Persons has tended to concentrate on the unauthorized migration to Palestine: between 1945 and 1948 more than 23,000 people sailed illegally from Italian shores. ⁸ Very little is known about the arrival of the displaced Jews in the peninsula, the geography of their shelters or the assistance they received. ⁹ The topic has been studied mainly from the angle of international relations; scholars have looked at how Italy’s approach to the emigration of Jewish DPs either reflected or impacted the reshaping of Italian foreign policy. ¹⁰

The literature focusing on refugees from Venezia Giulia and on Jewish postwar Displaced Persons offers richly researched and engaging overviews of specific topics. However, displacement tends to be seen as one component of larger historiographical problems, such as the creation of the state of Israel and Italian foreign policy within the context of the nascent Cold War. As a consequence, recent scholarship has neglected to examine these specific topics from the broader perspective of how the ‘refugee crisis’ was experienced in Italy, and Italian policies that were devised to respond to it. More generally, there is to date no consistent research that looks at the many different kinds of refugees in postwar Italy in the same context or treats them from the same analytical perspective. Pamela Ballinger has convincingly argued that ‘examining these populations and the respective regimes of refugee relief in tandem proves analytically productive’. Her investigation of the meaningful case of Trieste situates Italy’s responses to the various categories of displaced ‘in the framework of [postwar] reconstruction and normalisation’. ¹¹ My article is in line with this approach. It deals with ‘national refugees’, which means Italian civilians displaced by the events of the war or forced to migrate from former Italian colonies and ceded territories, such as people from Venezia Giulia. ¹² It also deals with the Displaced Persons – usually referred to as ‘foreign refugees’ (profughi stranieri) in Italian official documents – among whom Jews were the majority for most of the time. I have deliberately attempted to fit the stories of the different groups of refugees within the framework of a larger picture, which includes the disastrous effects of the war, the emergence of new political forces after the collapse of the Fascist dictatorship, and the establishment of an Allied military government.

The article focuses on the response of Italian governments to the large-scale movement of people taking place between 1944 and 1951, with a view to examining how the administration of refugees helped shape the political order of the newly born Italian Republic. As we shall see, responsibilities for caring for the displaced population were constantly being re-negotiated between national and international authorities. In responding to the refugee issue Italians adopted the same categories already in use by the international bodies, with the result that a binary regime arose which divided refugees into ‘national’ and ‘foreign’. During the postwar years providing relief to ‘foreign refugees’ emerged as an international problem and how the various parties interacted to deal with this question played a role in the restoration of Italian national sovereignty and Italy’s repositioning in the international context. At the same time, the relief of ‘national refugees’ arose as a crucial concern in restoring the economy, rethinking welfare and rebranding the national identity. In this article I take the view that refugee history in Italy resulted from an interaction between domestic and international policies, and I investigate both the development of a binary regime (‘national’ versus ‘international’), and the entangled stories of displaced persons classified into different categories.

The Italian ‘refugee crisis’ in the mid-1940s cannot be regarded as merely the by-product of postwar circumstances. The story of at least one segment of the 1945 camp population began as early as the 1930s, when women and men – many of them Jews – had fled Nazi Germany for Italy. For a few years they were allowed to live and work in Italy until they were expelled, and those who didn’t leave were eventually interned in camps. After the Liberation, the Allies and the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) classified them as Displaced Persons.

In the first part of the article, I consider Italy’s policies in the pre-war period and the years of refugee internment during the war. In the second part I focus on the interval between the Liberation and the Paris Peace Treaty (1947), when the administration of refugees was in the hands of the Allies and UNRRA, together with the Italian authorities. Tensions and negotiations that shaped this triangular relationship deeply affected the responses to the ‘refugee crisis’. In the third part I go on to look at the policies of the Italian government towards ‘domestic’ and ‘foreign’ displaced persons after national sovereignty had been fully restored. The drafting and implementing of the agreement with the International Refugee Organization (IRO) is particularly revealing, and it represents a bridge between Italy’s postwar policies and her approach to refugees in the 1950s.

The unprecedented number of displaced persons created by the First World War affected Italy only marginally. In the early 1920s the country gave shelter to a few people fleeing the Russian Revolution: according to the American Red Cross only 20,000 Russian refugees arrived in Italy, while 175,000 went to France and many more to Germany. Furthermore, the country’s dire economic plight pressed the Russians to move on shortly after their arrival. ¹³ There was a further influx of refugees a decade later, after Hitler’s rise to power. Approximately 20,000 women and men headed for Italy, quite a small share of the total number of those who fled Nazi political and racial persecution. ¹⁴ The Italian case is nevertheless intriguing, because a Fascist dictatorship was ruling the country.

Italy had a liberal tradition of receiving refugees, which the fascist regime initially continued. ¹⁵ In fact, during the first half of the 1930s, Italian delegates worked closely with the High Commissioner for Refugees and the Italian government ratified the 1933 Convention Relating to the International Status of Refugees. ¹⁶ This relatively open policy was not because Italy was particularly committed to the League of Nations. It was mainly intended to serve the country’s specific objectives in the area of foreign policy. The fascist government thought the intake of German refugees could facilitate relations with Great Britain and France and viewed it as an acceptable stratagem as long as it did not menace the domestic order. The flow of migrants heading for Italy was reasonably small, and Mussolini initially regarded the move as financially sustainable. At the same time political affiliation was significantly introduced as a barrier to immigration, and precise directions were given to prevent the anti-Nazi activists from entering the country. ¹⁷

Starting from 1926, the government had outlawed all parties but the National Fascist Party (Partito Nazionale Fascista, PNF) and had persecuted its political opponents. Many of them had gone into exile, heading mainly for France. ¹⁸ At this early stage no concern was raised against the immigration of Jews, although the fascist press was already gearing up its antisemitic campaign. ¹⁹ The contradiction shows how ambiguous Fascist refugee policy was, which from the beginning combined ‘tolerance and persecution’ ²⁰ : it left the door open to fleeing Jews, while laying the foundations for future discrimination against them. Fascist foreign policy was equally ambivalent and this fact influenced Italy’s peculiar approach to the question of refugees. Although Mussolini praised Hitler’s rise to power, and emphasized the ideological roots shared by the two regimes, he also wished to show his independence from Germany and to play the role of the honest broker between Germany and the Western democracies. Under these circumstances it was thought the modest inflow of Jewish exiles to Italy would contribute to smoothing Mussolini’s relationships with Great Britain and France. Fascist Italy offers one more piece of evidence that ‘in [the] Inter-war Period, refugees had become tools of foreign policy’. ²¹

The majority of refugees crossing the Italian border were German Jews, a number of them Poles who had moved to Germany before 1933. For many Italy was only a temporary shelter, since they had in mind the United States of America or Palestine as final destinations. ²² But in 1938 the already precarious status of those who had settled in the country changed dramatically when the Fascist government’s ambiguity finally turned into open hostility. In March the Anschluss set off a new wave of Jewish migration, and before many of the refugees could reach Italy, the border was closed to Jews from Austria. Admission was limited to those who could prove that they were only transiting the peninsula on the way to a further destination. ²³ The aim of this policy went beyond merely counteracting the ‘threat’ of massive immigration, as other European countries had done that year. ²⁴ The closure of the border to Jews from Austria had a political meaning as well and it was intended to forge stronger ties with Germany. In addition to forbidding the admission of Jews from Austria, Mussolini also declined Roosevelt’s invitation to the Evian Conference. ²⁵ Further proof that the issue of refugees was important in managing the relations with the Third Reich were the ‘safety measures’ taken on the occasion of Hitler’s visit to Italy, which ‘provided strong signals of a pro-nazi shift within the fascist regime’. ²⁶ During the seven days that the Führer toured Rome, Florence and Naples – in May 1938 – the police placed many of the exiles under arrest and kept the others under strict surveillance. ²⁷ This serious limitation of personal freedom showed the refugees that persecution was about to prevail over tolerance.

A few months later the government passed the racial laws, which forbade marriage between Jews and Italian non-Jews, expelled Jews from public offices and allowed them only limited access to the liberal professions. The racial laws also called for the immediate expulsion of all ‘foreign Jews’ in Italy, ²⁸ and revised the very notion of citizenship along racial lines. Thus, the refuge offered to the Jews had proved to be only a temporary arrangement.

The law required around 9000 people to leave, but it could not be effectively enforced, mainly because of restrictions on immigration in potential destination countries. Furthermore, during the first year of the war a few more thousand Jews succeeded in crossing the border and fleeing to Italy, which had not yet joined the conflict. Some of these people went right on to Palestine: for them, Italy was just a land of transit. ²⁹ For all the other refugees it soon became a place of internment. In June 1940 Italy declared war on France and Great Britain, and shortly thereafter the Italian authorities interned all the enemy aliens. While many other combatant states took similar ‘safety measures’, violating the individual freedom of hundreds of thousands, in Italy ‘foreign Jews’ were rounded up even if they came from friendly countries. The Fascist government regarded all Jewish refugees as enemies of the nation, regardless of their nationality.

Around 50 civil internment camps were operating in the country between 1940–3, under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of the Interior. ³⁰ About 20 more camps were opened after 1942 for the civilians deported mainly from the Italian occupied regions of Yugoslavia; they depended on the Army and most of them were concentrated in the north-eastern regions. ³¹ The Ministry of the Interior’s camps were almost exclusively located in the centre and in the south of the peninsula. The Italian authorities had planned to confine enemy aliens to the Centre-South because they regarded the North as the probable theatre of crucial military operations. ³² It was precisely this geography of internment that saved most refugee Jews from the deportations which – as is well known – took place in the Nazi-occupied area and in the regions under the control of the Italian Social Republic. After landing in Sicily, at the beginning of September 1943, Allied military forces quickly moved forward to liberate southern Italy. In two weeks they reached the camp of Ferramonti, in Calabria: its approximately 2000 inhabitants – mainly ‘foreign Jews’ – became the first group of Displaced Persons in liberated Italy. ³³

The Allied advance up the peninsula and the dynamics of the war sparked an acute refugee crisis which was initially a concern for the military operations, and later also became a crucial issue for Italy during the period of postwar reconstruction. Italians themselves were massively displaced because of the shifting battlefront and the bombings: tens of thousands of people took to the road seeking shelter, protection and assistance. ³⁴ But the number of the United Nations Displaced Persons was also rising substantially as large numbers of civilians fled from the war zones, in particular from the parts of Yugoslavia occupied by the Wehrmacht. In the last months of 1943 around 4000 people reached the shores of Apulia every week, crossing the Adriatic in overcrowded boats. ³⁵ At this early stage both groups of refugees – internally and internationally displaced – were the concern of the Allied Control Commission (ACC). The ACC was established when the Allies landed on the beaches of Sicily. It had five objectives:

(1) to organize military government operations under the armies in direct support of combat troops, (2) to give any immediate practicable help possible to the civilian population in order to prevent disease and unrest, (3) to prepare the governmental administration and economy for return to the civilian population as quickly as possible, (4) to supervise execution of the terms of the armistice surrender, and (5) to be the spokesmen of the United Nations to the Italian Government. ³⁶

In practice, it exercised full sovereignty over the country, although the authority of the Italian government was never officially suspended. ³⁷ The ACC set up a headquarters and a field organization composed of regional teams. The Commission was made up almost entirely of British and American officials, who were expected to share responsibilities equally. However, the British headed 16 out of the 25 sub-commissions, and according to US Lieutenant Colonel Thomas R. Fisher ‘Americans were generally outranked’. ³⁸ The United Kingdom strove to secure command of the ACC, since Italy was essential to expanding control over the Mediterranean area. ³⁹

When it came to refugees, the ‘primary purpose’ of the ACC was to ensure that the massive population movement did not interfere with military operations. Behind this policy was the view that:

a starving population is a centre of trouble – states a programmatic document from Headquarters – it will thieve, murder and riot in its struggle for existence … as it moves, it devastates the countryside, ever increasing in size the number of those starving. ⁴⁰

Refugees were seen as a kind of plague, which hindered the conduct of the war and aggravated its effects. Large numbers of internally displaced Italians appeared to pose the biggest threat because there were so many of them on the move. Unable to take in all the refugees and faced with a lack of dwellings, the Allied Control Commission concluded that:

every Yugoslav, or Jew or Czech, Austrian, Polish, etc. … that can be removed from Southern Italy means so much more space for Italian Refugees from the battle zones. If the former are not evacuated from Italy, we shall very soon have to think of shipping Italians from the mainland, and this will mean shipping them back again at a later date. The other Nationals, will on the other hand, sooner or later be shipped out of Italy in any case. ⁴¹

Based on this reasoning, in March 1944 around 10,000 Yugoslavs were moved to Cairo, ⁴² where the British Middle East Relief and Refugees Administration (MERRA) took care of their needs. ACC policy was dictated mainly by operational constraints, but it ultimately gave priority to assisting Italians in the liberated regions of the peninsula precisely because they happened to be in their own country. At the same time officials’ perception that ‘foreign refugees’ were rootless later made it easier for them to displace the DPs further afield. The introduction of the distinction between ‘national’ and ‘international’ refugees – which in later years would become entrenched – implied divergent forms of assistance and affected the geography of relief.

During the early stage of the Italian campaign – when the Allied military learned ‘how to handle civilians’ ⁴³ – the ACC had almost no partners in dealing with refugee rescue. Military authorities were fully aware that they lacked the skills and preparation to relieve civilians. ⁴⁴ Yet the task of administering refugees was regarded as too important to be outsourced. In the beginning only British and American Red Cross personnel supported the military forces in providing medical assistance and distributing supplies. In February 1944 the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees (IGCR) was authorized to appoint a resident representative in Italy, after the vice-director of the organization had visited the southern Italian camps and pointed out the ‘pressing needs of refugees’. ⁴⁵ In the meantime, voluntary agencies urged the ACC to share responsibility for relief operations. The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), and the British Friends Ambulance Unit (FAU) eventually drew up individual agreements allowing them to implement specific programmes among Displaced Persons, under the coordination and supervision of the IGCR. ⁴⁶ In its dealings with the Italian refugees, the ACC collaborated with local authorities for public assistance (Ente Comunale di Assistenza – ECA). These had been established by the fascist government and had already been in charge of internally displaced persons before 1943. Thus, the binary regime for refugee care – ‘nationals’ versus ‘internationals’ – clearly emerged already at this stage and it was firmly established when the Italian government came to play a role in the administration of displacement.

The turning point was the Liberation of Rome, in June 1944, and the establishment of the first national government composed of a large coalition of anti-fascist Resistance parties including the Communists but headed by the moderate Ivanoe Bonomi. ⁴⁷ Shortly thereafter, the governmental High Commission for Refugees (Alto Commissariato Profughi) began administering the camps housing Italian refugees. Since the summer of that year the High Commission for Refugees controlled directly or indirectly 38 assembly centres located in the liberated regions with only a few centres remaining in the hands of the Allies. ⁴⁸ Less than one year later the Ministry of Post-war Relief (Ministero dell’Assistenza Post-Bellica) absorbed the functions of the High Commission and became responsible for the problem of internal displacement. The Italian government had made the care for refugees its formal policy in acknowledgment of the suffering inflicted on the population by the war. Refugee relief was meant to be one cornerstone of postwar welfare and to help build a new relationship between the state and the citizens, within the framework of the emerging democracy. ⁴⁹ Thus, dealing with the internally displaced people – ‘one of the featuring problems of the post-war time’ ⁵⁰ – was not just a matter of immediate emergency, it also concerned the political, social and moral reconstruction of Italy. Yet in spite of its intentions, the dramatic lack of resources hindered the proper response of the state to the refugee crisis. This dilemma weighed heavily on the policy of the Italian governments throughout the long postwar period.

While the Allied army pushed northward and the new government settled in Rome, Italy’s place in the international relief programme was under discussion. In the summer of 1944 the Council of UNRRA had not yet decided if and to what extent the organization was going to assist the Italian population. Officially the decision would affect only the Italian refugees. However, since the management of the displaced people at large was in a transition phase, Italy’s uncertain status also slowed down the organization of aid for DPs. Several member states (among them the UK) believed that no aid should be given to an ex-enemy country, and the majority of senior officials felt ‘that public opinion in most of the United Nations would oppose aid to Italy at this stage’. ⁵¹ At the end of 1944, the UNRRA Council eventually approved the relief programme for Italy. The exceptional nature of the decision was made clear in the closing sentence of the resolution: ‘the operations in Italy should not constitute a precedent for operations in other enemy or ex-enemy territory’. ⁵² This statement underscored Italy’s peculiar and somewhat ambiguous status. In spite of the Italian Co-belligerent Army that was fighting on the side of the Allies, Italy’s former fascist alliance with Nazi Germany was not ignored. On the other hand, the inclusion in the international rehabilitation plan opened the door for Italy to ‘regain its place in the family of nations’ ⁵³ although it was impossible to foresee just what that ‘place’ would be, given the uncertain development of the international scenario. ⁵⁴ The subsequent negotiations among ACC, UNRRA, and local authorities took place at a time when Italy’s ambiguous status gave it considerable room for manoeuvre.

The UNRRA programme got underway immediately after the Council had resolved to provide logistical support for the Italian refugees’ return home. More specifically, the organization was supposed to take the refugees back to their homes in war areas that they had been forced to evacuate. ⁵⁵ The UNRRA Italian mission regarded internal displacement as a crucial problem for the country’s rehabilitation, while the Italian authorities were not up to the task, overwhelmed as they were by huge numbers of people in need of assistance. ⁵⁶ However, UNRRA’s operational plan did reaffirm the distinction between Italian and non-Italian refugees. In the words of the Chief of Mission, the American Spurgeon M. Keeny, ‘it is assumed that aid to the [non-Italian Displaced Persons] would have the priority’ over all the other recipients. ⁵⁷

The distinction between different recipients and the assistance they were entitled to was clearly stated in the official directives, but it often got blurred in practice. The overcrowded assembly centres sheltered ‘national’ and ‘international’ refugees alike, the screening process was extremely slow and people living in the camps had a hard time accepting that not all of them were allowed to stand in line for UNRRA distribution of food and blankets. Under these circumstances, the agency’s activities often went beyond the duties listed on paper. Summarizing the arrangements made for several camps, the director of the Displaced Persons Division, Tony Sorieri, declared that in Santa Maria di Bagni (Lecce) UNRRA was going to have administrative staff to deal with United Nations nationals, and he added that he would be glad ‘to utilize this personnel in connection with the Italian refugees in the same camp’. ⁵⁸ Santa Maria di Bagni was anything but an exceptional case. Given that the Italian authorities were not able to cope with the emergency, people in dire need continued to turn to UNRRA for help. In many camps different services offered to supposedly distinct categories of recipients were re-negotiated on the ground, with UNRRA providing supplies and basic assistance to displaced Italians. The distinction between ‘national’ and ‘international’ displacement, which was emerging as an essential category in the construction of the postwar refugee regime, ⁵⁹ proved difficult to enforce in the field.

Despite officially acknowledging the priority of ‘foreign refugees’, UNRRA was extremely slow and uneven in implementing its programme for these people. ⁶⁰ Protracted negotiations between the agency and the Italian government hampered the transfer of camp administration from the ACC to UNRRA as did the heterogeneous origins of the DPs themselves, many of whom did not meet the organization’s eligibility criteria. First of all, UNRRA declined any responsibility for former combatants, since its mandate was to take care only of civilian victims of the war. For example, the agency regarded as ‘not acceptable’ Yugoslav royalist partisans, who were sheltered in Italy and refused repatriation to their country, now ruled by Tito. The problem grew worse over time, as new refugees continued to arrive. According to UNRRA, those who had crossed the Italian borders after the cessation of hostilities could not, strictly speaking, be considered Displaced Persons, and were therefore not entitled to the organization’s care and maintenance; these people were classified instead as ‘illegal immigrants’. The Jews who came to Italy after the end of the war in order to leave for Palestine were also considered as belonging to this category.

The ACC urged the UNRRA mission in Italy to be as flexible as possible: military authorities were planning to withdraw from the country and the supposedly ‘objective’ classification of displaced people had to be adjusted accordingly. As a consequence, Jews could soon be included among the eligible displaced. In addition, the re-screening of the camp population on the basis of more ‘elastic’ criteria resulted in a reduction of the number of ineligible refugees, but, of course, this didn’t solve the problem. The negotiations, the hand-over to UNRRA of individual camps and the transfer of all the ineligible people to separate assembly centres took a very long time. In April 1946 the ACC still administered 15,000 DPs out of the roughly 40,000 people living in the camps. ⁶¹ In May the transfer to UNRRA of the ACC’s responsibilities for DPs was complete, but a dozen camps still remained in the hands of the military authorities. ⁶² At this point the problem was approached in the light of the expiration of the ACC mandate in Italy. The military authorities regarded UNRRA ineligibles ‘as an ultimate responsibility which the Italian Government should as early as possible be considering and dealing with, from the standpoint of an alien problem’. However, in the ACC’s opinion at this time ‘the Italian Government is not believed fully capable of feeding and administering the [displaced] groups’. ⁶³ Italy’s ‘incapability’ of taking care of DPs was primarily due to the lack of resources, but according to the Chief Commissioner of the Displaced Persons and Repatriation Sub-Commission that was not the only reason. Many of the refugees the Italian authorities were expected to take care of had been traumatized by the occupation and the violence of the Axis powers and they had probably not yet forgotten these experiences. ⁶⁴ The ACC could not entrust them to the Italians, who they clearly regarded as being unsuitable to handle this painful legacy of the war.

For their part, the Italian authorities had no wish to take charge of the ‘foreign refugees’. The issue was hotly debated among the Ministries involved between June and October 1946. When the discussion started, the Italian government was just entering a new phase. It was in June that the constitutional referendum was held and Italy became a republic. At the same time the Constituent Assembly had been elected and began drafting the text of the new constitution. The country continued to be ruled by a broad coalition of antifascist political parties headed by Alcide De Gasperi, the leader of the Christian Democrats. In the first free general elections the latter had emerged as the limited majority party. At this stage of the long postwar period, the building of national democratic institutions was still in progress, while the fragile ruling alliance was mainly concerned with planning Italy’s reconstruction and pulling the country out of its dire economic and social crisis. Italy’s response to the ‘foreign refugee’ problem took shape in this political context.

The Italian government firmly declined any responsibility for Displaced Persons who were ‘not acceptable’ to UNRRA and justified the statement with the economic crisis the country was going through, but its reasons were ultimately of a political nature. First – as stated by the Minister of Post-war Relief, the communist Emilio Sereni – the terms and conditions included in the 1943 armistice agreements did not even mention ‘foreign refugees’, therefore any pressure exerted by the ACC on Italy to provide for their maintenance was illicit. ⁶⁵ The Ministry of Foreign Affairs – in June 1946 the post of Minister was held by De Gasperi himself – agreed with Sereni and suggested ‘contest[ing] officially the juridical obligation of Italy to take care of foreign refugee camps’. ⁶⁶ Secondly, why should the Italian authorities take care of people who were not under their jurisdiction? In the memorandum it prepared for the ACC, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs pointed out that DPs were under the Allies’ protection, while in the camps Italian police could not even enforce national laws on foreign immigrants. ⁶⁷ To a certain extent these remarks echoed the numerous reports of the Ministry of Interior’s local delegates (prefetti), who complained about the ‘violence and crimes’ perpetrated by the refugees, played up the tensions between DPs and the local population, and asked for stronger ‘preventative’ measures, such as limiting camp inhabitants’ freedom of movement. ⁶⁸ In postwar Europe spatial segregation was emerging as the measure of choice for managing displacement, ⁶⁹ but the severe restriction of refugees’ movement was the strictest enforcement of it. Finally, the government argued that Italy was not a member state of the organizations in charge of international relief, and therefore under no obligation to assist the ‘international displaced’. ⁷⁰ In conclusion, the Italian government used negotiations over the care of 10,000 DPs ineligible for UNRRA as a way to reaffirm national sovereignty, and claim full membership in the assembly of nation states.

In August 1946 De Gasperi reported on a meeting between Italian representatives and the ACC delegation held at the Ministry of Post-war Relief. The Italians suggested that all the refugees sheltered in the ACC camps should be immediately repatriated, regardless of the reasons that had brought them to Italy in the past or the reasons that prevented them from going back home now that the war was over. ⁷¹ Immediate repatriation was clearly unacceptable for the Allied Commission and further negotiations led to a different solution. In spring 1947 the ACC handed over the camp administration to the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees (IGCR), according to the agreements signed at that time by the IGCR and the Italian government. The agreements did not satisfy all the Italian Cabinet members, since the ambition ‘to get rid of foreign refugees’ had been thus frustrated. ⁷² In spite of criticisms, the Minister of Foreign Affairs – the socialist Pietro Nenni – claimed the agreements with the IGCR were a successful political operation. Of course, the final goal remained ‘to get rid of foreign refugees’, but this had to be pursued in compliance with the rules of the international community that Italy wished to be part of. The IGCR was not only going to provide the refugees with care and maintenance, but also to resettle them abroad. ⁷³ According to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Italy had just made a step towards achieving its twofold aim: regaining ‘a place in the family of nations’, and remaining a land of transit rather than becoming a place of refuge.

Though the Ministry of Foreign Affairs considered it a great achievement, the agreement between the IGCR and the Italian government had a short life. By 30 June 1947 both UNRRA and the IGCR were slated to cease their activities and to be replaced by the International Refugee Organization (IRO). In July the Preparatory Commission for IRO (PCIRO) opened its office in Rome and started performing relief activities for Displaced Persons, but a new agreement with local authorities was needed. Negotiations resumed. The IRO was ready to provide care and maintenance for the approximately 32,500 people still living in the Italian camps, and also to organize their resettlement in other countries, but it requested a considerable financial contribution from the Italian government. At the time Italy was not eligible to join the new organization which was open only to United Nations member states. The PCIRO assured Italy that this restriction would soon be removed and that the country would gain a seat at the table of the organization. The requested contribution for the administration of the Displaced Persons still living in the country could be considered as a first instalment of the total future contribution Italy would be expected to pay once it was a member state. ⁷⁴

The proposal submitted by PCIRO was discussed at the beginning of the mandate of the new Cabinet. In May Alcide De Gasperi had formed a government of the centre, excluding representatives from the left wing parties. His aim was to consolidate a democratic and moderate political system, and at the core of his plans for Italy were closer economical, political and cultural ties with the United States of America. The agreement with PCIRO appeared to be crucial from two points of view: to ‘normalize’ Italy domestically and to reposition the country in the international domain. Nonetheless the request for a suitable financial contribution towards the maintenance of DPs was considered unacceptable. The country could not afford to assist its own refugees and a few camps had just been closed, how could it allocate special resources for ‘foreign refugees’? ⁷⁵ Again, Italian authorities declined any responsibility for the ‘international displaced’ reasserting their right to prioritize ‘national refugees’. Moreover, the issue of Italian displacement loomed as an even larger problem with the increased inflow of ‘national’ refugees from former colonies and ceded territories. In February 1947 the Peace Treaty had been finally signed, and its details had bitterly frustrated Italian nationalists: Italy had lost all its colonies and most of the Istrian peninsula. ⁷⁶ A few months before the Treaty, Italian authorities already looked with concern at the roughly 47,000 ‘national refugees’ they now had to take care of, of whom only 3000 were from Venezia Giulia and 11,500 from the African colonies. ⁷⁷ Obviously, the situation was destined to worsen dramatically as a consequence of the agreements signed in Paris. Under these circumstances, any contribution to the IRO budget would have meant privileging ‘foreigners’ over ‘nationals’. And the ‘privilege’ granted to ‘foreign refugees’ was – in the words of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs – ‘incompatible with the sovereignty of the host country’. ⁷⁸ Italian reasons for declining any responsibility for relieving DPs, then, went beyond the lack of resources. Again the point was that the nation state considered the requirement to care for foreign refugees an infringement on its own sovereignty. This connection was also the reason behind the rejection of any moral responsibility for the Displaced Persons.

We will never insist enough on the point – it is stated in the memorandum drafted in July 1947 – that the Italian Government is not responsible for the presence of refugees in Italy; DP assistance was a specific duty first of the Allies, and then of the international organizations that replaced them. ⁷⁹

The Italian republic, only recently arisen from the ruins of the Second World War, was hurrying to turn over a new leaf: the refusal to bear any responsibility for ‘international refugees’ and the repudiation of the memory of the role played in the conflict by the fascist regime were deeply intertwined.

Italian authorities, however, could not easily dismiss the problem of Displaced Persons. The government was aware it was running a twofold risk: to be left alone in caring for refugees, and to remain internationally isolated. They wished to conclude an agreement with the IRO in order to raise the country’s standing in the international community, but at the same time they needed to keep the financial burden to a minimum. In particular, the difference between Italy’s past relationship with UNRRA and its present relationship with IRO had to be made clear. ‘UNRRA was established in the time of armistice – stated the Minister of Foreign Affairs – and the [Italian] State also had to accept terms and conditions that limited its sovereignty and that today could not be renewed’. ⁸⁰ Negotiations were tense, but in October 1947 the PCIRO and Italy eventually signed the agreement. Italy’s contribution to DP administration was to be exclusively limited to services and facilities, ⁸¹ while one year later Italy became one of the IRO’s member states. According to the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Italy had taken a fundamental step towards admission to the United Nations and had achieved an important political goal. ⁸²

The process of negotiating first with the ACC and IGCR, then with the PCIRO, had forced the Italian authorities to be very clear about what they thought their responsibilities for the Displaced Persons should be. The government approached the issue in the light of the difficult and uneven process of political stabilization the country was going through. Although its engagement in taking care of the DPs had been reduced to a minimum, Italy still had a hard time coping with the problem. Italian authorities aimed to sort out the question of ‘foreign refugees’ in a reasonably short time, and at ‘protect[ing] law and order’ in the country. The arrival of new DPs was a crucial issue, and most of these were Jews. At the end of 1947, Jews made up around 18,000 out of the 22,000 Displaced Persons assisted by the PCIRO. ⁸³ Since the spring, Italian authorities had increased border controls in order to reduce entries and to lower the total number of DPs in the country. At the same time, they continued to turn a blind eye to the illegal departures of ships from the peninsula’s ports to Palestine. ⁸⁴ In addition to closely patrolling the border regions with Austria, the government also aimed to acquire a primary role in identifying and monitoring DPs already in the country. Italian representatives had already started to discuss these issues with the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees, and continued discussions with the PCIRO after the expiration of the IGCR mandate. It was only in December 1948 that the ‘Agreement for the Identification and Control of Displaced Persons’ was signed after very long and tense negotiations. ⁸⁵ The Minister of the Interior regarded the terms and conditions that both sides finally accepted with satisfaction, above all because they provided for the introduction of a special identity document for Displaced Persons, co-issued by the IRO and the Ministry of the Interior. The other ‘great achievement’ of the agreement was the long wished for limitation of the DPs’ freedom of movement and the imposition of curfews, ‘so that they could not escape from a scrupulous surveillance’ ⁸⁶ .

However, by the time the agreement took effect the number of ‘foreign refugees’ had already been significantly reduced. After May 1948, Jewish refugees migrated en masse to the State of Israel and by December only a few thousand of them were still waiting to leave for the same destination. Many of the ‘non-Jewish’ DPs in Italy were now just en route to a different place: the IRO used Italian ports to embark refugees who were being resettled. Fewer than 4000 people still lived in the ‘static camps’. ⁸⁷ Why did the Italian authorities pursue negotiations for the agreement on the identification and control of foreign refugees so tenaciously, in spite of the steady reduction of the population receiving IRO assistance? For the Italians, regaining control over DPs meant fully reacquiring their authority as soon as the last representatives of the Allied army had left the country. Secondly, Italian authorities deemed ‘foreign refugees’ a threat not only to law and order, but also to the political stability of the country.

As we have seen, Displaced Persons were suspected of being illegal immigrants and petty criminals by the Italian authorities. Between 1947 and 1948 these suspicions were cast in political terms, and it was feared that many DPs were agitators attempting to infiltrate the country with a subversive agenda. The chief constable’s report about a police operation that was carried out in the transit camp of Carbonara (Bari) reflected fears, accusations and stereotypes that were recurrent in the Interior Ministry’s papers. ⁸⁸ In this report the action taken in Carbonara is depicted as the successful conclusion of longer running investigations that had been launched in the firm belief that the camps might easily be hiding dangerous individuals. They were ‘disguised under the comfortable label of political refugees, but they belonged, on the contrary, to foreign political organizations and they had been sent [to Italy] in order to pursue propaganda and subversive activities’. The operation led to the police custody of 20 people:

all of them suspected of being members of foreign political organizations and Jewish terrorist organizations, Communist propagandists, individuals dangerous for national security, who commonly resort to subterfuge or are involved in ambiguous activities, all of them anti-Italian and therefore undesirable. ⁸⁹

The fear of ‘foreign refugees’ was behind many of the police reports, which were particularly wary of Slavs and Jews. ⁹⁰ They indiscriminately fused different stereotypes (the communist Jew, the Titoist Yugoslav, the terrorist Zionist), and reinforced the picture of refugees as an ‘amorphous and unruly mass of people’ menacing the nation. The perception of refugees as politically suspicious was reformulated in the polarised political climate of 1947–8, during the tense standoff between the centrist forces of the government and the left coalition.

The administration of the refugees from Venezia Giulia opened a new field of negotiation between the Italian government and the International Refugee Organization. Under Article 19 of the Peace Treaty, the inhabitants of the ceded territories whose ‘customary language’ was Italian were entitled to opt for Italian citizenship. In accordance with this provision, the IRO regarded all the ‘Venezia Giulians’ who opted for Italian citizenship as Italians temporary displaced within Italy, and thus ineligible for IRO assistance. According to the organization’s definition of refugee, recipients had to be displaced outside their country. ⁹¹ Only those who did not apply or who failed to receive permission from Yugoslavia to obtain Italian citizenship were considered eligible, since they were registered as Yugoslav citizens displaced in Italy. ⁹² Under these circumstances, the Italian government was in a dilemma and its attitude ‘was not unequivocal’. ⁹³ On the one hand, Italy was unprepared to face the inflow of refugees that became massive only in 1947. ⁹⁴ On the other hand, the Italian government was afraid that the IRO’s declaration of eligibility might prevent the refugees from acquiring Italian citizenship later on. Thus, it aimed at finding a compromise between the protection of the refugees’ rights to Italian citizenship, and the wish that ‘IRO [do] its best to assist with generosity as many refugees as possible’. ⁹⁵

IRO officials in Italy soon realized that the process of applying the Treaty’s provisions was going to be anything but smooth. ⁹⁶ They deemed the use of ‘customary language’ in defining national identity extremely problematic. First, ‘Venezia Giulians’ came from a multilingual region, where ‘one found genuine Italian-speaking Slovenes and equally authentic Slav-speaking Italians, without counting all those who were bilingual’. ⁹⁷ Secondly, the Treaty didn’t define what it meant by ‘customary language’ and it was not clear how this should be determined. The contradictions implied in the option model were intensively discussed within the International Refugee Organization, and the debate convinced IRO officials that the eligibility criteria needed to be revised. At the end of 1949 Italian and IRO representatives found a solution. All the refugees from Venezia Giulia who had opted for Italian citizenship pending the decision of the Yugoslav government could be registered under the heading ‘undetermined nationality’.

The Italians described the use of this category for classifying refugees as a technicality that had successfully allowed them to overcome the dilemma of how to assist the ‘Venezia Giulians’ ⁹⁸ . Using this category, however, meant denying the nationality principle that had characterized the binary regime (‘nationals’ versus ‘internationals’) of refugee relief since 1943. The Italian government had exploited the distinction inherent in the system in order to limit its assistance to ‘national refugees’, while declining any responsibility for the ‘international refugees’. In the context of Italian politics, caring for displaced Italians was strictly conceptualized as a matter of national welfare, and in the postwar years this idea took centre stage in the political debate on reconstruction. ⁹⁹ In the case of refugees from Venezia Giulia, the government proved ready to derogate from the binary regime because of serious pressures. The first of these was its own inability to provide proper assistance for ‘national displaced persons’, as their ‘long odyssey’ among the miserable camps scattered in the peninsula demonstrated. ¹⁰⁰ In addition, trouble encountered integrating the ‘Venezia Giulians’ into national life might interfere with the plan to ‘remake the Italians’ which the authorities held to be essential for the foundation of the Republic after the catastrophic defeat of fascism. ¹⁰¹

In November 1949 IRO had already received 18,000 applications from the ‘Venezia Giulians’, many of them had been screened for resettlement plans, and 1000 had already left for Australia or South America. ¹⁰² Italy ultimately turned out to be a land of transit for some of its own ‘national refugees’, who had fled the ceded territories, remained briefly in the country, and finally joined the outflow of migrants who were leaving for brighter prospects abroad.

In autumn 1950, Italy and the International Refugee Organization signed their last agreement. On the one hand, the IRO committed itself to resettling at least 20,000 refugees abroad and to leaving the country gradually: the deadline was originally set for September 1951, but was later postponed to March 1952. For its part, Italy promised to care for the IRO’s former recipients, but only for a maximum of 9500 people. ¹⁰³ Italian representatives were very pleased with the outcome of their negotiations. Just before the IRO’s final office closed, the Ministry of Interior – headed by the Christian Democrat Mario Scelba – again stressed how well conceived and efficiently implemented the agreement’s terms and conditions had been: Italy would be in charge of only 8000 people who were at the moment being cared for by the International Refugee Organization. ¹⁰⁴ The long experience of successful negotiations with UNRRA, IGCR and IRO probably helped Italian representatives to deal with the United Nations new agency, the High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), which opened its office in Rome in April 1952. Final arrangements drew on the past distinction between ‘national’ and ‘international’ displacement, and made the new intergovernmental organization responsible for refugee care, while national authorities maintained control of operations. The Italian government obtained the cooperation of the UNHCR in assisting former IRO recipients, and together with the UN agency designed and implemented new procedures for future asylum seekers. ¹⁰⁵

In August 1952 Italian and UNHCR representatives instituted the Joint Committee for Eligibility (Commissione paritetica di elegibilità), which was in charge of screening applicants and determining whether they qualified for the status of refugee according to the Geneva Convention’s definition. ¹⁰⁶ In the following decade most asylum seekers were women and men fleeing Eastern Europe who usually crossed the Italian–Yugoslavian border. Almost none of those who obtained the status of refugee remained in Italy. The International Relief Administration (Amministrazione per gli Aiuti Internazionali) – the state-controlled organization created in 1945 ¹⁰⁷ – assisted the applicants in the assembly centres while the Joint Committee screened them. The UNHCR finally resettled most of refugees in North America or in Australia. ¹⁰⁸ The booming economy during the end of the 1950s and the early 1960s was known as the ‘Economic Miracle’, and this phase of rising prosperity made it easier to integrate the postwar ‘national refugees’, and the collective memory of Italians soon forgot their painful story. ¹⁰⁹ Despite successfully overcoming the emergency of ‘internal displacement’, Italy did not become ‘an asylum country understood as a place of resettlement’: ‘As in the immediate aftermath of war, [it] continued to be a country for transit or for a short-term stay, before the resettlement overseas’ ¹¹⁰ .