Luigi Reale,Mussolini’s Concentration Camps for Civilians: An Insight into the Nature of Fascist Racism

Reviewed by: Philip Morgan, University of Hull, UK

No academic book should be measured against its blurb; but to say that this book changes ‘the historical map of the peninsular [sic] for ever’, shackles it with expectations which cannot be met. The book deals with the eighty or so civilian and military concentration camps set up from 1940 in mainland Italy and in Italian-occupied ex-Yugoslavia, to intern foreign and Italian Jews, Slavs, gypsies and undesirables of other nationalities. For those still seduced by the assumption that the Italian Fascist regime was humanely haphazard in the treatment of its enemies compared to the much more brutal German Nazism, the listing of these camps over several pages of text may serve as a salutary shock to the system. But the book states that the camps are rather more than a ‘shock-horror’ story. They apparently offer a ‘unique insight into fascist racism’ (158), and ‘provide evidence that fascist racism and Nazi racism evolved as two distinct but parallel movements that, although they shared many characteristics, were not the same’ (157). The alleged distinctions between Italian Fascist and German Nazi racism are usually rolled out in order to justify the view that the former was less totalitarian and less repressive than the latter, and that outcomes, for Jews and others, were qualitatively different. Only one of the camps, Risiera di San Sabba, in Trieste, was deliberately equipped to kill people, and it was never exclusively a death camp. But the book dismisses the gap in genocidal outcomes, saying that the application of race laws in Italy, of which the camps were a part, was ‘just as racist and destructive to human rights and life’ (157). So the organization of the camps between 1940 and 1943, when Italian Fascist racism was subsumed into Nazi racism with the German occupation of Northern and Central Italy, dispels the myth about the ‘subordinate nature of Fascist racism to that of the Nazis’ (157). In making the conventional distinction between the racism of the two fascist regimes, the book arrives at an unconventional conclusion about the consequences of their respective racial policies.

The book’s largely descriptive approach is unable to sustain the level of analysis required to make some sense of Italian Fascist racism and the implementation of its racial policies. A rambling, repetitive, banal, and mostly irrelevant historical narrative of the Italian Fascist movement and regime, marked by inaccuracies, mis-translations, even mis-namings, is no preparation for a dip into the conceptual differences apparently present in Italian Fascist and German Nazi racial ideologies. The book attempts to compare the 1938 race laws in Italy with the 1935 Nuremberg laws in Germany, in order to show that Italian Fascist racism was cultural and historical, while Nazi racism was ‘genetic’ and biological. The Fascist legislation, like that of Nazism, was very complex, and rather than drawing on Michele Sarfatti’s painstaking dissection of Fascist laws and decrees, the comparison simply reproduces the complexity of the laws. Where the respective texts of the laws are quoted from, what they show is that Italian Fascist race laws seem to have been inspired by as biological a concept of race as the Nazi laws. There is just no avoiding the conclusion that the notorious Race Manifesto of July 1938, setting out the principles behind the measures which followed, defined the Italians as a biologically pure Aryan race and denied that the Jews belonged to such a race, hence regarding them as unassimilable; nor that Demorazza, the state agency created to manage racial policy, used biological racial criteria to establish Jewishness in its census of Jews in August 1938. You may still be able to show that Italian Fascist racism was a kind of hybrid of biological and cultural racism, but it is not demonstrated here.

The problem, again, with the simply factual rendering of the camp regulations and of the conditions faced by the camp internees, is that we are not given an historical appraisal or evaluation of the camps, which would involve measuring them against what happened in other camps of the time. Conditions at the women’s camp at Casacalenda, used as a model of the civilian camps, did not actually appear to be that bad, and were certainly not much worse than the wartime deprivations its inmates shared with the host Italian population in this corner of south central Italy. Whether the camps’ regulations and conditions of life matched those in places of confino, where the regime quarantined its political opponents in the 1930s, or those in Nazi concentration camps, is not explored. Without this comparative assessment, we are unable to judge the quality of the experience of the civilian camps, and, indeed, the ideological purpose of such camps. Conditions were markedly worse in the camps located in occupied ex-Yugoslavia, to which Slavs were deported from areas of partisan activity, a process justifiably seen as an exercise in both counter-insurgency and ethnic cleansing.

A great deal of effort has been expended in trawling through central, provincial and local archives, but the lack of a critical commentary on the research findings does not enable us to evaluate how important and significant these findings are.