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The disaster of Italian primary sources about WW2

DrG

Active Member
A huge problem which does not seem to bother historians much is the disastrous situation of primary sources about Italy in WW2. I won't touch the matter of the gaps in Italian military and State archives, caused not only by destructions during the War, but also by selective weeding by both the occupiers and the Italian authorities, because it is too complex and not much has been written about it. I would like, instead, to focus on the papers, i.e. diaries, letters, private archives, of some top Italian statesmen and militars.

Mussolini's "carteggio riservato", i.e. his secret archive as Head of the Government, after 25 July 1943 was moved from Palazzo Venezia to Palazzo Vidoni (the seat of the Comando Supremo), where it was weeded. Then, after the creation of the Republican Fascist State (later renamed Italian Social Republic), it was moved to Mussolini's offices in Gargnano on the Garda Lake. In April 1945, when he moved to Milan, Mussolini made a selection of papers from this archive. The most important ones were kept in his two bags, the rest were placed on a small yellow truck. This truck broke down a few km North of Milan and was captured by partisans. The fate of its documents is unknown. Mussolini's bags were captured with him and their content fell on partisans' hands. Most of the papers were lost.
The fate of Mussolini's diaries is even more mystrerious, given that it is not clear whether he transported them to Milan or he hid them somewhere else.
The matter of Mussolini's documents has been treated in several books, for example Gencarelli, "Gli archivi italiani durante la Seconda guerra mondiale", Andriola, "Mussolini-Churchill, carteggio segreto", Bandini, "Vita e morte segreta di Mussolini", Festorazzi, "Il golpe di Dongo", etc.

The archive of the House of Savoy for the XX century has "disappeared". King Humbert II left it to the Italian Republic in his last wills, but when the executors went to his house in Cascais the archive was mostly empty. Its true fate is unknown, but there is the hypothesis that it has been stolen by French secret services, due to Humbert's remarks about secret letters exchanged between the French President, Lebrun, and King Victor Emanuel III urging the Italian entry into WW2, in order to justify the presence of Mussolini as a negotiator during the expected peace conference. Moreover, documents held in the Quirinale palace were destroyed after the armistice of 8 September 1943, but a officer of the Palace saved and hid some of them, handwritten by Mussolini. He returned them to the President of the Republic in December 1960, but they have disappeared since then.
King Victor Emanuel III's post-war memoirs apparently have been burnt by his daughter, Iolanda of Savoy, because they were politically dangerous for the image of the royal family after WW2. Senator Bergamini, who transcribed the King's mauniscript with a typing machine, had revealed only that the King had words of appreciation for Mussolini and was quite bitter towards Badoglio.
This topic has been treated in Perfetti, "Parola di Re", De Felice, "Umberto II ed il mistero dell'Archivio Savoia scomparso per il '900 e la seconda guerra mondiale", Gentile, "Le carte dei re d’Italia tra dispersioni, epurazioni, occultamenti e (parziali) ritrovamenti", and in this useful press review by the Italian Society for the Study of Contemporary History: https://www.sissco.it/articoli/archivio-savoia-1460/

Ciano's diares were partially rewritten and modified, with pages torn away and sentences added (according to Ramón Serrano Suñer, who apparently read some photos of the manuscripts, most of the colourful - to use an euphemism - remarks were added on the margins of the pages), in 1943. Despite this serious shortcoming, legions of historians, writers, etc. have used these diaries as if they were genuine, distorting the view of the Italian leadership in a way that probably will never be recovered. Just think about the huge influence played by these diaries on the memoirs written by other Italian politicians and militars shortly after the war, for example.
This serious matter has been treated in several studies, such as Palla, "La fortuna di un documento: il diario di Ciano" and Di Rienzo, "Ciano" (the introduction to this book, which you can pre-view on Amazon, provides a review of literature on the forging of these diaries).

Clara Petacci's diaries apparently should be genuine, given that they were recovered from a box in her garden after the war, then stored in the Archivio Centrale dello Stato, and their editors of their published versions state that they are original. Yet, a recent interview to Maria Pia Paravia, the author of a novel about Clara Petacci based upon an historical research, casts some serious doubts about their authenticity, because apparently the copies held by the Archivio Centrale are typewritten (who ever kept a typewritten diary!?), probably made by Clara herself in 1944-45, but the original manuscripts are still in private hands and their content is somewhat different.

The American edition of Adm. Maugeri's memoirs "From the Ashes of Disgrace" contain inappropriate remarks and sentences added by the American editor without the author's consent, yet some English historians still refer to them instead of using the Italian edition ("Ricordi di un marinaio").

And these are the most known gaps and forgeries which I recall. Of course, even more serious are the "unknown unknowns", i.e. those documents which we don't even know that have been lost/suppressed or forged.
 
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Andreas

New Member
The Ciano problem we have in Germany with the Halder 'War Diaries', which were also reconstructed after the war.

All the best

Andreas
 

DrG

Active Member
Thank you Andreas, I did not know about these problems with Halder's diaries. Do you mean that they were fully rewritten after the war, or partially changed by their author?

By the way, of course, I have not remarked the obvious fact that nearly every diary, collection of letters, etc. published by their author or with his heirs' authorization contain some kind of censorship or changes in order to avoid problems with living people or, which is even worse, to cast a positive light on the author; we can just hope that these changes are not too serious and biased. Only those diaries whose original manuscripts are available to the scholars (if possible in public archives) can be regarded as really genuine, provided that possible alterations (torn pages, additions, deletions, etc.) can be identified and the manuscripts have not been fully rewritten, of course.
 

Andreas

New Member
It's complicated, but it appears that Mr. Halder worked very closely with the researchers who transcribed the diaries and prepared them, so there are clear issues. The same applies to the war diaries of OKW, which were after the war prepared by academics who during the war had been the officers managing them.

All the best

Andreas
 

DrG

Active Member
Thanks! These information are very insteresting and somewhat disturbing: I didn't expect them, given also my relative ignorance about this topic.

By the way, and somewhat digressing, the great book "In Command of History" provides not only a clear description of how Churchill and his team of ghost writers wrote his "History of the Second World War" (which, of course, is a matter completely different from a primary source), but also there is a hint at prof. William Deakin's role in "borrowing" Cabinet documents on Churchill's will and never returning them. Deakin also wrote extensively about Italy in WW2 and had a certain influence on Renzo De Felice's work, but he was also a SOE officer and Churchill's personal acquaintance and assistant after the war for sensitive researches. I have deliberately avoided opening the hornets nest of the alleged Mussolini-Churchill exchange of letters, but frankly one needs to be very guillible to believe that Churchill made a vacation in exactly the same places visited by Mussolini at the end of the war both in 1945 and in 1949 (this latter trip with Deakin, moreover, was prompted by the news, spread by Italian newspapers, that an Italian double or triple agent working for the Italian and US intelligence, Angelo Zanessi, had recently recovered some documents hidden at the end of the war) only to enjoy the panorama.

Returning to Deakin, the former Japanese ambassador to Italy, Shinrokuro Hidaka, was very bitter towards the British historian/intelligence agent, because his account of Hidaka's meeting with Mussolini in the morning of 25 July 1943 was quite different from what he had told him. These remarks by Hidaka were collected by Piero Buscaroli in an interview he made to the Japanese diplomat in the Sixties and publised in the book "Dalla parte dei vinti. Memorie e verità del mio Novecento".
 
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