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cross‐posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/2945569

In the late 1940s, Walther (Walter) Rauff, an SS officer who was responsible for the murder of at least 100,000 people and was wanted by the Allies as a war criminal, was employed by [Zionism’s] secret service. Instead of bringing him to justice it paid him for his services and helped him escape to South America. Documents of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) that have been released over the past several years show that the Americans were aware that Rauff's case was not exceptional.

A CIA memorandum dated March 24, 1950 describes the relations between the [Zionist] agent Edmond (Ted) Cross, whose name is deleted on this document, and a [Fascist] named Janos Walberg: “Subject's engagement be [sic] the Israeli Intelligence Service would fit into the picture as revealed by talks with X with [Edmond (Ted) Cross a.k.a. Magen or Crowder] consisting in the utilization of former [Axis] elements for observation and penetration in the Arab countries. The attempt to send the well‐known former SS Colonel Walter Rauff to Egypt having failed, the Israeli Service with all probability (however this has not yet been confirmed) had engaged Subject [Walberg], whose sentiments and past would arouse no suspicions in Egypt that he is a Jewish agent.”

[…]

The fact that Rauff supplied intelligence to [neocolonialism] has been published before, but for some reason the reports did not generate a public debate over the moral implications of [Zionists] providing protection to a major [Axis] criminal, who was the subject of an international campaign by Nazi hunters Simon Wiesenthal and Beate Klarsfeld to bring him to trial.

Similarly, the renowned U.S. Holocaust researcher Richard Breitman, who as director of historical research for the Nazi War Criminal Records Interagency Working Group reviewed Rauff's CIA file, chose to ignore information indicating that [neocolonial] intelligence systematically employed [Fascists] in Arab countries.

[…]

The CIA received information that Rauff had acted on behalf of British intelligence in Syria and gave his handlers a copy of the Syrian intelligence service and political police reorganization plan. He seems to have been the servant of several masters at once. According to the CIA documents, in November 1949 Rauff arrived in Rome from Beirut and stayed at the Pensione Telentino under the name of Walter Ralf. Sources at the hotel said that he had little money and lived frugally. He had no visitors and received only a few telephone calls.

A Catholic priest known for his [Fascist] leanings gave Rauff 40,000 lire. On December 17, 1949, Rauff set sail for Ecuador. Both the ticket and his passport were supplied by either [neocolonial] or British intelligence.

In January 1950, Cross told CIA agents that Rauff had left Italy and had severed his ties with [neocolonial] intelligence, but had left behind many interesting documents. Cross promised to bring them to the next meeting, but the agents did not really believe him.

The neocolony’s leading institute for Shoah miseducation devotes far more attention to a minor Arab war criminal than to Rauff:

Yad Vashem has a special wall devoted to the Mufti of Jerusalem, Muhammad Amin al‐Husayni, a minor war criminal. Its purpose is to suggest that ‘there is much in common between the Nazis’ plan to destroy the Jews’ (Segev 2000: 425) and the Palestinian enmity to [Zionism] (Achcar 2010: 159–160).

Yad Vashem could have devoted a wall to Walter Rauff (1906–1984), a senior SS officer and head of the SS Technical Department who was responsible for the project of extermination using mobile gas trucks. Rauff was responsible for the murder of at least 100,000 Jews. But Rauff was subsequently employed by West Germany’s intelligence service and the Mossad, the [neocolony’s] secret service. The Mossad paid him, protected him and helped him escape to South America

(Emphasis added in all cases.)

In case anybody doubts Haaretz’s piece (which, to be fair, wouldn’t be completely unreasonable):

[…] Richard Breitman et al., U.S. Intelligence and the Nazis. For Rauff’s links with the [neocolonists] see Extract from PIRA 5390, 17 January 1950, Subject: Edmond Cross, in NARA, RG 263, Entry ZZ‐18, box 106, Walter Rauff Name File, and Chief, Foreign Division T, to Chief of Station [sanitized], June 19 1950, in NARA, RG 263, Entry ZZ‐18, box 106, Walter Rauff Name File. Rauff was only one amongst other notorious [Fascists] to have worked for [neocolonial] intelligence as the recent revelations on Otto Skorzeny have disclosed. The liberator of Mussolini was allegedly hired in the beginning of the 1960s, see Haaretz, March 27, 2016.

(Source.)

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The Battle of Waterloo (18 June 1815) was the last major engagement of the Napoleonic Wars (1803-1815), fought by a French army under Emperor Napoleon I (r. 1804-1814; 1815) against two armies of the Seventh Coalition. Waterloo resulted in the end of both Napoleon's career and the First French Empire and is often considered one of history's most important battles.

On 1 March 1815, Napoleon returned from exile to regain control of his empire, beginning the period of the Hundred Days. The great powers of Europe responded immediately by branding him an outlaw and declaring war. The decisive Battle of Waterloo was fought between the towns of Mont-Saint-Jean and Waterloo in modern Belgium, then part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. Napoleon's objective was to crush the Anglo-allied army of Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington, before it could be reinforced by a nearby Prussian army under Field Marshal Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher. Napoleon nearly succeeded in his goal when his men captured the farmhouse of La Haye Sainte and stood poised to break through the allied center. However, the timely arrival of several Prussian corps and a failed charge by the French Imperial Guard dashed Napoleon's hopes of victory. Four days after his defeat at Waterloo, Napoleon abdicated for a second time and was exiled to the island of St. Helena in the South Atlantic, where he would die six years later.

The Battle of Waterloo has often been regarded as one of the most decisive battles in history; it brought an end to the Napoleonic period and ushered in a new political era known as the Concert of Europe. Additionally, Waterloo marked an end to nearly 23 years of constant warfare that had devastated continental Europe since the Battle of Valmy in September 1792. After Waterloo, Europe enjoyed decades of relative peace, as the great powers did not fight another major war until the Crimean War (1853-1856). Still, the importance of the Battle of Waterloo is sometimes overstated; historians have argued that the odds against Napoleon were impossibly high, and had he not been defeated at Waterloo, he likely would have met his end on some other battlefield shortly thereafter

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I'm curious to know how the region changed shape after italy conquered the region in the first world war. this is kinda a niche topic so I'm sure there isn't much about it in english, but I'm interested in knowing if any of yall have read about it. I'm particularly interested in like the linguistic policies so I suppose I could look into other locations like the border regions of france/germany or even perhaps eastern Ukraine? thank yall for having a good forum as always :)

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cross‐posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/4773410

The first scholarly publications on transgender people under [German Fascism] argued that they were not persecuted. To be more specific, one foundational essay argued that they were not persecuted, and another argued that some trans women were, but only insofar as officials mistakenly believed them to be cisgender gay men.⁸ This, however, is not accurate.

Newer research shows a more complex and more violent situation. The newer scholarship also makes the case that racial status and other factors mattered when trans people ran into trouble with the [Third Reich]. Trans people were at risk. The risks they ran varied according to other things in their lives. Not all trans people suffered violence. Yet there is a pattern of state hostility and police harassment of trans people, particularly trans women. In some cases, it ended in murder.

This change in the literature is due to the growing number of scholars working on the topic, to changes in how we conceptualize [Fascist] violence more broadly, and to changes in how scholars conceptualize transgender people. It also owes to the digitization of archival records, which has made police files easier to find.

[…]

Like “Aryan” gay men, if trans people had “Aryan” status, they were not subjected to a systematic round‐up such as what the [Third Reich] carried out against German Jews. They did, however, face state hostility, harassment, and violence because they were transgender. [Fascist] officials generally had negative views of transgender people.

In what may be the only [Fascist]‐era book on the topic, the 1938 Ein Beitrag zum Problem des Transvestitismus (Marburg: Hermann Bauer), Hermann Ferdinand Voss writes: “Their asocial mindset, which is often paired with criminal activity, justifies draconian measures by the state.”¹⁴

Prior to the [NSDAP’s] “seizure of power,” not enough could be done about trans people, he wrote, but happily now, “There is the possibility of putting the people in question in protective custody or possibly having them castrated or, via temporary ‘appropriate detention (entsprechende Internierung)’ to impress upon them that they must put their inclination on hold.”¹⁵

In 1933, Hamburg officials wrote, “Police officials are requested to observe the transvestites, in particular, and as required to send them to concentration camps.” ¹⁶ (Historians now recognize that the category “transvestite” corresponded very closely to our modern concept of “transgender.”)

[…]

[Fascist] officials did not simply think trans women were gay men. They recognized trans women as different from gay men in ways that mattered. [Fascist] officials had a concept of “transvestitism” as distinct from, though related to, homosexuality. To quote Voss's 1938 book: “By transvestites we generally mean those persons who have the wish to primarily wear the clothing of the other sex and to act more or less as the opposite sex.”

In all of the cases I have examined, state officials refer to the accused people as “transvestites,” even when they also identified them as homosexual (which they did not always do). Officials often claimed that transvestitism was an aggravating factor, something that made the case more dire, the accused person more deserving of a heavier sentence.

(Emphasis added.)

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I don’t know. I look at the evidence and details from the trial… and idk. I trust my fellow Hexbears have good, informed opinions on this. Honestly same question about Tukhachevsky. If anything I’m probably more inclined to think he was innocent than Bukharin.

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cross‐posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/4801449

(Mirror.)

Although I intentionally wrote this for World Day Against Child Labour, as I was researching I learnt that it was 80 years ago today that the Reich Minister for the Eastern Occupied Territories, Alfred Rosenberg, proposed Heuaktion: the kidnapping and transporting of 40,000 Poles between the ages of 10 and 14 to the Third Reich as neoslaves. This dating is, as far as I can tell, purely coincidental. (Confusingly, some sources set the order’s date to June 14th. It seems that Rosenberg merely wrote the order on the 12th but hadn’t ratified it until the 14th, I’m guessing.)

In any case, I want to tell you about child labor under Fascism:

After [the Third Reich and the Slovak Republic] invaded Poland on 1 September 1939, the Polish territory under [Fascist] control was divided into two zones. Whereas about 40% was incorporated into the German Reich, the rest was transformed into the General Government. Policies towards the inhabitants of these zones at first differed significantly, but with time practices converged. In the annexed territories, policies were targeted at Germanisation and discrimination against, or deportation of, undesired inhabitants.²

On 1 April 1940, a compulsory service regulation (Dienstpflichtverordenung) obliged everybody over the age of 12 to work.³ After a measure issued on 26 October 1939 had prescribed the employment of Polish citizens aged between 18 and 60 in the General Government, the minimum age threshold was lowered to 14 years on 14 December.⁴

The problem caused by these violations of the German Youth Protection Act (Jugendschutzgesetz) prohibiting labour for persons under the age of 18 was solved by a decree on 1 September 1941 calling the provisions inapplicable to Polish children.⁵ Practices went beyond the legal framework, as children aged between 13 and 15 in a weak state of health were also considered eligible, and children deported with family members could work from the age of 10 upwards.⁶

Unemployed Polish citizens in the annexed territories and in the General Government needed to register at the employment‐exchange service (Arbeitsamt) and could be called up for work.⁷ Later, the police also organised razzias in streets, at public gatherings and in schools⁸ and sent recruits to transit camps (Umsiedlerlager), also called Poles’ camps (Polenlager).⁹ After a race examination, children were divided into those entitled for Germanisation and those to be sent off for forced labour.¹⁰

In the spring of 1942, these policy measures resulted in the 10 to 14 year age cohort being massively recruited. East Prussian farmers complained that two 10‐year‐olds were not ‘a proper equivalent’ of one male adult.¹¹ Their complaint touches upon an important aspect of child forced labour.

Until the age of 12, children were entitled to limited schooling, but after that age no legal measure foresaw differences in the workload for children and adults.¹² The amount of work children needed to perform was arbitrarily set in an undocumented negotiation between trustees and employers.

Like their adult counterparts, Polish child workers needed to obey a long list of police orders. They had to wear a ‘P’ sign knitted on their clothes, could not leave their lodgings after the curfew, had limited access to public transportation, only received holiday in exceptional cases and suchlike.¹³ Disobedience was punished and could lead to being sent to a work re‐education camp (Arbeitserziehungslager) for children under the age of 16, or a concentration camp for teenagers.¹⁴

Whereas Zofia Bigorajska claims that 35% of the authors of autobiographies about forced labour, including adults and children, report having been sent to such camps, Feichtlbauer estimates it happened to one out of 20 workers.¹⁵ This discrepancy may indicate that those who were sent to camps later felt a stronger need to write down their experiences than other forced labourers.

Estimates about the number of Polish child forced labourers are necessarily imprecise. Herbert Ulrich states that 5.7 million foreign workers were active in [the Third Reich] in August 1944, of which 1,659,764 were Poles.¹⁶ In a more recent work, Mark Spoerer estimates that, out of a total of 13.5 million foreign workers, there were 1.6 million Polish Prisoners of War, forced labourers and concentration‐camp prisoners, and 1.5 million Soviet and Polish child forced labourers.¹⁷

Two‐thirds of the approximately 1.6 million Polish forced labourers were employed on farms, with the others working mainly in industry.¹⁹ Among the German provinces, Brandenburg was the most popular destination, with 162,391 Polish forced labourers on 30 September 1944. It was closely followed by Eastern Prussia, with 144,511, including about 20,000 children.²⁰

Decree (Anordnung) Nr. 51 from 1 October 1940 anticipated the employment of Polish women between the ages of 16 and 20 with some knowledge of German and an ‘acceptable racial appearance’.²¹ The age category was widened, with the result that in mid‐1944 9,519 Polish female domestic servants between the ages of 14 and 35 were officially registered.²² Whereas some domestic workers came to be treated as family members, practices we would nowadays labelled trafficking were also evident.²³

[…]

Polish former child forced labourers narrate their leaving of home for an often unknown destination as a painful rupture of their life path causing them to grow up in a world with unfamiliar social rules.⁵⁷

Czesław Łuszczyński, for example, was transported from his village Modlin in Mazovia to the transit camp in Działdowo. He recalls how he awaited his race examination in a dorm: ‘The night was just a frightening blur. Why did my mother ever give birth to me? How could someone as stupid as me be working for a German? I saw my whole life flash before my eyes.’⁵⁸

After children had been selected for labour, most were exhibited at a local market. Many narrate in detail the experience of being offered for sale like cattle, as this exemplified the humiliation that was to accompany their later labour experiences.⁵⁹

(Emphasis added.)

…wow.


Click here for other events that happened today (June 12).1908: Sadly for us, Otto Skorzeny, SS officer, was born.
1935: Bolivia and Paraguay officially ended the Chaco War by agreeing on a ceasefire. By the way, Emden arrived at Wilhelmshaven.
1937: Reinhard Heydrich of the SS secretly ordered Jewish convicted criminals to be placed into protective custody after completion of their sentence from the justice department.
1938: The Empire of Japan’s 11th Army captured the airfield outside of Anqing, Anhui, China.
1940: London and Bangkok signed the Treaty of Non‐Aggression between His Majesty in Respect of the United Kingdom and the King of Thailand, then Bangkok and Tōkyō signed the Treaty between Thailand and Japan Concerning the Continuance of Friendly Relations and the Mutual Respect of Each Other’s Territorial Integrity. As well, Fascist tanks under Guderian crossed the Marne River at Chalons‐sur‐Marne, eighty miles east of Paris, and 154 Imperial aircraft attacked Chongqing, China at 1200 hours, the same time (kind of) when Fascist submarine U‐101 sank British ship Earlspark off Cape Finisterre, Spain, slaughtering seven and sinking seven and a half thousand tons of coal. Also off Cape Finisterre, U‐46 sank another Allied vessel at 1938 hours, massacring thirty‐two and sinking seven thousand two hundred tons of iron ore, and then sinking Willowbank at 1946 hours.
1941: A three‐day conference of SS‐Gruppenführer men began at the SS castle of Schloß Wewelsburg in Büren. Aside from that, Axis submarine U‐371 sank Allied ship Silverpalm in the North Atlantic, massacring the entire crew of sixty‐eight.
1942: During the morning roll call at Auschwitz Concentration Camp, somebody called out sixty Polish prisoners, then the Axis shot them at the Death Wall in the courtyard of Block 11 in retaliation for the clandestine resistance organizations in the Silesia region. The victims transferred to Auschwitz between 1940 and 1942 from Sosnowiec, Katowice, and Krakow. Likewise, the Axis pushed Allied troops back toward Tobruk, Libya, destroying many tanks, and Hans‐Joachim Marseille flew a mission to that country to provide support for ground troops.
1943: The Axis liquidated the Jewish Ghetto in Brzeżany, Poland (now Berezhany, Ukraine). It lead around 1,180 Jews to the city’s old Jewish graveyard and exterminated them… I have no words.
1944: Carl G. E. Mannerheim appealed for Wehrmacht reinforcement to fight against the recent Soviet offensive. Apart from that, General Erich Marcks, commander of the LXXXIV Korps in Normandie, France, died from his injuries when an Allied fighter‐bomber assaulted the staff car in which he was travelling to organize a counterattack to regain Carentan.

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submitted 2 weeks ago by yogthos@lemmygrad.ml to c/history@hexbear.net

In May 1990 speech Secretary General Manfred Wörner said "The very fact that we are ready not to deploy NATO troops beyond the territory of the Federal Republic gives the Soviet Union firm security guarantees."

This shows 2 things:

  1. As we already knew NATO had told the Soviet Union although that it would not move further East than East Germany
  2. They understood full well that NATO moving East was seen as threatening by USSR given the promise not to do so was a "security guarantee" for them.
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(1) An all-purpose bolo; (2) A haras or lampas scythe; (3) A punyál knife; (4) A small bolo; (5) A guna; (6) A garab sickle; (7) A pinutî sword; (8) A súndang or iták sword (also "tip bolo")

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cross‐posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/845945

Pictured: Wilhelm von Gloeden, a gay photographist who lost almost all of his work to the Fascists. (NSFW)

Although many of us (correctly) associate fascism with heterosexism, there is surprisingly little discussion on how Fascist Italy in particular oppressed queer folks, and if you resort to English Wikipedia you’ll find no more than a few paragraphs on the topic. Perhaps you assume that Fascist Italy pursued a campaign à la Third Reich. While your imagination is not terribly far from the truth, it isn’t perfectly accurate either.

Fascist Italy’s oppression of the LGBT+ community differed in some respects from the Third Reich’s and resulted in fewer deaths, but that hardly makes the oppression that gay Italians suffered any less serious or less worthy of remembrance either. Quoting Michael R. Ebner’s The Persecution of Homosexual Men under Fascism, in Gender, Family and Sexuality: The Private Sphere in Italy, 1860–1945:

Unlike Nazi Germany, where explicitly anti‐homosexual legislation and propaganda drove brutal repression, Fascist Italy did not specifically proscribe homosexuality in its legal codes or focus on anti‐homosexual themes in speeches and other official propaganda. Neither the régime’s penal code, the so‐called Rocco Code (1930), nor its public security laws (the 1926/1930 Testo Unico per la Pubblica Sicurezza) directly named same‐sex sex acts as crimes or threats to public security.

However, Fascism was definitely hostile to homosexuality. Vincenzo Manzini, a prominent jurist of the era, noted that the Fascist squads who helped bring Mussolini to power attacked homosexuals, corroborating this claim with a story about a group of ‘pederasts’ that regularly socialised at one another’s homes in Venice.

‘Around 1925’, he recalled, ‘the squadre d’azione (action squads) violently rooted out those degenerates and forced the police to take action’. More significantly, though, the Fascist régime’s legislators devoted significant time and attention to developing a strategy for eradicating homosexuality from Italian national life.

It is quite challenging to accurately estimate how many gay men and suspected homosexuals Fascist Italy directly persecuted. The only thing that we can say with certainty is that the total number could not have been smaller than one thousand:

Though difficult to ascertain, the total number of homosexual victims of Fascism was at least several thousand, a hypothesis born out by an itemisation and partial enumeration of the régime’s techniques of repression. […] From 1927 to 1939, the Bolletino della Scuola di polizia scientifica published a yearly breakdown of all case files [which] show [that] over a thousand homosexuals were registered by the Scuola from 1927 to 1939. This number does not include the years 1940–3, and neither does it account for Roman homosexuals arrested but not studied by the Scuola.

As elsewhere in Europe, gay men were frequently disparaged as ‘pederasts’, though the author has found little evidence that that was actually the case. Added to this were other stereotypes:

At the local level, police believed that homosexuals were inherently criminal. If some homosexuals were prostitutes or vagabonds, then all of them were. Stereotypes and a visceral disgust for the behaviour, appearance and mannerisms of homosexual men drove police commissioners to persecute them.

A closer examination of investigations leading to confino politico sentences demonstrates how these motives — stereotypes and prejudice — drove repression at the local level, while the régime’s ideological or programmatic rationale — the improvement of the Italian national stock — provided a universal and specifically Fascist justification.

[…]

Modesti reported that some of these men engaged in prostitution and extortion, while many others were only tangentially linked to Eugenio and Elio’s alleged criminal underworld. One public security concern posed by homosexuals, according to Modesti, was their frequent unemployment and inherent laziness.

Moreover, he reported, many ‘pederasts’ had sex with men of more ‘elevated social classes’ for the purpose of material gain. This type of relationship inevitably led to ‘sadism, the corruption of minors, libidinous acts, extortion, robbery [and] homicide’. As evidence he offered the example of a Swiss professor who had been murdered in Florence during the summer of 1934.

Modesti also stressed the young age of some Florentine homosexuals, referring to them generally as ‘very young’, even though only a few were under the age of 20. Elsewhere in Italy, police voiced similar concerns. Though minors were involved in a few isolated cases, police officials were largely concerned with young men.

Even gay men who willingly served the neopatriarchy (such as Ernst Röhm) were not immune to heterosexist persecution:

Indeed, though a few of the 30 men investigated were unemployed and allegedly prostituted themselves, most were lower‐middle to middle‐class professionals, employed as white‐collar workers, antique dealers, salesmen, shopkeepers, artists and draftsmen, or in other professions or trades. One was a Greek teacher, one a successful merchant, and another a wealthy property owner. Many belonged to the Fascist Party, and most were held to be ‘favourable to the Régime’.

[…]

The ‘most dangerous’ of the group was a 22‐year‐old unemployed electrician named Giovanni, who was married with two young children. Though he did not belong to the party, Giovanni had fought as a volunteer Blackshirt (a member of the Fascist militia) in Ethiopia. The danger posed by Giovanni, according to the Florentine police commissioner, was evidenced by his public behaviour and the lurid details of his sex life.

The penalties for gay men ranged from surveillance (thus inhibiting their sex lives), to cavity searches, to penal labor, or—keeping in with the bourgeois state’s eugenic policies—to confinement, specifically in work houses, hospitals, asyla, colonies, or elsewhat:

Fascist […] executive provincial commissions […] regularly condemned so‐called ‘pederasts’ to ‘common police confinement’ (confino comune), exiling them to small villages in the Italian south or interning them on island ‘confinement’ colonies for a renewable period of one to five years. No evidence of wrongdoing was required, and the accused was granted no defence.

[…]

Mussolini and Bocchini also determined whether an individual belonged in confino comune, for common ‘criminals’, or confino politico, for behaviour the régime deemed inimical to its political power or key initiatives. During the period 1936–9, approximately 100 men were deported to political confinement for ‘pederasty’.

Like the approximately 15,000 other Italians who shared their fate over the course of the régime, including many of Italy’s most militant anti‐Fascists, these men were deported to small villages and island ‘political’ colonies in southern Italy.

The small number of homosexuals sent to political confinement should not be interpreted as a sign of limited repression. The régime used confino politico selectively, and even a small presence of a political or social group often indicated large‐scale repression via other practices and institutions.

For example, the provincial commissions also inflicted noncustodial police sanctions such as ammonizione — a type of probation which required an individual to adhere to a curfew, to report to the police every morning, and to not arouse ‘suspicion’ — and diffida, a warning that an individual was under investigation. The number of individuals subjected to these measures for any specific reason is unknown, but the commissions assigned them more frequently than confino.

Police in Fascist Italy also had the authority to arrest, question, incarcerate and otherwise do whatever they wanted with an individual. In 1939 in Catania, a Sicilian provincial capital south of Mount Etna, the local police commissioner reported to Rome that in recent years he had stepped up police surveillance on cafés, dance halls, seaside and mountain resorts, and other public areas where homosexuals gathered.

His agents regularly arrested and detained (fermi per misure di sicurezza) suspected ‘pederasts’, and once in custody, they were interrogated and often subjected to humiliating anal examinations (visite sanitarie) to determine whether or not they had engaged in ‘passive pederasty’, or ‘anal coitus’. These ‘medical examinations’ were not unique to Catania.

(Emphasis added in all cases.)

As for how many homosexuals that the Italian Fascists killed, this is very difficult to answer, and the author does not propose any quantities; we will probably never know for sure. Nonetheless, I myself suspect that it was in the dozens (if not hundreds) due to police violence, extrastate violence, or the terrible living conditions in the prisons and penal colonies:

Life in the island confino colonies, especially on the Tremiti islands, was characterised by poor nutrition, unsanitary living conditions and monotony. Fresh water transported from the mainland had to be rationed to the detainees, and infectious diseases, malnutrition, dehydration and chronic exhaustion were common.

Further reading:

Private life and public morals: fascism and the ‘problem’ of homosexuality

Queer in Europe during the Second World War

The Pathologisation of Homosexuality in Fascist Italy: The Case of ‘G’

view more: ‹ prev next ›

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