Italian Renaissance: 70 Years without Fascism

In 2015, Italy celebrates the 70th anniversary of its liberation from the Nazi occupiers and fascists. In April 1946, at the suggestion of Prime Minister Alcide De Gasperi, Lieutenant General of the Realm Prince Umberto signed a decree declaring April 25 a national holiday – the Liberation Day of Italy. On that particular day in 1945, Sandro Pertini, a guerilla and future President, called on the Milanese to begin a general strike against the occupiers and fascists, who after the fall of the Mussolini regime in the summer of 1943 had proclaimed in northern Italy the so-called Italian Social Republic, a satellite puppet state of Nazi Germany.

In 2015, Italy celebrates the 70th anniversary of its liberation from the Nazi occupiers and fascists. In April 1946, at the suggestion of Prime Minister Alcide De Gasperi, Lieutenant General of the Realm Prince Umberto signed a decree declaring April 25 a national holiday – the Liberation Day of Italy. On that particular day in 1945, Sandro Pertini, a guerilla and future President, called on the Milanese to begin a general strike against the occupiers and fascists, who after the fall of the Mussolini regime in the summer of 1943 had proclaimed in northern Italy the so-called Italian Social Republic, a satellite puppet state of Nazi Germany. The Committee of National Liberation of Northern Italy called for an uprising throughout the territory occupied by the fascists. This uprising was the finale of the armed struggle of joint forces of the antifascist resistance and the Allies for the new democratic Italy. The Constitution of the Italian Republic entered into force on January 1, 1948 and banned the revival of the Fascist Party.

Since then, every year festive activities associated with this memorable date have been held throughout Italy on the day of April 25. Liberation Day is celebrated particularly solemnly in cities decorated with a gold medal for taking part in the liberation movement. On these days, Italians recall the contributions to the Resistance movement from more than five and a half thousand Soviet soldiers who escaped from Nazi concentration camps and joined the partisans. Many of them were decorated, including posthumously, with orders and medals of the Italian Republic.

The year 2015, as the 70th anniversary of the country's liberation, is marked, in particular, by the opening of a memorial exhibition in Modena of letters from the torture chamber, written by nearly three thousand political prisoners of the Nazi concentration camp in Fossoli – Italians, Austrians, Frenchmen, Germans, Czechs, Romanians, Bulgarians, Danes, and Greeks. Their letters were published in 1963 with a foreword by Thomas Mann. The exposition opens with the words of an Austrian prisoner declared prior to his execution: “We oppose the force of violence by the force of ideal.”

In his time, Bertolt Brecht, calling the Nazism the “monster who ruled the world,” warned that the “victory over it was too early to celebrate, because the womb that gave birth to it, was not yet sterile.” Italian President Sergio Mattarella’s felicitation on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Italy has a ring of these words.

The President calls for further research into this period of history, but warns against the danger of mentioning participants of the anti-fascist resistance in the same breath with the collaborators of the fascist regime. Sergio Mattarello stresses that in Italy, the Resistance is still the starting point of modern history. The Resistance Movement is, above all, a moral protest against the mysticism of terror and death, against the dictatorial regime of the “black twenty years,” against imperial militarism and racism, against intolerance of dissent, as well as against the mass conformism that dominated in Fascist Italy. “The anti-fascist sentiment conveyed from generation to generation, now constitutes the heritage of the collective memory of the people,” says President Mattarello.