Fascist Legacy

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Fascist Legacy is a documentary film about Italian war crimes during World War II. It was recorded by the BBC in 1989 and consists of two parts.

Fascist Legacy, UK (BBC) 1989, 2x50 minutes Director: Ken Kirby; History consultant: Michael Palumbo; Photography: Nigel Walters; Cut: George Farley; Narrator: Michael Bryant.

The first half concerns war crimes committed during the Italian invasions of Ethiopia and the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. Emphasis is placed upon Marshal Badoglio's use of mustard gas, bombing of Red Cross-operated hospitals and revenge massacres after an attempted assassination of the Italian governor of Ethiopia. The section examining the Yugoslav occupation focuses on witnesses at the Rab concentration camp and atrocities in the Croatian village of Podhum near Rijeka.

The second half concerns the period after the Italian capitulation in 1943 and is mostly about American and especially British hypocrisy during this period. Ethiopia, Yugoslavia and Greece requested extradition of 1,200 Italian war criminals (the most wanted were Pietro Badoglio, Mario Roatta and Rodolfo Graziani), and provided full documentation of their crimes. Both the western allies' governments saw in Badoglio's government a guarantee of an anti-communist post-war Italy, so they did their best to delay the requests until 1947 when the Peace Treaty with Italy returned full sovereignty to Italy: sovereign states usually do not extradite their citizens to foreign countries.

A pathetic detail of the history is that one of the few Italian officer prosecuted and executed by the British controlled court was an anti-fascist, Nicola Bellomo, responsible for the death of British prisoners of war. It was on September 9, 1943, the day of Allies' invasion of the Italian mainland, that general Bellomo, then commander of the XII MVSN Zone, formed a makeshift Italian force and counter attacked Germans that tried to occupy the port of Bari [1]. In this successful defence action, general Bellomo was wounded. As an anti-fascist, general Bellomo may have been considered a threat to the Badoglio government. Bellomo, as a gesture of military honour, preferred not to escape from the prison when the door was intentionally left open, after he was sentenced to death.

The documentary cynically ends with Churchill's quote about "the better tomorrow with a new world order."

Italian public television RAI bought a copy of the film but for years it was never shown to an Italian audience because it would significantly change the opinion Italians have about their role during World War II. Italian channel La7 has shown large excerpts of "Fascist Legacy" in 2004. Showings of the documentary are organized in Italy by groups with an anti-fascist orientation.