These days it is fashionable to claim Mussolini as a fundamentally decent fellow led astray by an opportunist alliance with Hitler. Whether this revisionism is the song and dance of a minority, or something more widespread and daft, is hard to say. Italians understandably wish to view themselves as brava gente — good people — so they prefer to blame Hitler for Mussolini’s murderous 1938 racial laws against the Jews. The truth is, Nazi Germany never demanded an anti-Semitic campaign as the price of friendship with Italy. On the contrary, Mussolini resented the imputation that his anti-Jewish legislation was imposed on him from without.
By the time Iris Origo’s Italian war diary opens in 1939, the racial laws have declared Italian Jews a contaminant akin to the Nazis’s Fremdkörper, an alien within the state. The anti-Semitic propaganda was of course endorsed by the Fascist Party and the muzzled Italian press, but it was not taken seriously by the larger public, and certainly not by Origo.
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