Describes the history and nature of the Italian Race Laws during the period (1938-43) when Italy was independent of German control.

Publisher Description

Mussolini's Children uses the lens of state-mandated youth culture to analyze the evolution of official racism in Fascist Italy. Between 1922 and 1940, educational institutions designed to mold the minds and bodies of Italy's children between the ages of five and eleven undertook a mission to rejuvenate the Italian race and create a second Roman Empire. This project depended on the twin beliefs that the Italian population did indeed constitute a distinct race and that certain aspects of its moral and physical makeup could be influenced during childhood. Eden K. McLean assembles evidence from state policies, elementary textbooks, pedagogical journals, and other educational materials to illustrate the contours of a Fascist racial ideology as it evolved over eighteen years. Her work explains how the most infamous period of Fascist racism, which began in the summer of 1938 with the publication of the "Manifesto of Race," played a critical part in a more general and long-term Fascist racial program.

Provides a comprehensive history from the rise of fascism in 1922 to its defeat in 1945. The author uses statistical evidence to document how the Italian social climate changed from relatively just to irredeemably prejudicial. He demonstrates that Rome did not simply follow the lead of Berlin.

This book is the first collection of multi-disciplinary research on the experience of Italian-Jewish musicians and composers in Fascist Italy. Drawing together seven diverse essays from both established and emerging scholars across a range of fields, this book examines multiple aspects of this neglected period of music history, including the marginalization and expulsion of Jewish musicians and composers from Italian theatres and conservatories after the 1938–39 Race Laws, and their subsequent exile and persecution. Using a variety of critical perspectives and innovative methodological approaches, these essays reconstruct and analyze the impact that the Italian Race Laws and Fascist Italy’s musical relations with Nazi Germany had on the lives and works of Italian Jewish composers from 1933 to 1945. These original contributions on relatively unresearched aspects of historical musicology offer new insight into the relationship between the Fascist regime and music.

How did Italy treat Jews during World War II? Historians have shown beyond doubt that many Italians were complicit in the Holocaust, yet Italy is still known as the Axis state that helped Jews. Shira Klein uncovers how Italian Jews, though victims of Italian persecution, promoted the view that Fascist Italy was categorically good to them. She shows how the Jews' experience in the decades before World War II - during which they became fervent Italian patriots while maintaining their distinctive Jewish culture - led them later to bolster the myth of Italy's wartime innocence in the Fascist racial campaign. Italy's Jews experienced a century of dramatic changes, from emancipation in 1848, to the 1938 Racial Laws, wartime refuge in America and Palestine, and the rehabilitation of Holocaust survivors. This cultural and social history draws on a wealth of unexplored sources, including original interviews and unpublished memoirs.

In this revisionist history of Italy's role in the Holocaust, the author presents an account of how ordinary Italians actively participated in the deportation of Italy's Jews between 1943 and 1945, when Mussolini's collaborationist republic was under German occupation

Analyzes the systematic imprisonment and torture of 'hostile' civilians, including Jews, Slavs, and dissidents. Using case studies and comparisons with the Nazis, studies the persecution and sometimes mass murder of Italians by their Fascist compatriots.

The relationship between Nazism and occultism has been an object of fascination and speculation for decades. Peter Staudenmaier’s Between Occultism and Nazism provides a detailed historical examination centered on the anthroposophist movement founded by Rudolf Steiner. Its surprising findings reveal a remarkable level of Nazi support for Waldorf schools, biodynamic farming, and other anthroposophist initiatives, even as Nazi officials attempted to suppress occult tendencies. The book also includes an analysis of anthroposophist involvement in the racial policies of Fascist Italy. Based on extensive archival research, this study offers rich material on controversial questions about the nature of esoteric spirituality and alternative cultural ideals and their political resonance.

The compelling story of Pope Pius XI's secret relations with Benito Mussolini. A ground-breaking work, based on seven years of research in the Vatican and Fascist archives by US National Book Award-finalist David Kertzer, it will forever change our understanding of the Vatican's role in the rise of Fascism in Europe.