Mussolini's Camps Civilian Internment in Fascist Italy (1940-1943)

This book—which is based on vast archival research and on a variety of primary sources—has filled a gap in Italy’s historiography on Fascism, and in European and world history about concentration camps in our contemporary world. It provides, for the first time, a survey of the different types of internment practiced by Fascist Italy during the war and a historical map of its concentration camps. Published in Italian (I campi del duce, Turin: Einaudi, 2004), in Croatian (Mussolinijevi Logori, Zagreb: Golden Marketing – Tehnicka knjiga, 2007), in Slovenian (Fašisticna taborišca, Ljublana: Publicisticno društvo ZAK,2011), and now in English, Mussolini’s Camps is both an excellent product of academic research and a narrative easily accessible to readers who are not professional historians. It undermines the myth that concentration camps were established in Italy only after the creation of the Republic of Salò and the Nazi occupation of Italy’s northern regions in 1943, and questions the persistent and traditional image of Italians as brava gente (good people), showing how Fascism made extensive use of the camps (even in the occupied territories) as an instrument of coercion and political control.

List of figures; Preface; List of abbreviations; Note on the text; Introduction; 1. Preliminary survey; 2. The bureaucratic machine; 3. The internees; 4. Life in the camps and care of the internees; 5. Topography and history of the camps (1940–1943); 6. Chronology of the main administrative and legislative acts and orders (November 1926–November 1943); Bibliographic references; Index

Carlo Spartaco Capogreco is considered one of the foremost international experts on the history of Civilian Internment during Fascism. Currently, he is Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Calabria and Scientific Advisor for the Foundation Jewish Contemporary Documentation Center in Milan. Among his other writings of note are Il piombo e l’argento (Rome: Donzelli, 2007); Renicci (Milan: Mursia, 2003); Ferramonti (Florence: La Giuntina, 1987). He has contributed entries and essays to the Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2018); La Shoah in Italia (Turin: Utet, 2010); Dizionario dell’Olocausto (Turin: Einaudi, 2004); Dizionario del Fascismo (Turin: Einaudi, 2002); Dizionario della Resistenza (Torino: Einaudi, 2001); and has also edited and annotated the critical edition of Maria Eisenstein’s L’internata numero 6 (Milan: Mimesis, 2014).