Holocaust denial is an antisemitic conspiracy theory that asserts that the Nazi genocide of Jews, known as the Holocaust, is a fabrication or exaggeration. Holocaust denial involves making one or more of the following false claims:
Italian war crimes have mainly been associated with Fascist Italy in the Pacification of Libya, the Second Italo-Ethiopian War, the Spanish Civil War, and World War II.
During World War II, the German Wehrmacht committed systematic war crimes, including massacres, mass rape, looting, the exploitation of forced labour, the murder of three million Soviet prisoners of war, and participated in the extermination of Jews. While the Nazi Party's own SS forces was the organization most responsible for the genocidal killing of the Holocaust, the regular armed forces of the Wehrmacht committed many war crimes of their own, particularly on the Eastern Front.
Mediterraneo is a 1991 Italian war comedy-drama film directed by Gabriele Salvatores and written by Enzo Monteleone. The film is set during World War II and concerns a group of Italian soldiers who become stranded on an island of the Italian Dodecanese in the Aegean Sea, and are left behind by the war. It won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1992.
The Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution was an art exhibition held in Rome at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni from 1932 to 1934. It was opened by Benito Mussolini on 28 October 1932 and was the longest-lasting exhibition ever mounted by the Fascist regime. Nearly four million people attended the exhibition in its two years. Intended to commemorate the revolutionaries who had taken part in the rise to power of Italian fascism, the Exhibition was supposed to be, in Mussolini's own words, "an offering of faith which the old comrades hand down to the new ones so that, enlightened by our martyrs and heroes, they may continue the heavy task."
The foibe massacres, or simply the foibe, refers to mass killings and deportations both during and immediately after World War II, mainly committed by Yugoslav Partisans and OZNA in the then-Italian territories of Julian March, Kvarner and Dalmatia, against local Italians and Slavs, primarily members of fascist and collaborationist forces, and civilians opposed to the new Yugoslav authorities. The term refers to some victims who were thrown alive into the foibe., deep natural sinkholes characteristic of the Karst Region. In a wider or symbolic sense, some authors used the term to apply to all disappearances or killings of Italian and Slavic people in the territories occupied by Yugoslav forces. Others included deaths resulting from the forced deportation of Italians, or those who died while trying to flee from these contested lands.
The Italian racial laws, otherwise referred to as the Racial Laws, were a series of laws which were promulgated by the Mussolini government in Fascist Italy (1922–1943) from 1938 to 1944 in order to enforce racial discrimination and segregation in the Kingdom of Italy. The main victims of the Racial Laws were Italian Jews and the native African inhabitants of the Italian colonial empire (1923–1947). In the aftermath of Mussolini's fall from power and the invasion of Italy by Germany, the Badoglio government suppressed the laws in January 1944. They remained enforced and were made more severe in the territories ruled by the Italian Social Republic (1943–1945) until the end of the Second World War.
German collective guilt refers to the notion of a collective guilt attributed to Germany and its people for perpetrating the Holocaust and other atrocities in World War II.
Racism in Italy deals with the relationship between Italians and other populations of different ethnicities and/or nationalities which has existed throughout the country's history.
Angelo Del Boca was an Italian journalist and historian. He specialized in the study of the Italian Colonial Empire, and the involvement in Libya, Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Somalia during the first part of 20th century. Del Boca was the first post-WWII Italian scholar to devote himself extensively to the study of Fascist Italy's expansion in Africa, and to publish information on the crimes committed by the Italian army in Ethiopia and Libya during its period of Fascism and World War II.
Emilio Gentile is an Italian historian and professor, specializing in the history, ideology, and culture of Italian fascism. Gentile is considered one of Italy's foremost cultural historians of Fascist Italy and its ideology. He studied under the renowned Italian historian Renzo De Felice and wrote a book about him.
The myth of the clean Wehrmacht is the negationist notion that the regular German armed forces were not involved in the Holocaust or other war crimes during World War II. The myth, heavily promoted by German authors and military personnel after World War II, completely denies the culpability of the German military command in the planning and perpetration of war crimes. Even where the perpetration of war crimes and the waging of an extermination campaign, particularly in the Soviet Union – where the Nazis viewed the population as "sub-humans" ruled by "Jewish Bolshevik" conspirators – has been acknowledged, they are ascribed to the "Party soldiers corps", the Schutzstaffel (SS), but not the regular German military.
The Myth of the Eastern Front: The Nazi–Soviet War in American Popular Culture (2008) by Ronald Smelser and Edward J. Davies, is a historical analysis of the post-war myth of the "Clean Wehrmacht", the negative impact of the Wehrmacht and the Waffen-SS mythologies in popular culture, and the effects of historical negationism upon cultural perceptions of the Eastern Front of the Second World War.
The victim theory, encapsulated in the slogan "Austria – the Nazis' first victim", was the 1949–1988 Austrian ideological basis formed by Austrians themselves under Allied occupation and independent Second Austrian Republic. According to the founders of the Second Austrian Republic, the 1938 Anschluss was an act of military aggression by the Third Reich. Austrian statehood had been interrupted and therefore the newly revived Austria of 1945 could not and should not be considered responsible for the Nazis' crimes in any way. The "victim theory" that had formed by 1949 insisted that all of the Austrians, including those who strongly supported Hitler, had been unwilling victims of the Nazi regime and were therefore not responsible for its crimes.
The Wehrmacht: History, Myth, Reality is a 2002 book by German historian Wolfram Wette which discusses the Myth of the clean Wehrmacht. The original German-language book was translated into five languages; the English edition was published in 2007 by Harvard University Press. The book builds on Omer Bartov's 1985 study The Eastern Front, 1941–1945: German Troops and the Barbarisation of Warfare. The book received a positive reception.
Marching into Darkness: The Wehrmacht and the Holocaust in Belarus is a book by the American historian Waitman Wade Beorn, published in 2014 by Harvard University Press. It discusses the participation of the German Wehrmacht in the Holocaust and other crimes against humanity during the course of the early stages of the German-Soviet War (1941–45).
Good Germans is an ironic term — usually placed between single quotes such as 'Good Germans' — referring to German citizens during and after World War II who claimed not to have supported the Nazi regime, but remained silent and did not resist in a meaningful way. The term is further used to describe those who claimed ignorance of the Holocaust and German war crimes.
Two of the three Axis powers of World War II—Nazi Germany and their Fascist Italian allies—committed war crimes in the Kingdom of Italy.
Francoist Spain remained officially neutral during World War II but maintained close political and economic ties to Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy throughout the period of the Holocaust. Before the war, Francisco Franco had taken power in Spain at the head of a coalition of fascist, monarchist, and conservative political factions in the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) with the aid of German and Italian military support. He was personally sympathetic to aspects of Nazi ideology including its anti-communism and anti-Semitism. It appeared possible that Spain might enter into an alliance with the Axis powers in 1940 and 1941. In this period, Franco's regime compiled a register of Jews resident in Spain and added Jewish identity to its official identity documents. Other pre-existing anti-Jewish measures remained in force.
