[THE WARTIME EVENTS]

The nazi military occupation

Contemporarily the Nazis rearranged the Italy’s military occupation. Albert Kesselring, commander of the occupation’s German army, gave out an ordinance in which declared: "The Italian territory is submitted to me and it’s territory of war"; moreover Kesserling submitted to his decisions "the italian Authorities and organizations".
A systematic politics of Italy’s “germanization” was pursued, with the purpose to annex Italy to the "great Germany". The provinces of Udine, Gorizia ,Trieste, Bolzano, Trento and Belluno were excluded by the Repubblica di Salò’s authority and respectively submitted to the Carinzia and the Tirol: the birth of the RSI coincided, therefore, with the transfer of ample areas of the country to the foreigner.
The German project of "economic and politics subordination" of Italy manifested immediately after the armistice of September 8.
In this project the Repubblica di Salò constituted the diplomatic and propagandist screen, with the military strength entirely subordinated to the Germans.

The objective of the German military administration was double: on one side to enslave the Italian economy to their own war demands and on the other side to recruit manpower to employ to the Reich’ service.
It was a systematic exploitation of each sector of the country’s economic life.
The enterprises of south Italy had to be transferred towards the north of Italy in order to subtract them from the advance of the Anglo-American troops; the industries were decentralized to avoid the bombardments and were closed the useless ones. The large part of what was produced, (material in iron, chemical, mineral and textile products), was sent toward Germany. In total 321.592 tons of goods were sent from Italy, for a value of about half million marks of the epoch, more or less two third of the whole production. To the acquisition of ended products, the requisition of whole establishments and their transfer in Germany was added.
Also the manpower was taken; those requisitions were, especially in Trentino Alto Adige and in Friuli-Venezia Giulia, real deportations of big quantities of masculine population. Unemployed, dismissed workers, people on strike, partisans which were captured, civil people which were raked up, the prisoners, all of them became a reservoir of worker moving to Germany to the Reich’s service. The Italians of these regions was loaded on wagons and displaced to the Lager; they died in thousands. Nevertheless, the occupation’s German troops found in Italy a hostile reality: the workers’ resistance, the protective attitude of the industrialists, the incapability of the fascist authorities to collaborate but, above all, the partisan resistance. All of this became an insurmountable obstacle to the Nazi’s raking operations.