BOOK: Antonio GRILLI, Resistenza e repressione. Il Tribunale speciale per la difesa dello Stato nella RSI (1943-1945) [Biblioteca di testi e studi] (Roma: Carocci Editore, 2025, 348 p. ISBN 9788843096138, € 38

 

Abstract:

In Italy, the fascist dictatorship, from the 1920s onwards, equipped itself with particularly incisive instruments to strike at anti-fascism. The most well-known was the infamous Special Tribunal for the Defence of the State. The Special Tribunal punished very severely, often with death sentences, anyone who attempted to harm the life of the “Duce” or the fascist system of power. A true star of repression during the fascist regime, from 1926 to 1943, the Special Tribunal also operated in Italy during the Second World War and the Italian Social Republic, the so-called “Republic of Salò”, established by Mussolini and his followers with the help of the Third Reich in a war-torn northern Italy under German occupation from September 1943 to May 1945.

But in that new context, the reconstituted Special Tribunal had to face new challenges and obstacles that were previously unthinkable and now insurmountable: anti-fascism had transformed into an  armed resistance, the presence of Italian and German military and war tribunals was suffocating and the conflict between the forces of the German occupier and the Allies, which were slowly moving up the peninsula, was accompanied by a ferocious civil war made up of reprisals, summary justice and the law of retaliation. There was no longer any room for traditional judicial procedures!

This book reveals the story, until now little known, of a judicial star in decline: in Mussolini's "Republic of Salò", from 1943 to 1945, the already famous Special Tribunal for the Defense of the State still had, at times, the limelight and held important trials (such as those of admirals and generals considered "traitors" to the Axis; or of important segments of the Resistance). But in that climate of heated war and dizzying escalation it lost the repressive centrality it had had in the previous two decades. The already feared Special Tribunal for the Defense of the State was reduced to punishing only a marginal anti-fascism. The star of the Special Tribunal was waning, and with the Liberation it would soon disappear together with the dictatorial regime that had created it.

On the author:

È professore associato di Storia del diritto medievale e moderno all’Università e-campus (Novedrate/Roma). Ha insegnato nelle Università di Miskolc, Ratisbona e Bologna.

See publisher's website.