Mapping Fascist Repression, Following The Italian Resistance

This paper is the first official report on a Marie Curie project entitled
Last Letters from the World Wars: Forming Italian Language, Identity and Memory in Texts of Conflict, which started in September 2018. This project deals with a linguistic and thematic analysis of the last letters of people sentenced to death during the First and the Second World Wars, conducted with digital humanities tools. In this very first part of the project, I am preparing the lexicon analysis that will be the focus of my methodology. I am also creating a geographical representation of the corpus because this project is intrinsically geographical in its approach. Indeed, mapping appears necessary considering the linguistic particularities of the Italian territory, which is characterised by a linguistic diversity on the local level.

In this part of my research activities, I am developing some tools that are specific to the analysis of the Second World War. Notably, I have already collected and georeferenced four datasets (heretofore named as DS) regarding the Italian Resistance against fascism and the Nazi occupation. I have reworked or created data on this topic thanks to my collaboration with the staff of several Italian institutions and archives:

DS_1 - The network of all the massacres committed by Nazis and Fascists since the beginning of the Italian dictatorship. This data was originally collected in the framework of a previous project,
The Atlas of the massacres of Nazis and Fascists (http://www.straginazifasciste.it/), by the Central Institute of the Resistance in Milan. The original project led to the creation of a basic database, managed by a SQL system that communicates with Google's API. I added dates and a new style to this project.

DS_2 - The political and racial arrests and deportations committed by Nazis and Fascists against civilians and the partisan army. This data is contained in the database of the Italian Documentation Centre of Jewish Culture, with which I have started a collaboration in order to create a mapping of their very rich material.

DS_3 - The entire corpus of letters written by partisans, generally Italians, before their execution. This data is directly connected with the project Last Letters. The letters are georeferenced and analysed so that an historical and linguistic analysis could be applied.

DS_4 - The movements of the Italian fighters who participated in the Spanish Civil War beside the Spanish Republic against Franco. This data is collected by the Ferruccio Parri Institute, which asked me to exploit it digitally.

These four datasets present a huge amount of data (approximately between 20.000 and 30.000 elements already categorised and georeferenced) that perfectly display the repression acted by Nazis and Fascists on members of the Resistance and populations, but also the activities of Italian partisans in reaction to this oppression. Indeed, the letters were usually written in the areas where Fascists had crushed their opponents through military attacks.
This research has already appeared that a digital mapping approach is essential in dealing with this historical data. This method has never been applied before, and can highlight new connections and differences between Nazi and Fascist abuses. This map, which I have already built,
https://goo.gl/BZSo3L, shows how a digital visualisation of the massacres can help to understand in what parts of the country repression was led by Germans or Italians. These peculiarities highlight the dualism of the Italian Resistance, which can be considered both as a phenomenon of resistance and a civil war. This is a very debated problem in historiography, which is linked with ideological positions. Indeed, admitting that Italy was involved in a civil war means that partisans were soldiers of a regular army, as opposed to a group of patriots who fought against foreign invasion. If partisans were construed as a regular army, their war against the Italian Social Republic could be considered a war against other Italians and not against Fascism, which was defeated on 8 September 1943 with the armistice signed between the Italian army and the Allies.

The data I have collected so far will be presented using a combination of digital tools such as Gephi, Carto and Google Earth. I am particularly interested in the construction of networks in order to understand what categories of people were mainly repressed. I have georeferenced the data with R and Openrefine and, after correcting coordinates by checking on the maps the potential errors every ten records, I have built datasets divided into several categories regarding politics, social background and gender. Through the use of network analysis combined with spatial analysis, I would like to shed light on the differences between Nazi and Fascist repression, insofar as different categories of people were targeted by one or the other.
The idea is to compose the very first atlas of Fascist and Nazi repression in Italy using only open source tools. The mapping is thought and coded mainly with the use of R, without the use of Shiny, but also in JavaScript for some special layers, especially the chronological ones.
The meaning of this work is to shed a new light on this period considering that, even in the archives, the actions of Nazis and Fascists were often covered for political reasons after the war. For instance, at the end of the Second World War, politicians probably understood that it was impossible to punish everyone for their crimes and therefore, they often had files disappear from the dossiers. The case of the “cupboard of shame” is a very famous example of these tendencies: in 1994, a wooden cabinet was discovered inside a large storage room in the Palazzo Cesi-Gaddi, in Rome which, at the time, housed the chancellery of the military attorney's office. The cabinet contained an archive of 695 files documenting war crimes perpetrated on Italian soil under Fascist rule and during Nazi occupation after the armistice on September 8, 1943, between Italy and the Allied armed forces. The cupboard’s doors were locked and facing the wall when they were discovered.
As this case shows, Italy still has trouble dealing with its past. The Fascist regime represents an uneasy heritage for today’s political parties and citizens. Mapping the Fascist repression of that time is a way to display the historical responsibilities of Fascism through the violence expressed against racial and political categories, and the use of a digital map enables us to visualize the phenomenon under a new light. Connecting those historical events with the geographical places where they happened facilitates the emergence of patterns in the repression of populations in the course of the most tragic event of twentieth-century Italian history.

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