VE Day at 80: Antifascism Is Ours
As we mark the 80th anniversary of the defeat of Nazism in Europe, the radical antifascist legacy of the Second World War is in danger of being forgotten. For the sake of survival, we can’t let that happen.
A group of Yugoslav Partisans in Mount Dinara, near the border of present-day Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia. (Source: Wikimedia Commons)
The former San Sabba rice mill, in the northeast Italian port city of Trieste, resembles many other relics of past industry. Its five storeys retain the stark red of its more-than-a-century-old brickwork, but it has a ghostly, dilapidated air. No longer a hub of labour, it has, over the decades, been encircled by more modern structures, from corrugated-iron superstores to apartment blocks not quite tall enough to peek into its courtyard. The bricked-up windows and high perimeter walls seem almost to be hiding its shame — and shame is exactly what it has.
The San Sabba complex was, from September 1943 to late April 1945, one of the key structures of the Holocaust in Italy, a transit camp which ‘processed’ thousands of Jews designated for extermination at Auschwitz. There were other Italian concentration camps — not extermination sites but ones that captured human beings to prepare them for death; this is what had happened already to colonised people in Libya, then to foreign Jews on Italian soil, and then along the Adriatic coast that had been de facto annexed by Nazi Germany. Yet this was the only Italian concentration camp to have its own crematorium. It was part of the machinery of mass deportation, but also itself the site of thousands of murders.
On a recent Holocaust Memorial Day, the anniversary of the Liberation of Auschwitz, I attended a ceremony at the site, where dignitary after dignitary termed San Sabba a reminder of the evil of antisemitism. But this could hardly be taken in isolation. Right-wing officials insisted that San Sabba counts among several sites of ‘totalitarianism’ in this region, which had not just come from one political side. This followed a script well-rehearsed by Italian deputy premier Matteo Salvini, telling us that there are no ‘Serie A and Serie B martyrs’, whether those who died at Auschwitz or at the hands of communists. Yes, here Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy organised the massacre of the Jews. Still, the argument went, we ought to also remember the Italians slaughtered in the name of antifascism by Yugoslav communists just down the road.
This story does not celebrate fascism’s heroes but treats its dead as Italian victims. Yet it also ignores the decisive fact about who was killed at San Sabba. The victims were, in the main, Yugoslav antifascists — political prisoners massacred and cremated by German Nazis, Italian fascists, and their (mostly Ukrainian) foreign helpers. The Italian state has no day of penance for them.
How can such a misrepresentation become the official line — proclaimed in solemn tones even at a memorial site like San Sabba, whose museum tells of a completely different reality? It appears that, from Szczecin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, agitation around the idea of a ‘double genocide’, both Nazi and communist, is an increasingly successful narrative for overturning antifascist narratives of the Second World War. Almost a third of a century since Silvio Berlusconi’s first right-wing coalition government, it is unsurprising this same schema is common fare in Italy today.
For the last two decades, in fact, the Republic — and no longer only parties sympathetic to the Fascist regime — has officially commemorated what is called ‘anti-Italian ethnic cleansing’ by Yugoslav partisans, in a role reversal that demonises Europe’s most successful Resistance movement. It is only logical that this version of events ignores the Axis powers’ invasion and partitioning of Yugoslavia, and the million people who died as a result. Like Polish or Lithuanian or Ukrainian ‘double genocide’ approaches, it draws an equals sign between the Holocaust and partisan, anti-fascist, communist ‘totalitarianism’, while painting local collaborationists (in this case, the original, Italian, fascism) as little more than bystanders caught between two evils.
The erosion of antifascist narratives of the Second World War is, in a sense, the long wave of the collapse of Soviet Communism, as well as that of independent communist-led states like Yugoslavia. In the EU, resurgent nationalists in the ex-Eastern Bloc have led the charge against a presumed ‘one-sided’ focus on fascist criminality, with the Russian invasion of Ukraine also fuelling the call to recognise anti-Soviet resistance forces as heroic freedom fighters, no matter what their own politics, record, and crimes. From ex-East Germany to Hungary and even — on the other side of the former Iron Curtain — Italy, nationalist parties routinely denounce the postwar use of antifascism as a tool of legitimising pro-Soviet communists and silencing ‘honest patriots’.
A combination of claims to be ‘recognising all victims’, overcoming a supposedly all-dominant historical ‘bias’, and escaping the Left’s infantile obsession with now-dead fascist movements, provides these arguments with polemical verve and, for many, emotional force. But for those of us on the Left, the exhibit at San Sabba also offers reason to question that antifascists ever did get it all our own way. When in 1976, it reminds us, the Italian courts finally tried to bring a camp commander to justice, it proved impossible to do so. West Germany refused his extradition, blocking the move by leaning on a bilateral treaty from 1942 signed between Berlin and Rome.
Even in the postwar decades, even when the direct and lived memory of the fascism was most alive, in most of Europe there was not a harmonious ‘antifascist consensus’ shared uniformly across political sides, still less throughout the population. Even one-party communist-ruled states in the Eastern Bloc contained large swaths of citizens who had experienced 1945 as a defeat. If ex-Nazis were less present in the upper echelons of the German Democratic Republic than in Federal Germany or Austria, this was still a post-fascist society.
In the West, too, most of fascism’s former supporters and accomplices — chastened by their military defeat as much as revelations of their crimes — preferred not to stoutly defend their wartime record. In many cases, this was also because their path to redemption passed through rallying to the new order rather than the kind of backward-looking intransigence displayed by parties like Italy’s neofascists. Yet even this overnight conversion generated conflicts, under the pressure of what were, in many European countries, powerful antifascist movements, not just those driven by nostalgia for the Second World War or those all-triumphant after 1945, but also those concerned with and empowered to continue the wartime struggle in the present. To understand the decline of antifascism in contemporary political culture demands we also understand on what bases their strength was built, and why it is so weakened today.
Too Early, Then Too Late
Antifascist identity, and the criticism of it, is all in the timing. The British-American classicist Bernard Knox — a veteran of the International Brigades who also fought in the US Army in the Second World War — famously reported how a Yale hiring committee in 1946 had identified him as a ‘premature antifascist’. To have fought Nazi Germany was noble, but to have been there already in Spain when the US government had pandered to Franco — as it did still after 1945 — marked you out as a subversive. On the American left, the ‘premature’ label became a badge of honour. Yet to be an antifascist for too long might also be suspicious.
Today, parties like Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy and Marine Le Pen’s National Rally, themselves rooted in wartime fascism, will admit that in 1945 the Resistance, or at least its non-communist parts, fought to re-establish independence and democracy — but that after the moment of Liberation, antifascism could only be a zombie ideology, or worse, a pretext for endless purges and score-settling. This affirms a position that has long enjoyed broad credibility across a more mainstream media space. For evidence, we need only look at the 1980s BBC series Secret Army, centred on a café in Brussels aiding downed Allied airmen. By the end of the drama, the enemies are no longer Nazis but the eleventh-hour Stalinist partisans trying to seize power; a character breaking the fourth wall tells us that communism killed ‘172 million people’, no less.
In that same decade, historians like Renzo De Felice, among the most important biographers of Mussolini, suggested that while fascism and antifascism had left deep marks on public consciousness in 1945, these would tend to fade over time. The postwar Italian Republic was often called a child of the Resistance — but would those Italians born after that date really consider it central to their political identities, or antifascism the necessary framing for liberal democratic standards that were in any case widely accepted? The passing of the Resistance generation, and more broadly of Italians who had experienced fascism on their own skin, would surely weaken the emotional heft of this history.
To this ‘biological’ condition of senility, historian Sergio Luzzatto added, was a crisis of ‘legitimacy’, driven by both the failure of communism and the demise of the parties that had led the Resistance struggle, felled by the mass anti-corruption trials of the early 1990s. The ‘crisis of antifascism’, he insisted, lay in the fact that it had been the banner of political forces who no longer enjoyed legitimacy, and who had thus brought it down with them. Similar reflections came from historians discussing the demise of antifascism as a state ideology in the German Democratic Republic and beyond.
In this sense it is worth considering how much antifascism as a galvanising political creed is not only about memories of World War II. In an incisive 2021 book, Fascismo mainstream, Italian researcher Valerio Renzi reflects on the way that different generations of antifascism, and even multiple perspectives on historical progress, created a many-layered antifascist identity in postwar decades. In the Italy of the 1960s or 1970s, antifascism was, of course, the memory and lived experience of the time under Mussolini’s rule. It was an example from the past — the moment when some millions of Italians had in one way or another joined strikes, revolts, and even armed Resistance against their oppressors, and were briefly able to dictate terms to the ruling class.
But it was also the real movement in the present — the millions-strong parties, the ‘magma-like’ entry of the working class into republican democracy, and the mass-scale political education of Italians long condemned to toil and meagre literacy. It could also be a forward-looking horizon — the postwar Constitution’s ever-unrealised promise of a state that would ensure ‘workers’ full participation’ in determining Italy’s future. This antifascism was an important spur to militancy in the present. In 1960, the attempt to form a conservative government reliant on neofascist votes sparked a resounding backlash, with strikes and protests over the summer bringing down a prime minister for the first time since the Second World War.
It is this connection that today seems under threat: not understanding of the historical record of fascism and Nazism, or even public awareness of it, but the link between the antifascist struggle during the Second World War and a popular, mobilised Left in the present day. It is not that the past has faded from memory, but that the heroic narrative of Resistance mobilisation often seems more distant from present-day realities. This is not because the postwar years were a golden age of antifascist unanimity. Even just a few years after 1945, Christian-Democratic governments in both of the main historic Axis powers, Germany and Italy, were willing to integrate former fascist personnel into leading positions; the same was true even in Gaullist France. Antifascism was not consensual but rather a legacy most strongly upheld by one political side, a banner of communist popular frontism that edified the real movement in the present.
Memory Wars
Teaching American students in Florence last term, I wondered how I might communicate the idea that commemoration is about the present more than the past. De Felice’s claim that the passing of the Second World War generation would cause the fading of identities based on fascism and antifascism seems almost obviously true: but also isn’t. How, then, to account for the fact that wars over the past are constantly resurfacing? Battles over historical commemoration still routinely make frontpage news, from the Roman-saluting crowds in Milan who honour murdered neofascist Sergio Ramelli, to the government in Warsaw that made it a criminal offence to discuss Poles’ role in the Holocaust. How long will this go on?
Perhaps an all-American example can help us think about why the divide will remain here to be fought over, rather than simply disappear. Decades after the South’s defeat in the Civil War, organisations with some attachment to that past like the United Daughters of the Confederacy (founded in 1894) promised to keep alive the memory of the ‘Lost Cause’ — but also to support racial segregation in the present. Even today, the Confederate monuments built as symbols of white supremacy, during the Ku Klux Klan era of the 1920s and then the period of resistance to Civil Rights in the 1960s, remain objects of political struggle. Does someone with a Confederate bumper sticker want to rerun the Secession and reintroduce chattel slavery? Probably not. Do they want to advertise their present-day racism? Yes.
We might think the same when contemporary nationalists put up statues to the antisemites and Nazi-collaborationists of the 1940s, honouring them as anticommunist freedom fighters. This is surely not proof that we are simply returning to that past. Rather, the broad visibility of this conceit lies precisely in the idea that there is a shared European experience of victimhood and suffering at the hands of ‘totalitarianism’, which has long remained somehow unspoken. This is palatable even for far-right forces who have long since accepted the principle of parliamentary democracy: it is, if anything, a kind of rebalancing operation through which social democrats, notably former communist ones, ritually condemn their own political ancestors.
This was the narrative promoted by a now-infamous 2019 resolution passed by the EU Parliament, which among other things cast Soviet war memorials in Eastern Europe as symbols of Russian imperialism. As Owen Hatherley has argued, this also involves the troubling tendency to treat socialist and antifascist culture in general — for instance, Hungarian monuments to the International Brigaders — as nothing but the ideological confetti of Stalinism. Yet this does more than just dismiss the Resistance of old. For even compared to more intelligent statements of ‘totalitarian’ theory such as those of Hannah Arendt, the idea of Europe as a victim of twin totalitarianisms also tends to expunge fascism’s roots in an entirely European tradition of colonialism, civilisational supremacy, and mass killing.
Today, with war again looming over Europe, the EU’s leaders solemnly opine on our continent’s historical responsibility to uphold the values trampled on by totalitarians — from the Nazis and communists of yesteryear to the Putinites and Islamists of the present. It is in this spirit that the 80th anniversary of the Second World War saw no representative of the defeated states agree to attend the Victory Day parades in Moscow or Minsk, and no Russian or Belarusian representative invited to Berlin. We can, of course, readily accept that Vladimir Putin’s call to ‘de-Nazify’ Ukraine is a gross miscasting of his great-power war aims. It seems a rather more dubious proposition for the German government to take up this banner instead, proclaiming that its plans for Europe-wide rearmament — also encouraged by the Trump administration — as the embodiment of learning the lessons of twentieth century.
Yet this is precisely the role reversal that we now face. In much liberal opinion, right-wing populist forces like the Alternative für Deutschland and Matteo Salvini’s Lega stand accused of being extremist precisely insofar as they express doubts over the wisdom of a pan-European army, imagined as the beacon of progress and human freedom.
Antifascism is not pacifism, and in the interwar decades, the most ardent opponents of Hitler and Mussolini were often champions of arming the people for the coming struggle. Yet, this is much unlike the kind of militarisation we are seeing today. This is not a turn to the fascism of the past, but a hybridisation of a liberal view of Europe’s role as international policeman with a nationalist and civilisational idea of Europe as a fortress to be defended from all comers, whether they arrive by tanks or dinghies. This is, in a sense, a forward-looking vision. But it is charged not with the optimistic vision of postwar antifascism, but an increasing obsession with arming ourselves to resist inevitable decline.