Despite overthrow and imprisonment, he was still the same Duce. His broadcast elicited rage and despair among growing numbers of Italian partisans, but encouraged popular resistance to the already resented occupation authorities. More immediately significant, from every part of the northern peninsula, volunteers by the thousands flocked to Mussolini’s phoenix-like reappearance. Thus encouraged, he was hailed on 23 September as the leader of the Italian Social Republic (RSI), a reborn Fascist regime purged of concessions to the monarchy and the church, and officially recognized as an independent state with its own embassies and ambassadors by Bulgaria, Slovakia, Croatia, Rumania, Hungary, Japan, Thailand, Japan, Manchuria, and the Third Reich.

Contrary to Allied critics, the Salo Republic was not a puppet-state manipulated by the Germans, although, of course, it was indebted to them for its existence. Hitler knew that any attempt to manipulate a Fascist resurgence would appear transparently artificial. Far better to allow his ideologically kindred friend to mostly have his own way. For his part, Mussolini relished the opportunity of radicalizing his movement; to purge it of its conservative tendencies, and attract young blood into its ranks by reviving the old revolutionary appeal it early possessed when struggling for power. But there were new influences to be embraced. In addition to the Roman salute, RSI followers greeted each other with the three middle fingers of the right hand, palm inward, to signify the Republic’s motto: Onore, Corragio, Fedel: ‘Honor, Courage, Loyalty.’

A broad streak of mysticism ran through the Salo Republic, due in part to Anthroposofia, an occult movement emphasizing the spiritual, prehistoric origins of the Aryan race. In reaction to Christianity, condemned by some radicals as a form of religious bolshevism, the tri-finger salute’s esoteric significance stood for Wollen-Wissen-Koennen – ‘Will-Wisdom-Understanding’–inscribed over Wewelsburg Castle, in Germany, where Italian volunteers in the Waffen-SS were in training. A collar patch of the RSI’s Vendetta Battalion similarly featured the image of three arrows united by a yoke, not unlike the symbol of Jose Antonio de Rivier’s Falange in the Spanish Civil War. But a more obvious change was the Italian flag. Its central House of Savoy coat of arms was replaced by a Roman eagle grasping the fasces.

Mussolini felt reinvigorated and freed from compromising with a fossilized Catholicism and a stifling monarchy by the radicalism electrifying his new ideological life. “Our battle is an ungrateful one,” he declared, “yet it is a beautiful battle, since it compels us to count only upon our own forces. Revealed truths we have torn to shreds, dogmas we have spat upon. We have rejected all theories of paradise. We have baffled charlatans–white [conservative], red [Marxist], and black [Catholic] charlatans, who placed miraculous drugs on the market to give their form of felicity to mankind. We do not believe in programs, in plans, in saints or apostles. Above all, we do not believe in their kind of happiness, in their ‘salvation’, in any ‘Promised Land’.”²¹

Some loyal, though moderate Fascists and patriotic nationalists were put off by the radical tone of Mussolini’s reform. “I who have dictated this doctrine,” he told them, “am the first to realize that the modest tables of our laws and program–the theoretical and practical guidance of Fascism–should be revised, corrected, enlarged, developed, because already in part they have suffered injury at the hand of time.” He brushed aside warnings that such extremism would deter, not encourage recruitment by arguing that radical measures were the most popular in times such as these: “You admit the people into the citadel of the State, and the people will defend it. If you close them out, they will assault it.”²²

He was right. More than 200,000 volunteers stepped forth before the end of 1943 to flesh out four new divisions trained in Germany by Wehrmacht instructors in Heuberg, Sennenlager (Wuttemberg), Munzingen (Baden), and Grafenwoer. These became, respectively, the Italia, Littorio, Monterosa, and San Marco. As some indication of the popular support enjoyed by the Salo Republic, another two full divisions were added before war’s end. Outfitted with modern equipment and weapons mostly superior to anything they knew in the old Italian Royal Army, the volunteers’ level of training and morale were high.

When Mussolini visited them during April and again in July 1944, his spirits were greatly uplifted. “With so many young men such as we have just seen,” he told his party secretary, Alessadro Pavolini, “one gets the impression that most of Italy is on our side, even if those compatriots presently trapped behind the enemy lines of occupation are physically prevented from speaking and acting freely.”²³

His recruitment efforts were aided at least in part by the Allies themselves. Welcomed as peace-makers by war-weary Italians in the days immediately following his arrest, Anglo-American demands for ‘supplementary rations’, such as liquor, cigarettes, private cars, or any other luxury goods were taking a heavy toll on the Italians. The purchasing power of both the British pound and U.S. dollar became so inflated that even black market prices soared beyond the reach of ordinary people. Food costs rose by 700%, as the average Italian worker earned three slices of crusty bread per twelve-hour work-day. Death through malnutrition spread throughout the Allied-occupied areas, while theft and prostitution reached epidemic proportions. These conditions melded with the ensuing civil war to drastically inflate the numbers of persons killed. As Greene and Massignani report, “It is probable that more Italians died in World War II after September 8, 1943 than before, at least if one discounts casualties from high-altitude Allied bombing.”²⁴ The countryside itself was populated by millions of impoverished, ailing people.

To assist the Allies in their conquest of Italy, Roosevelt government officials cut deals with Mafia leaders deported to the U.S. by Mussolini two decades before, reinstalling them throughout Sicily and southern Italy. In his brief history of organized crime as the Americans’ own secret weapon to further their Italian policy, King Orry tells how “Lucky Luciano, head of Murder Inc. and Capo di Tutti Capi, arranged Mafia support for the invasion; he did this from his prison cell in New York State for a few business and personal concessions, of course. So, Lucky was released and flown back to his homeland to ‘facilitate the invasion’, and, on the side, to re-set the Mafia’s power structure and establish its new narcotics empire.”

“Vito Genovese, well-known New York hoodlum wanted for murder and numerous other crimes, turned up in uniform in Sicily as a liaison officer attached to the U.S. Army. The U.S. also resuscitated another convicted Mafiosi, Don Cali Vizzini, and placed him in control of the island’s civil administration with complete authority, military vehicles and supplies at his disposal. Through threats, bribes and skill, these grafters soon out-maneuvered the do-gooding military government of occupied territory to the degree that it was estimated that of all military supplies landed at Naples for the Allied armies, at least a third was stolen from the port.”

“So, for the last sixty-odd years, America has suffered from this act of stupidity, and Italy far worse. For what Italian Prime Minister has been able to govern without Mafia connections and support?”²⁵

Economic misery and moral decline combined with street crime, disease, squalor, and political chaos. Anglo-American popularity was not helped by publication of a U.S. scheme to dissolve Italy as a nation by carving up the entire peninsula among the Allies, with the northeast of the country parceled out to the despised Yugoslavs. Its better-known counterpart, the so-called ‘Morganthau Plan’–the brain-child of the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morganthau–similarly outlined the partitioning of postwar Germany. Mussolini had warned that “capitulation would be the end of Italy, not only as a great power, but as a power at all.”²⁶ And now the words, “Duce, return to us!”, were daubed on ruined walls across Italy south of Rome, as General Eisenhower’s advisors warned him that the dictator’s reputation was undergoing a popular upswing.

Life under the liberators was becoming so intolerable even many of the Grand Council members who voted against Mussolini in July now regretted their decision. Dino Alfieri, the Fascist Minister for Press and Propaganda, and Giuseppe Bastianini, the Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs, pleaded forgiveness from their refuge in Switzlerland, as did the President of the National Fascist Confederation of Agricultural Workers, Annio Bignardi, and the Minister of Corporations, Tullio Cianetti. Giacomo Suardo explained that he abstained from voting one way or the other, due to his position as President of the Senate, and applied for membership in the Republican Fascist Party. But the Duce would have none of it. “If these gentlemen had voted differently back then,” he said, “the situation would not have developed as it has for them, for me, and, more importantly, for our country.”²⁷ All, save Cianetti, who was sentenced to thirty years imprisonment, were condemned to death in absentia by Verona’s Fascist Republican Tribunal. The high-profile Minister of Foreign Affairs, Count Galeazzo Ciano, and four others who cast their negative votes, were executed by firing squad on 1 November 1944.

A day after founding the Salo Republic, Mussolini met with Himmler for the creation of an Italian SS. Its purpose was to build an élite fighting corps that would set high standards for the rest of the RSI armed forces to emulate. In early October, 3,000 signed up. But Eastern Front veterans of the Corpo di Spedizione Italiano, who had fought beside the Germans in Russia, were quick to join the SS after King Victor Emmanuel declared war against Germany on the 13th. Eventually, more than 15,000 volunteers served in the various Italian SS formations.