Im Reich der Unsicherheit? Italienische Archive und die Erforschung des Faschismus

Brunello Mantelli - Im Reich der Unsicherheit – VFZ 4/2005 - Abstract With the exception of some military records of secondary importance, the Italian archives were not confiscated by the Allies after World War II. This was not very fortunate for research into Fascism, as historians now had to fight on two fronts. They were faced with widely scattered records, and they had to cope with a lot of laws and regulations rather unkind to the historian. This essay deals with the history of Italian archive laws and describes the situation in the archives today. The various records on Fascism are scattered amongst numerous state-run and private archives. Besides the Central State Archives (Rome), there are the Foreign Ministry and the General Staffs of the Armed Forces (army, navy, air force), which are entitled to deal with their records themselves. Apart from those, there are also the independent and hardly accessible archive of the Carabinieri and the Archives of the Istituti Storici della Resistenza which both play an important role for the research into the events after Italy's capitulation on 8th September 1943 (German occupation, Resistenza etc.).