I

In 1919, Italy annexed from Austria-Hungary the territories of Trentino-South Tyrol, the small Canal Valley, at the border with Austria and Slovenia, and Venezia Giulia, an area including the cosmopolitan city of Trieste, its hinterland, and the region of Istria. South Tyrol was inhabited by a local majority of about 200,000 German-speakers, while Venezia Giulia was home to around 500,000 Slovenian- and Croatian-speakers. As a result, Italian authorities faced the task of incorporating populations speaking different languages and showing little identification with the Kingdom, even outrightly opposing annexation.Footnote ¹²

Italian policy-makers had already faced issues related to linguistic and cultural heterogeneity. These included the integration of linguistic groups such as the francophones of Aosta Valley and debates on whether southerners were ‘true’ Italians or not.Footnote ¹³ However, minority organizations in South Tyrol and Venezia Giulia contested Italian rule much more vigorously and called for broader forms of cultural and political autonomy than previous minority actors had ever done.Footnote ¹⁴ Furthermore, such contestation arose at a time when minorities turned into a key international question. As suggested by Eric Weitz, the Paris Peace Conference marked the transition from an international order based on state sovereignty and dynastic legitimacy, to a so-called ‘Paris system’ grounded in population politics and ‘an ideal of state sovereignty as rooted in national homogeneity’.Footnote ¹⁵ As a consequence, minorities, i.e. populations whose existence challenged the congruence between state and nation, became an issue of primary international concern, so much so that the peace treaties established a minority protection system supervised by the League of Nations.Footnote ¹⁶ The combination of these factors caused considerable anxiety among Italian politicians and cast the minority question in a significantly different light.

Post-1918 minority questions, in Italy and beyond, were not about heterogeneity per se. They were rather about sovereignty and perceived loyalty to the state.Footnote ¹⁷ In the context of the ‘triumph’ of Wilsonian self-determination, minorities were considered populations who did not belong to, or did not identify with, the dominant nation that was deemed to have the right to govern the state.Footnote ¹⁸ In practice, however, throughout Europe the boundaries dividing majorities and minorities were contested and fluid. The minority treaties did not offer a clear definition of ‘minority’ and simply enumerated some elements (race, religion, and language) that could help to identify one.Footnote ¹⁹ In the Italian context, two terms, allogeni and alloglotti, reflected the contradictions around the category of minority. In most cases, the fascists used these words to refer to the inhabitants of the new provinces that did not speak Italian as their native language. The terms were synonyms and indicated a divergence from some kind of Italian norm, suggesting that the allogeni/alloglotti were Italian by citizenship, but their true nationality was unclear. Allogeno referred more strictly to national or ethnic belonging, while alloglotto indicated someone who spoke a language different from Italian and generally implied a higher chance of assimilation in the majority culture. These terms allowed fascist officers and intellectuals to name these populations without using the term minority or calling them Germans or Yugoslavs. The fascists could thus distinguish them from ‘normal’ Italians, while at the same time keeping the door open to their eventual assimilation and denying the existence of minorities in Italy altogether.Footnote ²⁰

Despite the ambiguity surrounding the concept of minority, most contemporary commentators referred to minorities as national minorities and tended to emphasize two features. The first was a claim of difference, in national terms, coming from a substantial share of members of the minority. This claim asserted that the minority constituted a political community distinct from the majority group that identified with the state. The second feature was an asymmetric power relation between the minority and the rest of the inhabitants of the state, where the minority was in a non-dominant position.Footnote ²¹

In the immediate post-war period, Italian politicians gave assurances that they would treat the inhabitants of South Tyrol and Venezia Giulia liberally. By contrast, the fascists never concealed their aim to assimilate the minorities and eagerly pursued this goal once in power. At first, they relied on measures such as the imposition of Italian in schools, public administration, and the public space, the Italianization of names, and the suppression of minority organizations. Later, the regime also tried to modify the demographic balance in the new provinces through a policy of land colonization that entailed buying land from non-Italian-speakers and giving it to Italians from the old provinces. Yet these attempts only succeeded superficially. When Hitler took power in Germany and set out to unite all German minorities scattered around Europe within the Reich, Italian sovereignty over the new provinces was still highly contested. The Nazis’ accession had a double effect on Italian domestic affairs. It alarmed the fascist regime in Italy about potential future attempts on behalf of the new leadership in Berlin to annex South Tyrol. Furthermore, it fuelled hopes among the South Tyrolean population that Hitler could eventually realize his plans to redraw the map of Europe. Although Hitler repeatedly declared to be ready to sacrifice South Tyrol in exchange for a solid alliance with fascist Italy, by the time of the 1938 Anschluss it became clear to both governments in Rome and Berlin that a definitive solution to the question of South Tyrol had to be found. This chain of events led the two regimes to sign the Option Agreement in June 1939. By the end of December of the same year, the local population had to decide whether they wanted to leave their homeland forever or to remain and behave, in accordance with the fascists’ perspective, as ‘good Italians’. A vote for Italy tacitly implied the loss of any hope of maintaining a different national and linguistic identity, which a substantial part of the German-speaking population of the region had stubbornly strived to preserve throughout the interwar period.Footnote ²²

For the fascists, the Option Agreement represented an implicit recognition that twenty years of harsh Italianization policies in South Tyrol had failed. Although there were some important members of the Italian regime who were in favour of a complete resettlement of the South Tyrolean population, the majority aimed to only expel supposed ‘agitators’ who were deemed to be fomenting popular resistance against the government's assimilationist measures. This was evident in the shock expressed by many fascists when, in the final months of 1939, they realized that an overwhelming majority of the German-speaking population was about to cast its vote in favour of emigration to Germany (eventually, the Optanten, i.e. those who voted for relocation, accounted for about 85 per cent of the overall population of the province). Suddenly, Italian authorities faced a thorny dilemma. After having bombastically claimed for about two decades that the South Tyroleans would inevitably assimilate into Italian culture, they were now confronted with the possibility of a plebiscite in favour of emigration to Germany that threatened to inflict a serious wound to Italian national pride. From September 1939, the regime launched a campaign to convince the South Tyrolean population to remain. At the same time, both for reasons of prestige and distrust of the allogeni, the fascists could not throw all their weight behind this campaign, therefore making only inconsistent efforts at reassuring those who intended to stay (called the Dableiber) that they would be treated fairly after the vote.

This article argues that in order to understand why the fascists adopted such hesitant behaviour in the second half of 1939, one needs to consider the longer history of Italian homogenization policies in South Tyrol and Venezia Giulia. These attempts had three major characteristics: a naïve belief that the assimilation of the minorities would be inevitable; the lack of means to carry out radical land colonization policies; and a deep-seated distrust of the allogeni, even of those who enthusiastically assimilated to Italian culture and served the Fascist Party loyally. These three features structured fascist policy in the new provinces throughout the interwar years and led to a form of consistent ambivalence that culminated in the puzzling behaviour adopted by the regime during the Option.

The next sections dissect these three features. They also show that minorities were not only a ‘problem of eastern Europe’.Footnote ²³ Western European governments confronted minority questions too and some of them tried to solve these questions through harsh homogenization policies.

II

On 15 July 1923, a bald bearded man with a prominent moustache gave a speech at a public meeting in the municipal theatre of Bolzano, the capital of South Tyrol. His name was Ettore Tolomei and he served as Mussolini's adviser on questions related to the German-speaking population of this region. The speech, entitled Provvedimenti per l'Alto Adige (Measures for Alto Adige), listed a series of policies that would ensure the Italianization of the area after centuries of Austro-Hungarian control. The Provvedimenti had already been endorsed by the recently installed fascist government in Rome and constituted a kind of roadmap to the region's ‘redemption’. The plan included a mix of Italian language imposition in the public space, the assimilation of youth by means of schooling in Italian, and the transfer of land from German- to Italian-speakers.

Tolomei's blueprint built on the idea that South Tyrol was geographically Italian, but foreigners had invaded it and de-nationalized the local population. Hence, in spite of their German-speaking nature, the inhabitants of South Tyrol were in fact Italian and the government had the duty to re-awaken their Italianness.Footnote ²⁴ Other notable members of the National Fascist Party (PNF, Partito Nazionale Fascista) shared similar ideas. In 1927, the South Tyrolean fascist Giuseppe Cristofolini reminded readers of the party periodical Gerarchia that Austria-Hungary had favoured the emigration of Germans in the area in the late nineteenth century and had thus upset the natural Italian character of the province.Footnote ²⁵ Benito Mussolini himself declared, in a speech given in parliament in June 1926, that out of the 180,000 German-speakers in South Tyrol, 80,000 were Italians who had been Germanized and promised ‘to redeem them’.Footnote ²⁶ A year later, addressing parliament again, the Duce repeated that ‘up there [in South Tyrol] there is a minority of Italians who speak a German dialect as their language of use, and they have only been speaking this way for a century’. In his concluding remarks, Mussolini outlined measures to more speedily complete the Italianization of the ‘inhabitants of Alto Adige, whom we consider as Italian citizens who must rediscover themselves’.Footnote ²⁷

In the 1920s, not only did Mussolini assert that the inhabitants of the new provinces in the north and in the east were ‘disguised’ Italians, but also affirmed that these populations could not resist the ‘exceptional’ assimilative power of the Italian culture. For instance, in a meeting in November 1922 with some delegates representing the Slovenian-speaking population of Venezia Giulia, the Duce quietly informed his guests that their transformation into Italians was inevitable since the Italian ‘3,000-year-old culture conquered everyone until now’. ‘This is why – he added – I do not fear the Slavs, and I do not wish for a violent assimilation, as if Italy feared them.’Footnote ²⁸

Mussolini might have been more inclined to acknowledge in private, rather than in public, whatever doubts he may have had about the possibility of assimilating the minorities. Yet, in a circular of November 1925 that he sent to all the ministries of his government to detail some guidelines for their work in the territories annexed from Austria-Hungary, Mussolini stressed that those areas were originally Italian and their Italian nature had been erased ‘only because of arbitrary and violent actions of foreign governments’.Footnote ²⁹ He thus recommended unity of action and a carrot and stick policy aimed at punishing ‘agitators’, who would hamper the allogeni's assimilation. The rest of the population should experience the advantages of belonging to the Italian state.Footnote ³⁰

In the late 1920s, some party members began to realize that assimilation would be harder than initially expected. However, for most fascist officers this recognition did not put into question the supposedly inevitable nature of the process. In 1927, the Italian ambassador in Vienna, Giacinto Auriti, predicted that South Tyrol would remain the main obstacle of a friendly relationship between Italy and Austria and this would last ‘for ten years at least, that is, until the generation born in that province after its re-conquest would become adult’.Footnote ³¹ Despite his concerns for Austro-Italian relations, Auriti was still optimistic about the prospects of the assimilation of South Tyrolean youth. Similarly, a couple of years later, the prefect of Bolzano concluded that ‘the allogenous element becomes ever more sympathetic towards Fascism and the veiled hostility that it manifested towards all that is Italian is almost completely gone’.Footnote ³² If assimilation had not occurred yet, several members of the regime argued, this was mostly because of the anti-Italian activities of some agitators financed from abroad.

Against this more sober, but still optimistic, appreciation of the dynamics of assimilation in the new provinces, some fascists began outlining alternative pathways, notably land colonization. In the same 1927 Gerarchia issue cited before, Ettore Tolomei raised doubts about the policies adopted until then and wrote: ‘schools are an excellent thing and on this matter we are proceeding excellently, but schools bear only an ephemeral fruit if a group of Italian families do not settle in any of the Alto Adige villages, if Italian ownership [of the land] will not be extended’.Footnote ³³ Encouraging the immigration of Italians from the other provinces to alter the demographic balance became a new priority.Footnote ³⁴

However, the regime never gave up its assimilationist efforts. On the contrary, in the 1930s, the authorities even bolstered their attempts, despite rising doubts about the possibility of Italianizing the allogeni and the growing priority given to colonization. The government also tried to penetrate the minorities’ social fabric by establishing fascist organizations dedicated to entertainment (Opera Nazionale Dopolavoro), youth (Opera Nazionale Balilla), and welfare (Opera nazionale di assistenza all'Italia redenta) in the new provinces. Through language classes for adults, farming schools, kindergartens, summer camps for kids, free lunches for the destitute, winter subsidies to the unemployed, plays, and sporting events, obviously all in Italian, the regime aimed to win the support of the local population.Footnote ³⁵ The idea was that the allogeni could not help but appreciate the material advantages that the regime brought to them and, slowly, they would begin identifying with their new state.Footnote ³⁶ Furthermore, as we will explore in more detail below, the logic behind settlement was to surround minority communities in order to better assimilate them, rather than simply replacing expelled allogeni with Italians from other provinces.

The reason why the idea of assimilating minorities through Italianization retained its currency despite its lack of success had to do with the combination of two conceptions of national identity: the organicist conception of the nation-state, whereby the national community was deemed to be similar to a living organism, on the one hand, and the mainly voluntaristic nature of the Italian national identity on the other. In Nazi Germany, the organicist conception of the nation went along with a strong biological racism that could easily justify the expulsion of minorities from the national body. In contrast, Italy's wide regional heterogeneity made it harder, although not impossible, for a strictly biological understanding of the nation to take roots. Before the introduction of racial laws in the late 1930s, and outside the context of the colonization of Africa, Italian racism was based more on images of superiority of the Italian culture and the assimilative might of the Italian nation than on fantasies of biological racial purity, although the latter were not absent and spread further after 1938.Footnote ³⁷ Admitting that the minorities had to be expelled because it had been impossible to assimilate them was tantamount to recognizing that the fascists had been wrong all along about the supposedly overwhelming assimilative power of the Italian nation. Hence, the regime could not let go of assimilation, although, at some point, this seemed to be more instrumental in generating consensus among the Italian population in the old provinces than to Italianize minorities.Footnote ³⁸ As perceptively argued by Gaetano Salvemini, sometimes it looked as if what the fascists really wanted was not so much that the minorities become Italian, but rather that ‘they appear to be Italian’.Footnote ³⁹

III

Although assimilation remained a pillar of fascist policy in the new provinces, at the turn of the 1930s doubts about its efficacy began to grow. In Venezia Giulia, the anti-fascist and pan-Slavic clandestine group TIGR (Trst, Istra, Gorica, Reka) carried out numerous terrorist attacks and brought home to many party members that resistance was more deeply rooted than previously thought. In 1930, the leadership of the fascist federation of Trieste called for a more realistic approach. The attacks, the politicians argued, had ‘dashed illusions and hopes nourished in these last years, especially by the local authorities in charge, of a simple work of assimilation of the Slavs’.Footnote ⁴⁰ Similar doubts also spread in South Tyrol. In this context, settling the new provinces with Italians coming from the other areas of the Kingdom acquired increasing popularity.Footnote ⁴¹

The idea of the ‘conquest of the land’ of South Tyrol had a longer history going back to the period before the First World War, when nationalist and irredentist circles emphasized its expediency in the Italianization of the area. However, before the late 1920s, no Italian government drew any concrete plans of land colonization. In 1926–7, the fascist regime made a first attempt in collaboration with the Organizzazione Nazionale Combattenti (ONC), an association of former soldiers. They aimed to expropriate 1,000 hectares of land from German-speaking tenants to settle between 200 and 600 families from the old provinces in the area between Merano and Lavis, to the north of Trento. Lack of resources, foreign policy concerns, and the opposition of the Tyrolean tenants derailed the project. Yet the regime did not abandon land colonization altogether.Footnote ⁴² A few years later, in January 1931, the Ministry of the Interior sent a circular to the prefects of Venezia Giulia asking them to identify parcels of land owned by the individuals belonging to the Slovenian/Croatian minority that could be transferred to Italian settlers.Footnote ⁴³

Against the background of the 1929 crisis and the consequent attempts of the regime to apply autarchic policies, the regime identified the Ente Rinascita Agraria (Body for the Agrarian Renaissance or ERA), an agency founded in 1920 that mainly administered war-damaged farmlands in Veneto,Footnote ⁴⁴ as the most suitable body to expropriate the allogeni's land. In August 1931, the government transformed it into the Ente di Rinascita Agraria delle Tre Venezie (Body for the Agrarian Renaissance of the Three Venices, ERATV) and gave it the specific purpose of buying land from owners belonging to the minority populations of South Tyrol and Venezia Giulia. Initially, the ERATV was more active in the eastern provinces, especially in Gorizia, where it bought about 3,000 hectares of land before 1933. It later reoriented its focus towards the province of Bolzano.Footnote ⁴⁵

Yet the purchase of agricultural land there faced two major challenges. First, as compared to Venezia Giulia, Tyrolean farms were more intensive in nature. Therefore, they were more expensive and they required a skilled workforce that was not easy to find in the old provinces.Footnote ⁴⁶ The fascist organizations that were running the farms had such a hard time finding suitable candidates that, in some cases, local executives asked the leadership in Rome to let them allocate some of their high-altitude farms to the allogeni, which completely defeated the purpose of the organizations’ activity.Footnote ⁴⁷ Moreover, the Ente, and other authorities active in the purchase of land, had to confront the competition of members of the minority who, supported by foreign investors from Germany or Austria, could often afford higher prices.Footnote ⁴⁸

As of 30 September 1938, 325 farms, accounting for 8,933 hectares of land, had passed from the property of individuals identified as allogeni to Italian hands through the Ente's purchases. That represented only 0.6 per cent of the productive agricultural surface of the new provinces.Footnote ⁴⁹ As a comparison, by the end of the 1930s, the redemption of the Agro Pontino (Pontine Marshes) in Lazio, the main land redemption project carried out in Italy, created 2,953 farmhouses and 64,666 hectares of farm parcels.Footnote ⁵⁰ Even Roberta Pergher, who has claimed that the colonization of South Tyrol was the most important strategy pursued by the fascists in the region in the 1930s, acknowledges that until 1939 these efforts were piecemeal at best.Footnote ⁵¹

The history of the Ente shows that even if fascist authorities had wanted to pursue more radical policies to replace the local population with Italians from the old provinces, deemed to be more loyal to the state, they would have confronted unsurmountable economic and logistic hurdles. The Ente, and other land-redemption organizations, not only had a hard time competing with German landowners and buyers. They also enjoyed very small economic margins in the running of their farms. In several instances, these farms could not yield profits. Hence, sharecroppers called for state subsidies to keep their farm running and shrewdly described their holdings as bastions of the nation in hostile territory in order to convince authorities to accept their demands.Footnote ⁵² Yet most of the time these subsidies were denied on account of the already considerable sharecroppers’ debt.Footnote ⁵³ The need to reduce losses prevailed over the patriotic mission to ‘conquer’ the land in border areas, thus exposing the material limits of the regime's capabilities to carry out even moderate policies of land colonization. The resource constraints confronted by the regime in the 1930s are not surprising given the concomitant development of two other major land colonization projects: the Agro Pontino in Lazio, which involved the transfer of around 29,000 people between 1932 and 1939; and the Ventimila programme in Libya, where around 25,000 farmers and their families colonized the north African coast in 1938–9.Footnote ⁵⁴

In this overall unsuccessful Italianization of the land, the creation of the industrial zone of Bolzano stands out as an exception. Built in 1935 on an area obtained through expropriation of land from Tyrolean owners, the industrial zone truly transformed the city. Italian-speakers went from accounting for 21 per cent of the total population in 1921 to 62 per cent in 1939. Yet, as stunning as this reversal might appear, the Italian community in the city remained isolated from the surrounding German-speaking Tyrolians.Footnote ⁵⁵ More importantly, although land colonization with Italians from the old provinces did become a pressing priority, it was never meant as a total replacement for the assimilation of the local population, but rather as a catalyst to accelerate this. In 1931, for instance, the federal secretary of the Fascist Party of Pola called for increased colonization, but he clarified that this was required in order to ‘inject abundant blood of pure Latin race into the population living along the border’ (our emphasis).Footnote ⁵⁶ Even Tolomei, in 1935, referred to the ‘amalgam’ that would result from mixture of locals and settlers from the old provinces.Footnote ⁵⁷ Hence, ‘a variety of influential players were envisaging settlement as a kind of beguiling encirclement that would surround the allogeni and eventually absorb them’, rather than as their total replacement.Footnote ⁵⁸

IV

In 1925, Mussolini issued a circular detailing the guidelines for dealing with the populations of the new provinces annexed from Austria-Hungary. The Duce emphasized how civil servants in these territories served a critical patriotic function and had to exhibit exemplary conduct, since locals attentively observed their behaviour.Footnote ⁵⁹ Four years later, one of these local civil servants, the federal secretary of the Fascist Party in the eastern province of Gorizia, Pino Godina, reminded the provincial party assembly of Mussolini's words. Party members, he warned, should avoid ‘giving the impression that there are two different categories of citizens: the Italian who has only rights and the Italian of Slovenian language, who has only duties’.Footnote ⁶⁰

In principle, this concern for equal treatment was in line with other pillars of the party's ideology. It went along with the strict centralism and uniformity of treatment that the fascists wanted to ensure throughout the country. Since the allogeni were deemed as Germanized/Slavized Italians who had to be ‘restored’ to their original essence, it was also logical to treat them as all other citizens. However, equal treatment remained wishful thinking. A deep-seated distrust of the Italians that were considered to belong to the minority populations of South Tyrol and Venezia Giulia lingered on within the fascist regime throughout its history.

The allogeni denounced such distrust. In a memorandum written in 1927, the South Tyrolean MPs Karl Tinzl and Paul von Sternbach lamented that:

Fascist authorities did not conceal their suspicions in their internal correspondence. In 1926, the prefect of Trieste, Giovanni Gasti, decried the ‘double, treacherous’ nature of the politicians representing the allogeni. Their political movement, Gasti added, was

Similarly, in 1924, the central organs of the Fascist Party recommended to local party members in Venezia Giulia not to ‘welcome Slav adherents, which are usually prompted to register themselves…because of unacceptable aims, or out of personal interests. One cannot rely – the document concluded – on such treacherous elements’.Footnote ⁶³

Even when some allogeni showed total commitment to the fascist cause and proved to be able to work reliably within the administration, the regime was not keen on having them in positions of power. Massimiliano Markart's story provides a vivid illustration of such distrust. As podestà (fascist mayor) of Merano, Markart received widespread praise for his impeccable fascist record and outstanding administrative performance. Yet this did not save him from exclusion from his position. In the mid-1930s, after several years of pressure from local members of the PNF, he was eventually replaced with a ‘pure’ Italian. In an insightful message sent to the prefect of Trento a few years earlier, the sub-prefect of Merano, Di Suni, who had taken Markart's defence in the local wrangle that eventually led to his removal, presciently predicted that:

Di Suni clearly understood that distrust was a major hindrance on the way to the Italianization of the allogeni. The questionable skills and moral conduct of many public officers sent from the old provinces to fill the gaps in the administration of South Tyrol and Venezia Giulia made the fascist reluctance to give public offices to members of the minorities even more difficult to accept.Footnote ⁶⁵

Another fitting example of the regime's distrust of the allogeni concerns the committed fascist of Slovenian origin, Albino Furlan. Furlan joined the Fascio in 1926 and, according to party sources, showed clear Italian sentiments. In 1929, he became political secretary of the local branch of the PNF in the municipality of Monrupino, near Trieste, and in a few years increased local party membership from 5 to 80 individuals. He was held in high esteem by all local authorities. These impeccable credentials notwithstanding, in 1933, owing to his Slav origins, he was transferred to a municipality in the province of Perugia during a general process that removed primary school teachers not deemed to be trustworthy because of their origin. Local protest brought Furlan's case to the desk of the vice-secretary of the Fascist Party, Arturo Marpicati. Moved by Furlan's record, Marpicati asked the minister of education, Francesco Ercole, to reconsider Furlan's transfer. The case eventually came before the prefect of Trieste, Carlo Tiengo, who refused to accept Furlan's return. Tiengo argued that teachers of Slav origins, ‘even if moved by the best intentions, cannot carry out, for reasons of kinship, relations and environment, the delicate task of Italian and fascist educators in this province’.Footnote ⁶⁶ The regime could not free itself from the consistent tendency to exclude the allogeni from whole spheres of Italian society, while simultaneously forcing them to become ‘good’ Italians.

V

In 1939, the procedure of option, whereby the subjects/citizens of a new state could choose to retain their former subjecthood/citizenship after annexation, was not new. It had been introduced in the late eighteenth century, increasingly used in the nineteenth, for instance after the 1871 German conquest of Alsace-Lorraine, and widely applied to the redrawing of borders effected at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference. Option procedures were meant as exceptions, targeting specific cases and a limited number of individuals. Population transfer agreements, an innovation of the immediate post-First World War period, also remained exceptional until the Second World War, but they targeted large portions of a territory's population. In 1923, the Treaty of Lausanne formalized for the first time in international law the expulsion of approximately 1 million Greeks from the new-born Republic of Turkey, as well as the forcible removal of around 400,000 Muslims living in Greece. In the late 1930s, population transfer was a legitimate measure of conflict resolution, albeit of last resort. In 1936, for instance, the governments of Romania and Turkey arranged the transfer of more than 67,000 Turks from Transylvania to Turkey's mainland. Other cases occurred later in Bulgaria, Bessarabia, and the Baltic Republics, among others. Thus, the international community reckoned both option procedures and population transfers as valid international practices. Moreover, before 1939, governments saw these practices as tools for reducing opposition to annexation or reconquest, as in the Greek–Turkish case, in the latter's immediate aftermath.Footnote ⁶⁷

In South Tyrol, however, Italy and Germany agreed to allow the local population to opt for either country twenty years after the transfer of the territory from the Austro-Hungarian empire to Italy. Furthermore, the two governments took this decision fairly abruptly and, despite letting the population choose, they made clear that the procedure should bring to an end any contestation of Italian sovereignty over the region. The ensuing polarized climate and the expectation that the Option would ‘solve’ the South Tyrolean ‘problem’ once and for all turned the event into a hybrid between a traditional option procedure, a plebiscite, and a population transfer.

The Option Agreement in South Tyrol constituted a radical departure from the approach that Italian authorities had followed until then. While the German side sought the complete transfer of the German-speaking population, the fascists rarely contemplated this scenario. Of course, there were disagreements within the regime and some fascists supported a total resettlement. In March 1939, for instance, Tolomei's journal, Archivio per l'Alto Adige, called for a total exodus inspired by the ‘great Kemal’, with obvious reference to the Greek–Turkish population exchange.Footnote ⁶⁸ Also, in 1938, Giovanni Preziosi, a high-ranking fascist politician, urged the Duce to let go of the idea that the Germans could be assimilated (which incidentally suggests that Mussolini still deemed assimilation possible). Preziosi believed that the only solution left for Italian authorities was to give the ‘Germans of South Tyrol back to Germany’.Footnote ⁶⁹ Other supporters of a total solution were the vice-minister of the interior Guido Buffarini Guidi, the head of Italian police Arturo Bocchini, the minister of foreign affairs Galeazzo Ciano, and the ambassador in Berlin Bernardo Attolico.Footnote ⁷⁰

Yet several other members of the fascist government, most notably within the Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and, above all, the local administrators in South Tyrol, were much more reluctant to push for a complete ‘cleansing’ of the region. On the contrary, they aimed at selectively pushing some allogeni, identified as agitators, to leave. In this way, the assimilation of the remaining population would be easier.Footnote ⁷¹ For instance, in a report to the Ministry of the Interior of May 1939, the prefect of Bolzano, Giuseppe Mastromattei, wrote that the agreement the government was discussing with the Nazis should aim to free South Tyrol from those German elements that ‘contrast the action of the Fascist regime’. He further argued that if all the other South Tyroleans were forced to go to the Reich, one would quickly see that ‘all this attachment to Germany on the part of the allogeni is more apparent than real, and how this population…loves peace, is greedy and is open to follow that regime which better ensures calm and prosperity’.Footnote ⁷² In the negotiations held in Berlin in June 1939, Mastromattei made it clear that Italy's priority was to transfer to the Reich the 10,000 German citizens living in South Tyrol, who were deemed to be a stronghold of Germanism in the area. The prefect also asserted that at least half of the 200,000 German-speakers holding Italian citizenship in South Tyrol were not German by ‘race’.Footnote ⁷³ At the end of August, Mastromattei was still convinced that only about 30,000 people would leave the region and that, if the regime wanted to increase the figure, it had to take active measures.Footnote ⁷⁴ In other words, while the Nazis openly advocated transferring all German-speakers and even adopted flexible definitions concerning the right of option, as happened in the Canal Valley where speakers of Slovenian dialects were also entitled to opt, the Italian authorities showed a more cautious position.Footnote ⁷⁵

Italian officials initially adopted a posture of aboulic retreat from the public debate, but the spread of Nazi propaganda throughout South Tyrol forced the prefect to take remedial action. Towards the end of September 1939, Mastromattei launched a campaign to try to convince the local population to keep Italian citizenship. The campaign, however, was conducted with little enthusiasm. Even actors not directly involved in the regime noticed the Italian executive's hesitation. In a letter to Mussolini from mid-November 1939, an anonymous writer who showed a solid understanding of events in South Tyrol bitterly concluded that:

The prefect's change of tack in the autumn attracted even stronger criticism from supporters of a total resettlement. At the end of September, the Italian ambassador in Berlin, Bernardo Attolico, angrily asked the minister of foreign affairs, Galeazzo Ciano, ‘why on earth do we want to compel people to remain within our borders who intend, want, and have shown their absolute will to remain for ever and ever German and none other than German?’.Footnote ⁷⁷

In those final months of 1939, many South Tyrolean and external observers attributed Mastromattei's change of strategy to economic reasons. According to the rumours that spread throughout the province, at the end of the summer the prefect had realized that a full resettlement, as seemed increasingly likely in light of reports coming from throughout South Tyrol, would be detrimental to Italian coffers. He thus decided to reverse the hands-off approach followed until then.Footnote ⁷⁸ Relying on these rumours, some authors have explained Mastromattei's move from silence to opposition to Nazi propaganda as being chiefly motivated by economic factors. Yet there is no strong archival evidence showing that economic motivations constituted the over-riding reason for the regime's policy change. On the contrary, Leopold Steurer has convincingly argued that by the end of October 1939, the negotiations for the financial side of the Option were quite favourable to Italy.Footnote ⁷⁹ In addition, the available sources suggest that fascist authorities were not grasping the economic consequences of a total exodus, nor were they planning for the mass resettlement of the area.Footnote ⁸⁰ However, it is true that, as seen in section III, the economic limitations faced by the regime when implementing the Option Agreement do reflect a structural feature of fascist policy in the new provinces throughout the interwar period: when the Italian government contemplated a move to more radical measures, resource constraints consistently frustrated the regime's ambitions.

Focusing excessively on economic reasons, the historiography has overlooked the importance of national prestige as a reason for the Italian U-turn in South Tyrol. After all, accepting a total transfer would have been a humiliating recognition that the policy pursued for about two decades had completely failed.Footnote ⁸¹ Party members reporting on local trends in late 1939 were well aware of the damage that the Option was going to inflict on Italy's national pride, as shown by an anonymous fascist from Meran relating a mission to the village of Naturns:

The text confirms that the regime did not expect the German-speaking population of South Tyrol to vote overwhelmingly to leave, a conclusion that other documents corroborate.Footnote ⁸³ Most fascists were caught off guard once that outcome became clear. This was consistent with the assumption of inevitable assimilation that had informed fascist policy in the new provinces for about two decades. Even if some grew more sceptical of this conviction from the late 1920s, and there were disagreements and diverging opinions within the regime, the belief that sooner or later the majority of the German-speaking minority would yield to fascist efforts persisted in the mind of many fascist officers. These explained every resistance with reference to the propaganda of a few agitators, who were the main target of the ‘selective’ exodus that local authorities wanted to achieve.

The text above also shows that the regime had limited room to persuade the allogeni. The officer who authored the report was sent to Naturns to convince German-speakers to remain. Yet he refused to beg locals in order not to ‘undermine the prestige of the Nation’. The fascist's limited range of options to entice the allogeni also derived from the regime's deep-seated distrust of them. In his most important speech to the German-speaking population of the region, Mastromattei affirmed that ‘those who will freely opt for Italian citizenship will remain in South Tyrol, provided that any diffidence and hostile intention will be abandoned’ (our emphasis).Footnote ⁸⁴ The regime could not write a blank cheque to the allogeni in order to lure them to stay. It rather had to ensure that all the so-called ‘agitators’ would leave. Such a mistrust of German-speakers is even clearer when considering the regime's attitude towards the Dableiber. Instead of teaming up with them to counter Nazi propaganda, the regime often hampered their activities.

VI

Fascist policy in the new provinces was consistently ambivalent. The regime not only pursued the total assimilation of the minority populations of South Tyrol and Venezia Giulia, which was beyond what it could possibly achieve with the resources and capabilities it had. The fascists also wished to absorb populations that they fundamentally mistrusted into the body of the Italian nation. National prestige complicated things further. The hypertrophic concept of Italian grandeur promoted by fascist propaganda convinced central and local authorities, despite abundant counterevidence, that the allogeni would inevitably become loyal Italians.

The 1939 Option Agreement proved to be consistent with this approach and offered the clearest example of such delusions. Moreover, the late fascist attempts to turn the boat represented the harshest moment of reckoning.Footnote ⁸⁵ The regime found itself walking on a tightrope. On the one hand, it could not push for a radical solution because this would have been a (not so) tacit admission of failure. Additionally, even if the regime had been willing to go for a total resettlement, it would have run into major resource constraints. On the other hand, the fascists could only make half promises of benevolent treatment to the allogeni because the underlying assumption of the Option Agreement was the Dableiber's willingness to accept assimilation. Blinded by oversized national pride, the regime reached a dead end. As Mastromattei grudgingly acknowledged in January 1940, shortly before being removed from office, many fascists had indulged in the ‘illusion that it would be easy to “assimilate” the German population of Alto Adige’, that assimilation would be ‘a certain and lasting success’.Footnote ⁸⁶ In other words, the fascists had become victims of their own rhetoric.

A glaring confirmation of this attitude comes from the eastern provinces. In a message to Mussolini of November 1941, that is, well after the Option debacle, Italo Sauro, then Mussolini's adviser on ethnic issues in Venezia Giulia, concluded his report with a passionate defence of the regime's homogenizing efforts:

To add insult to injury, after a promising start, the departure of the allogeni came to a halt in the summer of 1940. By the end of that year, only about 50,000 people had left South Tyrol. In the three following years, an additional 25,000 joined the count. Overall, only about a third of the Optanten actually emigrated. Some never meant to move in the first place and had simply voted against Italy out of hatred against two decades of harsh repression. Others were discouraged by the disenchanted accounts of life in the Reich coming from those who had already emigrated. Many simply waited to receive an estimate of their property, a process bogged down by endless discussions about the financial terms of the operation. Above all, the Nazis profited from the presence in South Tyrol of German governmental organizations in charge of resettlement to build up extensive institutions that catered for the community of the Optanten, for instance by creating a network of schools in which the language of instruction was German. Hence, not only the ‘question’ of South Tyrol was not settled forever, as the fascists had thought, but also the fascist regime began losing control over the province well before the armistice of 8 September 1943 and the ensuing German occupation.

Trying to save face, in his message to Mussolini in January 1940, Mastromattei referred to the allogeni that had opted to remain in Italy as evidence ‘that our twenty-year-long work of political penetration has not been completely vain’. ‘The civilization of Fascism – he added – has exercised its decisive influence even on people of undoubtedly different origins, race and culture.’Footnote ⁸⁸ Despite complaining about the illusions that had undermined the fascist approach in the new provinces, Mastromattei remained loyal to the twenty-year-long fascist tradition to avoid coming to terms with the limits and ambivalence of their attempts to assimilate the allogeni.