alternatehistory.com

Here's the first post-war chapter for you, mainly focusing on post-war reconstruction . Foreign developments will be in the next chapter.




In 1945 the Second World War had finally ended with the defeat of Japan, which had been preceded by the defeat of Germany in 1944. Approximately 55 million people had died, including more than 5 million Jews murdered by the Third Reich, and many survivors were left homeless. In many cases, surviving Holocaust victims returned only to find that other people had moved into their homes and had taken many of their possessions. In some cases, such as in Poland, returning Jews even experienced anti-Semitic violence. Non-Jewish refugees were also to be found everywhere, looking for protection, shelter, food and also medical care: the complete collapse of basic medical services in many places, due to war devastation, caused outbreaks of disease. In the meantime, the European economy had collapsed with 70% of industrial infrastructure destroyed, and a lot of other infrastructure being in ruin as well: entire cities had been destroyed, especially in Germany, which was the economic engine of Europe.

And there was the elephant in the room of what to do with Germany. Germany was divided into five occupation zones controlled by the US, Britain, France, Italy and the Soviet Union – France in the southwest, Britain in the northwest, the United States in the south, the USSR in the east, and the Italians in Austria. German territories east of the Oder-Neisse line were hived off to Poland while East Prussia was divided between Poland and the Soviet Union. Additionally, millions of Germans living in these territories or in the Czech Sudetenland were expelled and experienced hardship: thousands froze to death while being transported by slow and ill-equipped trains and many ethnic Germans, primarily women and children, were seriously mistreated by Czech and Polish authorities. In total some ten million German refugees arrived in Germany from countries across Central and Eastern Europe while many German POWs became forced labourers to provide restitution to the countries occupied by Germany. Additionally some factories were removed as war reparations, but in 1947 the Truman administration decided that Europe couldn’t be rebuilt without the German industrial base on which it had previously been dependent. The Anglo-French-American zones became the Federal Republic of Germany in 1949.

The Soviet zone had less luck: due to their own economic devastation the Soviets decided that reparations, even though they would alienate the German workforce from communism, were more important than alliance building. Eventually even they saw relaxation of punitive measures (Soviet soldiers, for example, were restricted to their bases and so rape of German women finally became a thing of the past). In 1949, the Soviet zone became the German Democratic Republic. The Allied Control Council essentially became a symbolic organization: it couldn’t do anything because Cold War tensions paralyzed it.

Europe became divided. The Eastern Bloc was composed of those states “liberated” by the Red Army: East Germany, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Serbia, Romania and Bulgaria all became communist regimes based on the Stalinist model. Croatia became a pseudo-fascist Italian puppet state headed by Ustashe leader Ante Pavelic. Slovenia became a separate country and, surprisingly, was allowed its democracy (albeit on the condition that it accepted Italy dominating its foreign affairs). Members of Italy’s Slovenian minority, which had been subjected to compulsory Italianization, were given the choice of staying in Italy or giving up their Italian citizenship and migrating to Slovenia. Croatia included Bosnia-Herzegovina and the period 1944-1946 saw deportations of ethnic Serbs, with Serbs being severely mistreated by Croatian authorities. Croatia agreed to cede Dalmatia to Italy, further strengthening Italian control of the Adriatic Sea, and oriented its iron ore exports to Italy. Kosovo was annexed to Italian Albania, giving Italy control of deposits of lead, zinc and chrome. The communist “Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia” in the meantime was only composed of Serbia, Montenegro and Macedonia. Outside communist regimes and some dictatorial regimes on the Mediterranean Sea most of Europe was a part of the free world. Italy, Spain and other regimes in southern Europe fared a separate but generally pro-Western course.

Austria, which was the Italian occupation zone of Germany, was a different case. Mussolini immediately reinstated the Federal State of Austria as it had existed until 1938 and hoisted Kurt Schuschnigg right back into the saddle. The new regime conducted a denazification campaign that was very rigorous in its initial phases with 1946 seeing the search of over 100.000 homes and 10.000 arrests in Vienna alone. Several tens of thousands of arrests took place across the country, but in most cases it was determined that the suspects had merely joined the Nazi party for career reasons. The vast majority of the country’s civil servants were reinstated once the Italians decided that maintaining a military administration down to the local level was much too expensive. True Nazis and Nazi leaders, on the other hand, were thrown in jail and the now illegal NSDAP was virtually decapitated. Austrofascism was reinstated and the country became a conservative Catholic autocracy once more, but not independent. Austria was now under Italian influence, economically, militarily and politically. Its factories and hydroelectric capabilities would be an asset to Italian reconstruction.

By far the greatest contributor to Italian post-war reconstruction was the black gold that came from Libya. Major oil deposits had been discovered in 1943 in a geological survey ordered by Italo Balbo, the Governor-General of Libya, but no development had been done due to the war. To that end Mussolini created the Ministry of Oil in 1945 and took the portfolio himself (in addition to his cabinet posts as Prime Minister, Minister of War and Minister of the Interior). In that year, Agip (Azienda Generale Italiana Petroli – General Italian Oil Company) was given the exclusive rights to exploit it and it purchased the necessary drilling equipment in Texas, using Marshall Aid to do so. In 1947 the first crude oil started to flow at 65.000 barrels a day, which was about equivalent to 10.000 tonnes: a day’s worth of production in 1947 equalled the entire annual production of 1940. It was exported at a price of little over one dollar a barrel and Agip’s Libyan operation therefore made a turnover of about 23.7 million dollars (356 million in 2011 dollars) from Libyan oil. By 1948 daily oil production had doubled to 130.000 barrels, some 20.000 tonnes, while the price of oil reached 2 dollars a barrel. That meant Libyan oil production in 1948 was worth about 95 million dollars, or 1.8 billion 2011 dollars, and 50% of Agip’s profits went into the state’s coffers through taxes. The petroleum industry became the largest sector of the colonial economy by far, perhaps to the neglect of others. Mussolini said that the black gold was the cornerstone of “ricostruzione nazionale” or national reconstruction. That year also saw Mussolini’s 65th birthday and, as part of his cult of personality, it was declared a national holiday.

While the discovery and exploitation of oil was a national triumph that was celebrated during the 25th anniversary of the March on Rome in October, the death of King Victor Emmanuel III in December 1947 at age 78 cast a shadow over that. Two ceremonies were held: one was a state ceremony filled with fascist and royal symbolism while the second was a church ceremony in the Pantheon in Rome, where the King was interred alongside his father Umberto I and his grandfather Victor Emmanuel II. Mussolini, despite being a vitriolic atheist and considering religion a mental illness, attended the service and gave a eulogy. Victor Emmanuel’s son succeeded him as King Umberto II and his wife Marie José, sister to Leopold III of Belgium and aunt to the future King Baudouin, became Queen Consort. Opinions on Victor Emmanuel are mixed: fascists, if they had an opinion on him at all, were moderately positive, while anti-fascists considered him a puppet of Mussolini.

In the meantime, Mussolini decided to launch a major propaganda campaign to promote emigration to Italian Libya, in particular the Libyan provinces of Tripoli, Misurata, Benghazi and Derna, which had become part of metropolitan Italy in 1939. The campaign had the greatest effect in southern Italy, which was still the poorer part of Italy despite serious investments. Between 1947 and 1955 the size of the Italian community swelled from 120.000 to 250.000 while the Arab population reached 1 million. The Italian population was 20% of the entire colonial population, but in Tripoli and Benghazi it was 51% and 46% respectively. A few thousand Jews that had found refuge in Italy from the Nazis had become Fascist Jews also answered Mussolini’s call to settle Libya. Its Jewish population reached 37.000 compared to 30.000 before the war, almost 3% of the population (along with foreign Jews, Italy’s Jewish community reached 50.000, with some going to Libya and others to Israel though most remained in Italy).

Libyans were actively involved in the development of their country as they had been allowed to join the National Fascist Party, and in particular the “Muslim Association of the Lictor” created especially for them, since 1939 (the “Arab Lictor Youth” was its youth organization). Since the late 1930s Libyans, also known as “Italian Moslem Arabs”, had equal rights with Italians in the existing legal system (these Italian laws were in full contrast with the colonial policies done by the French and British authorities in their African empires, where the colonial populations were separated and segregated from the white colonists). They were allowed to pursue careers in the administration or the Regio Esercito, which decided to form the 3rd and 4th Libyan Division as well as the 1st Libyan Armoured Brigade (only equipped with WW II vintage armoured cars and obsolete tankettes, but still one of the few colonial armoured units in Africa). The Regia Marina now also manned a destroyer squadron with Libyans.

As a result, support from the Libyan population not only continued but increased as their prosperity grew. In the late 1940s and the 1950s Libya saw massive infrastructural works: oil money allowed for the completion of the 1040 kilometre Tripoli-Benghazi railroad along the coast. Construction also began on an 1100 kilometre railroad toward the border fortress town of Ghat in the southwest on the border with French Algeria through Sabha, Germa and Awbari. A 550 kilometre railway from Sirte via Waddan joined up with the Tripoli-Ghat railroad at Sabha. An 800 kilometre railway into Cyrenaica, the strategic oil producing region of Libya, ran from Benghazi to Al-Jawf. That lay in the Kufra basin, one of the most heavily irrigated oases of the Sahara desert, which is dominated by depressions on three sides that make it dominate east-west traffic across the desert. Besides Cyrenaican oil, its function as a traffic hub in North Africa and a well-watered oasis made it a strategic asset. The railroad strengthened Italian control of its colony. The last major railroad built was the 500 kilometre stretch of track that extended the Tripoli-Benghazi line toward the border town of Bardia, location of a fortress, via Derna and Tobruk. All-in-all, in combination with existing track, Libya’s railroad network would reach ~ 4.400 kilometres by 1955.

The educational system was also radically expanded: in 1939-’40 the Italian population (10% of the population at the time) had 81 elementary schools while the Libyans (over 85% of the local population at the time) had 97. There were also three secondary schools for Libyans in 1940 – two in Tripoli and one in Benghazi. Between 1947 and 1955, the number of elementary schools for Italians was increased to 207 and the number of schools for Libyan children expanded spectacularly to 785 for a total of 992 schools. Education became virtually free apart from token tuition fees, and it became mandatory in Libya for all children aged 6-12 in 1949 and that was extended to the age of 14 in 1956. By the mid 1960s the Libyan populace would be 90% literate as a result, as well as being educated in the Italian language, arithmetic, history, geography, topography, music, and handicrafts. The number of secondary schools, in the meantime, increased from a mere three to 19 while a military academy and a large number of vocational schools were also opened. Italy also built two dozen new villages as a reward for Libyan military performance in WW II, each of which had its own mosque, elementary school, library, small hospital and “social centre” containing sport grounds, a theatre and a cinema. Libya started to change: it moved away from the largely illiterate society of farmers, fishermen, artisans and nomads. During the 1950s it became a sedentary, urbanized society with a middle class of office clerks, civil servants, shop owners, teachers and military officers.

Of course Italy itself also underwent tremendous development in the post-war era. The Milan-Turin-Genoa industrial triangle – which was a centre of automotive, machinery, aerospace and naval production – recovered and grew. It wasn’t for nothing that the cheap and practical Fiat 500 became incredibly popular upon its introduction in 1957 and even turned into a symbol of the post-war Italian economic miracle. More exclusive car brands like Maserati, Lancia and Alfa Romeo also resumed production and Mussolini was often seen driving such sports cars. With hobbies like fast cars, fencing, playing the violin, writing political essays, and keeping pet lions, he seemed much more like a celebrity and a dynamic, multi-talented figure rather than a dull politician (propaganda practically made him out to be superhuman and exceptionally virile). In the meantime, Alfa Romeo, Maserati and Lancia started to participate in car racing almost as soon as the war was over to promote their cars, such as the Lancia Aurelia which sported the world’s first full-production V6 engine. With car ownership radically increasing in the 1950s, it’s no coincidence that the “autostrada” (highway) was propagandized as a symbol of the economic miracle (besides the fact that in the 1920s Italy had been the first country to build a highway). In a few years time between 1948 and 1951 the highway network increased from 400 km to 2000 km in a period of frenzied construction. And of course oil money was used to fund a literacy campaign, such as in Libya but on a much grander scale. By 1960, the Italian population would be 97% literate. Besides that, Italy also got free universal healthcare and university education was made accessible to all classes, albeit only for men given the emphasis on traditional gender roles (women were to be housewives and mothers to large families; sexual behaviour deemed deviant, such as homosexuality and prostitution, was combated aggressively and the former was labelled a social disease). The country’s television audience also exploded: in 1955 television had reached only 100.000 households, mostly the homes of party big wigs able to afford them, but in a decade that number increased tenfold.

With the discovery of sizeable natural gas deposits in the Po Valley, industrialization spread into Emilia and Mussolini’s birth region of Romagna. Natural gas could be used to produce fabrics, glass, steel, plastics and paint. Besides that, via the Haber process, natural gas could be used to produce ammonia for fertilizers and it’s no coincidence that the Po Valley indeed became a centre of fertilizer production. Besides that, natural gas has applications in chemical industry, petrochemical industry, electricity production, metallurgy, pharmaceuticals and electronics and these sectors indeed emerged. The Milan-Turin-Genoa triangle expanded into an industrial region covering much of Emilia, Romagna, Veneto, Lombardy and Liguria. Mussolini also used Libyan oil money to modernize underdeveloped southern Italy, using dirigist economic policies to set up Palermo, Catania, Messina, Naples, Bari, Brindisi and Taranto as centres of petrochemical industry. That increased employment, and there was also a land reform that organized a large number of small holdings into a smaller number of larger holdings by encouraging poor peasants to immigrate to Italy’s colonies, Libya in particular.

While Italy’s economy experienced growth rates up to 10% from the late 1940s well into the 1950s, its political influence also expanded. Austria, Croatia and Slovenia were a part of the Italian sphere of influence from the get-go and Greece had been Finlandized since 1940, when it had been bullied by Italy into granting the Regia Marina basing rights. Mussolini briefly considered joining the European Coal and Steel Community, but ultimately decided to focus on the Mediterranean Sea and form his own “fascist bloc.”