Catalogue description German War Documents Project: The Italian Collection (Captured Italian records): Photocopies and Reports

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Details of GFM 36
Reference: GFM 36
Title: German War Documents Project: The Italian Collection (Captured Italian records): Photocopies and Reports
Description:

Copies of Italian documents on foreign and internal affairs covering Benito Mussolini's time in power, which were filmed after falling into Allied hands at the end of the Second World War. The collection includes Mussolini's private papers which he took with him to Northern Italy in 1943, and diplomatic papers of Count Galeazzo Ciano, his son-in-law and Foreign Minister from 1936 to 1943.

Amongst the papers are private and official documents of Mussolini, Ciano and Graziani, and those of several Italian ministries and commissions, including Mussolini's Secretariat (Mussolini's private papers or 'Archivio Segreta'), and selected documents from the Italian Ministries of Foreign Affairs, the Interior, Italian Africa, and Popular Culture.

The series also contains reports made by the Psychological Warfare Branch at the Allied Forces Headquarters in Rome in 1944-1945, and documents discovered in the German embassy in Rome.

Date: c1920-1945
Arrangement:

Each group of files filmed was given a job or serial number. Each page was given a frame number, which in the prints or photocopies becomes a page number. The apparently missing job numbers (eg 55-100) belong to other material, not part of the Italian Collection, filmed in Rome at the same time.

Held by: The National Archives, Kew
Copies held at:

Microfilms of this material have been incorporated into the much larger collection of German Foreign Ministry microfilms in GFM 34.

Legal status: Public Record(s)
Physical description: 645 file(s)
Access conditions: Available in microform only
Custodial history: These copies, usually referred to as the Italian Collection, were loaned by the Foreign Office to St. Antony's College, Oxford between 1956 and 1990, and in some publications are referred to as the St. Antony's Collection of Italian documents.
Publication note:

More detailed accounts of the various captured Italian archives will be found in:The chapter by Howard M Smyth on Italian civil and military records in Robert Wolfe (ed) Captured German and Related Records: a National Archives Conference, November 1968 (Ohio, 1974) and Howard M Smyth Secrets of the Fascist Era (Illinois, 1975). An Italian edition of the Hitler-Mussolini correspondence was published in 1946; Ciano's conversations were published in 1948 both in Italy as L'Europa verso la Catastrofe and in English translation as Ciano's Diplomatic Papers. The papers were used extensively for Sir William Deakin Mussolini, The Brutal Friendship (1962).

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