Giuseppe Bastianini was born on 8 March 1899 in Perugia, in the Kingdom of Italy. He served in the First World War as a second lieutenant of the Arditi assault units and became a Freemason. He joined the fascist movement at a very young age, rising quickly to become secretary of the Perugia fascio and deputy secretary of the National Fascist Party from 1921 to 1923. During this period he also became a member of the Fascist Grand Council, a position he held until 1927. In his 1923 book Revolution, published by Giorgio Berlutti in Rome, he described the role of the action squads in creating the revolutionary situation that would allow fascism to seize power, writing that the squads, tempered by betrayals and ambushes, had changed from punitive expeditions into agile assault battalions whose task was no longer merely to punish but to strike at the government and parliament in order to legalize the revolution and hand Italy over to those who understood its victorious potential.
Bastianini played a direct part in the preparations for the March on Rome. From August 1922 he helped organize the insurrection. On 29 September in Rome he was among the small group of fascist leaders informed by Benito Mussolini of the planned action. On 24 October in Naples, during the San Carlo congress, he attended the restricted meeting at the Hotel Vesuvio where Mussolini, the quadrumviri, and the three party deputy secretaries approved the final plan. From Naples he returned to Perugia, which had been chosen as the seat of the general command of the march, and on the night of 27-28 October he and other local leaders ordered the occupation of the Umbrian capital. On 28 and 29 October he issued two proclamations to the citizens of Perugia and Umbria: the first urged recognition of the army’s authority, and the second, after King Victor Emmanuel III had invited Mussolini to form a government, announced the fascist victory.
After the seizure of power, Bastianini was appointed head of the Fasci Italiani all’Estero, the organization coordinating fascist activities among Italians living abroad. Under his leadership the movement expanded rapidly, and by 1925 he could report to the Grand Council the existence of groups in forty countries. He urged expatriates to spread authentic fascist ideas wherever they lived, but his activities soon clashed with professional diplomats who resented the politicization of their work. Bastianini openly called for a complete reform of the diplomatic service, insisting that only convinced fascists could be true Italians and that all diplomats must therefore belong to the party. Mussolini eventually adopted a compromise: he dismissed non-fascist diplomats but curtailed the Fasci all’Estero’s powers, restoring authority to the consuls and limiting the organization to ideological instruction, sport, and charity. Bastianini resigned his post in late 1926.
In the same year he was elected to the Chamber of Deputies for Umbria and served as undersecretary at the Ministry of National Economy from 1926 to 1927. He was one of the 250 signatories of the Manifesto of Fascist Intellectuals drawn up by Giovanni Gentile in 1925. In 1927 he entered the diplomatic service, first as consul general in the Tangier International Zone, then as Italian envoy to Lisbon from August 1928 to November 1929, and later on missions in Athens. In 1932 he was appointed ambassador to Warsaw, a post he held until 1936. His experience in Poland, a country admired by many Italians for its Catholic traditions, helped persuade Mussolini to delay Italy’s entry into the Second World War. In October 1939 he succeeded Dino Grandi as ambassador to the United Kingdom, where he remained until June 1940. He worked unsuccessfully to keep Italy out of the conflict. Upon his return he volunteered for service on the Greco-Albanian front during the winter campaign and was decorated for military valor. From March 1939 he had also sat as a national councillor in the Chamber of Fasces and Corporations.
On 7 June 1941, following the Axis conquest of Yugoslavia, Bastianini was appointed governor of the newly created Governorate of Dalmatia. His administration pursued a vigorous policy of Italianization. He made Italian mandatory alongside Croatian and Serbo-Croatian in schools, changed Croatian place names and street names to Italian forms, and brought teachers from Italy. He offered scholarships for study in Italy to both Italian and non-Italian Dalmatian students, of whom 52 Italians and 211 Croats and Serbs took advantage. Serbs and Croats considered untrustworthy were expelled or imprisoned. On 11 October 1941 he established the Extraordinary Tribunal of Dalmatia, which within weeks conducted summary trials without proper investigation and imposed forty-eight death sentences, thirty-five of which were carried out immediately. In June 1942 he ordered the creation of the Melada concentration camp, where thousands of civilians seized during anti-partisan operations were interned; about a thousand prisoners died there, three hundred shot as hostages.
Bastianini’s governorship provoked sharply contrasting judgments. Renzo De Felice described him as a capable and realistic administrator, free of gratuitous violence and ready, when possible, to assist local populations and Jews. Yugoslav authorities, however, accused him of war crimes and demanded his extradition after the war. The governorate’s territory allowed several thousand Jews to find refuge in the Italian zone and thus escape deportation by Germans and Ustaše; roughly four thousand were concentrated in the Rab (Arbe) camp, where conditions for Jews were markedly better than for Slav internees. In his later memoirs Bastianini claimed that his protection of Jewish refugees earned him the ironic nickname “honorary Jew” from German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, though no independent historical source corroborates the episode. He clashed repeatedly with Italian military commanders, especially Generals Quirino Armellini and Mario Roatta, over troop dispositions in Split and the respective powers of civilian and military authorities. He eventually secured Armellini’s removal. Bastianini was replaced as governor by Francesco Giunta in February 1943 after a government reshuffle in Rome.
In February 1943 he was recalled to Rome and appointed undersecretary at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, effectively replacing Galeazzo Ciano while Mussolini nominally retained the portfolio. Because of the Duce’s ill health and heavy workload, Bastianini acted as de facto foreign minister. He proposed two strategies to avert the Allied invasion of Italy: persuading Hitler to negotiate a separate peace with the Soviet Union so German troops could be redeployed to the Mediterranean, or convincing Hitler to allow Italy to withdraw from the war and declare neutrality. Neither idea had any prospect of success. He also attempted to forge a Balkan bloc of minor Axis partners—Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria—under Italian leadership to counterbalance German dominance. At the Feltre meeting on 19 July 1943 he joined Dino Alfieri and General Vittorio Ambrosio in pressing Mussolini to seek an exit from the conflict. When Mussolini refused even to raise the issue with Hitler, Bastianini’s credibility with the Duce suffered further damage. On 24-25 July 1943 he attended the fateful meeting of the Grand Council of Fascism. Although not an enthusiastic conspirator, he declared that Mussolini had ruined Italy through inaction and voted in favor of Dino Grandi’s order of the day, which stripped the Duce of military command and restored full powers to the king.
After Mussolini’s arrest, Bastianini was condemned to death in absentia at the Verona trial of January 1944. He escaped execution by fleeing first to the Chianti hills in Tuscany and then to Switzerland, where he remained until the end of the war. In the immediate postwar period the Yugoslav government of Marshal Tito accused him, together with Generals Mario Roatta and Francesco Giunta, of war crimes committed as governor of Dalmatia. The Italian Investigation Commission for alleged war criminals, set up by the Army Staff and the government, reported on 6 May 1946 that Bastianini’s conduct had been marked by “excessive obedience towards Mussolini” and that he had surrounded himself with fascist elements whose excesses had provoked resentment among the local population. Nevertheless, the Special Court of Assizes in Rome acquitted him of all charges in 1947, as did the Commission for Sanctions against Fascism.
Bastianini lived quietly in the postwar years. In 1959 the small Milanese publisher Vitagliano issued his memoirs under the title Men, Things, Facts: Memoirs of an Ambassador. The book was reissued in 2005 by Rizzoli under the more dramatic title I Wanted to Stop Mussolini, presenting the recollections of a fascist diplomat who claimed he had tried, within the limits of loyalty, to moderate the regime’s course. He died in Milan on 17 December 1961 at the age of sixty-two.
Source:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giuseppe_Bastianini
https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giuseppe_Bastianini
https://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/giuseppe-bastianini_(Dizionario-Biografico)/
Bastianini, Giuseppe. Volevo fermare Mussolini. Memorie di un diplomatico fascista. Milan: Rizzoli, 2005.
Gentile, Emilio. The Struggle for Modernity: Nationalism, Futurism, and Fascism. Westport: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2003.
Hibbert, Christopher. Benito Mussolini: The Rise and Fall of Il Duce. London: Penguin Books, 1965.
Morgan, Philip. The Fall of Mussolini: Italy, the Italians, and the Second World War. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.
Tomasevich, Jozo. War and Revolution in Yugoslavia, 1941–1945: Occupation and Collaboration. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001.
Di Sante, Costantino. Italiani senza onore. I crimini in Jugoslavia e i processi negati (1941-1951). Verona: Ombre Corte, 2005.
NCOs of the German 1. Gebirgs-Division with Italian soldiers of the "Celere" Division in Stalino, Ukraine, October 1941. In that month, during the Axis advance into the industrial heartland of the Donets Basin as part of Operation Barbarossa, the 1. Gebirgs-Division, operating under the command of Generalmajor Hubert Lanz within the XXXXIX. Gebirgs-Korps led by General der Infanterie Ludwig Kübler, pushed southward after the Battle of the Sea of Azov and reached the major Soviet industrial city of Stalino (present-day Donetsk) on 20 October. Simultaneously, elements of the Italian Corpo di Spedizione Italiano in Russia (CSIR), commanded by Generale Giovanni Messe and attached to the German Heeresgruppe Süd, advanced in coordination with the German mountain troops; the highly mobile 3ª Divisione Celere "Principe Amedeo Duca d’Aosta" formed the spearhead of this effort, deploying its 3° Reggimento Bersaglieri in fast-moving columns supported by the cavalry regiments Savoia Cavalleria and Lancieri di Novara. Despite heavy mud, destroyed bridges, fuel shortages and determined Soviet rearguard resistance, the Italian cavalry and Bersaglieri executed flanking manoeuvres and seized the vital railway station and northern approaches to Stalino on the evening of 20 October, while German Gebirgsjäger entered the city from the south and completed the occupation of the industrial zone. The joint action, praised by both Italian and German commanders for the decisive contribution of the Celere Division’s mobility and the tenacity of the mountain troops, secured the key mining and metallurgical centre for the Axis and opened the route toward the Mius River. Following the capture, the 1. Gebirgs-Division continued eastward through Stepanowka, Amwrossijewka and Dmitrijewka, establishing a bridgehead across the Mius by early November, while Italian units of the Celere Division consolidated positions in and around Stalino before later sharing defensive sectors with the 1. and 4. Gebirgs-Division along the same river line through the harsh winter of 1941–1942.
