ABSTRACT
Italo-Spanish relations between 1943 and 1945 are fully immersed in the 1935–1945 decade, during which Italy was in turn victim and perpetrator. Italian support for Francisco Franco during the Spanish Civil War is to be placed in the new activism of Fascism in foreign policy. If this support was consistent with Mussolini’s intentions of emphasizing and reiterating Italy’s international role, it also served to attest clearly the new direction taken by Fascist foreign policy. The following Rome–Berlin Axis and the accentuating Axis’s anti-communist dimension highlighted an increasing ideological proximity both between Italy and Germany and between Italy and Francoist Spain. A commonality that led the Spanish government to allow in later years the activity of Italian Social Republic (RSI) agents on its national territory. The analysis of these relations between the RSI and Spain highlights the persistence of the link between the Iberian country and Mussolini’s regime. This was a sign that support in the civil war and ideological affinity had not reduced Caudillo’s debt to the Duce. However, it is beyond doubt that the lost war and the events of July 25 had greatly weakened Mussolini’s authority. The subordination of the RSI to German occupation is the most important element of discontinuity from the previous fascist regime; even though Mussolini sought in all ways to carve out a role of autonomy for himself to not appear like any other Quisling, the events briefly described in these pages show how the RSI’s margins of autonomy with Germany were always very limited.
