The Coinage of Fascist Italy

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Originally Mussolini had reckoned on a short European war, not a protracted world war. Financially, his military exploits to date had proved extremely costly, since Italian industrial output could not match that of Britain or Germany, meaning that Italy’s military was grossly under-equipped. After the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941, both Mussolini and Hitler declared war on the USA. One year later, the USA dropped the use of the Bellamy salute, which had originated in 1892 as part of the Pledge of Allegiance, because it resembled the Fascist and Nazi salutes.

Disaster beckoned as the British gradually trounced Italy’s forces in North Africa, and by 1943 industrial unrest swept across Northern Italy itself. Italians had lost faith in Mussolini and no longer wanted to fight Germany’s war. Anglo-American forces took Sicily on July 9 1943, and at a meeting of the Fascist Grand Council on 24 July 1943, dissident Fascists voted for the King to reassume his governmental powers. An apathetic Mussolini ignored the vote, but when he visited the King next day, the King dismissed him as prime minister and placed him under military arrest.

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The military flag of the Italian Social Republic featured a Roman eagle clutching the fasces.

On September 8, as the Allies were liberating southern Italy, the Germans occupied northern and central Italy, rescuing a reluctant Mussolini and installing him as dictator of the short-lived Italian Social Republic. The rump regime issued a few stamps and banknotes but no coins.

In reality, Mussolini was now the mere figurehead of a German puppet state, where the brutal German military administration, aided by die-hard Fascist collaborators, made all the important decisions. Its nominal capital was still Rome, but its de facto capital was the small town of Salò. According to Stanley Payne, a historian of fascism: “The experience of the Salò regime discredited Mussolini more than the twenty years of Fascist government which preceded it.”

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Unsubtle propaganda in the Italian Social Republic: “Germany is truly your friend”.

Around 15000 Italians fought in the Italian Waffen-SS Legion.

The Nazis recruited many foreign nationals into the Waffen-SS.

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Meanwhile the King fled to southern Italy with his military government, where he arranged an armistice with the Allies. On October 13 1943 his government declared war on Germany, and the two Italian regimes descended into the chaos of civil war: Allies and partisans versus Nazis and Fascists. In April 1944, the King transferred most of his royal powers to his son, Umberto. On 27 April 1945, partisans captured Mussolini and his mistress en route to Switzerland, as they tried to escape. Both were executed by shooting the next day. 

Their bodies were taken to Milan, where they were hung upside down outside a petrol station and mutilated by an angry mob. Meanwhile, in Berlin, Hitler blamed his own downfall on his “fatal friendship” with Mussolini, before committing suicide on April 30. Though Mussolini’s dictatorship had been mild compared to Hitler’s, his regime’s naked aggression abroad meant that it reaped a rich harvest of retribution, and he deserved his ignominious fate.

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From Wikipedia:

Initially, Mussolini was buried in an unmarked grave but, in 1946, his body was dug up and stolen by fascist supporters. Four months later it was recovered by the authorities who then kept it hidden for the next eleven years. Eventually, in 1957, his remains were allowed to be interred in the Mussolini family crypt in his home town of Predappio. His tomb has become a place of pilgrimage for neo-fascists, and the anniversary of his death is marked by neo-fascist rallies.


Mussolini brought death and destruction to his country. It is astonishing that anybody should want to honour such a failure.

The King abdicated in May 1946 and was briefly succeeded by his son, Umberto III. In a referendum the following month, 52% of the electorate voted to abolish the monarchy, which had been fatally tainted by its close association with Fascism. The ex-King retired to Egypt, where he died in 1947. Umberto moved to Portugal and died in 1983.

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Italy, 1 lire, Year 2000.

In 1999 and 2000, Italy issued a series of collector coins entitled “Goodbye to the lira”. It reproduced lira designs from the first half of the twentieth century. Astonishingly, one of them was the distinctly Fascist lira design of 1936. Just imagine if the Germans had reproduced a design depicting the Nazi swastika.

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Fantasy pieces portraying Mussolini that were produced in the 1970s.

After the war, various fantasies portraying Mussolini were produced in Italy in the 1970s, by and for neo-fascists. Their reverse designs are clearly based on those of actual Italian coins of the 1920s. Because of this, some collectors believe that these fantasies must be trials, patterns or even fantasies produced during the Italian Social Republic, or during the prior Fascist regime of the Kingdom of Italy. This is emphatically not the case. No such patterns or trials were produced by either of the Fascist regimes, nor were any such unofficial fantasies produced during those periods.

 

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After World War 2, a fantasy set of supposedly unissued stamps for Alpenvorland-Adria appeared on the market. It was alleged that they were produced in the final days of the war. In 1943 the German military had occupied the South Tyrol, which was part of the territory of the Italian Social Republic, with the intent of re-merging it into Austria. Austria was of course part of Germany at that time, having been annexed in 1938.

See: Operational Zone of the Alpine Foothills.


Italy had itself originally annexed the South Tyrol, which still was home to many ethnic German-speaking Austrians, as a result of the post-First World War territorial treaties. Though these alleged stamps were produced to a high standard and look similar to, though different from, the war-time set for “Provinz Laibach” (German-occupied Slovenia), it is clear, for various reasons (including the type of paper used), that they could not have been produced before the 1960s. They are therefore - however fascinating - mere fantasies (or “cinderella stamps”).

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See also: Coinage of Albania under Italian occupation.