Liberation of Northern Italy — April 25
The German forces in Italy surrendered on 2 May 1945, and 25 April is the day Italy commemorates. The campaign had run for twenty months from the Sicily landings and had been the hardest fighting in the western theatre: a peninsula of rivers and mountains running across the line of advance, defensive lines prepared in depth, and a chronic shortage of resources after Normandy took priority. The final offensive opened on 6 April 1945 across the Senio and broke the Gothic Line positions in the Po valley. What distinguishes the Italian ending is that the country liberated much of itself. The Committee of National Liberation for Northern Italy called an insurrection on 25 April, and partisan formations took Genoa, Milan and Turin before the Allied columns arrived, in Genoa taking the surrender of a German corps outright. The Resistance had grown from a few thousand in 1943 to perhaps a quarter of a million, drawn from communists, socialists, Catholics, liberals and monarchists who agreed on nothing except the Germans, and had cost some 45,000 dead with reprisals against civilians at Marzabotto, Sant'Anna di Stazzema and the Ardeatine Caves. The German surrender in Italy had been negotiated secretly in Switzerland for weeks and took effect a week before the general capitulation. Some 12,000 to 20,000 people were killed in settling accounts in the following months. The monarchy was abolished by referendum in 1946, and the constitution of 1948 was written by the parties that had been in the Resistance. That is why 25 April rather than 2 May is the national holiday. The distinction between being liberated and liberating oneself was the foundation the postwar republic was built on, and Italian politics has argued about the accuracy of it ever since.
- Year: 1945 CE
- Category: Political
