Questo evento, presentato da il professore Emanuele Sica (Royal Military College of Canada) e con la partecipazione di Ben Shepherd (Glasgow Caledonian University) e Carlo Gentile (Universität zu Köln), si focalizzerà sui controversi anni 1943-1945, quando la penisola italiana fu occupata da unità tedesche in seguito all’Armistizio dell’8 Settembre con gli alleati. Incalzati dai partigiani italiani e dalle forze alleate, unità tedesche disperate si vendicarono sui civili italiani, uccidendo all’incirca 22,000 civili italiani. Le presentazioni esamineranno le operazioni di controinsurrezione dell’esercito tedesco con le unità paramilitari fasciste e il loro impatto con i civili italiani.
Emanuele Sica is an Assistant Professor in European and Military History at the Royal Military College of Canada, Kingston, Ontario. He successfully defended his PhD thesis on the Italian Military Occupation of France during the Second World War at the University of Waterloo, 2012. His book, Mussolini’s Army in the French Riviera, has been published in 2016 by University of Illinois Press and has been published in Italian, and a French edition is forthcoming. He is also the main editor, along with Richard Carrier, of a collective volume Italy and the Second World War: Alternative Perspectives (Brill Publishing, 2018). Aside from collaborating with the Italian Defense Ministry Historical Section and writing several essays on the First and Second World War, he has lectured at Italian, French and Canadian universities and at the Canadian Forces College in Toronto.
Carlo Gentile, Dr. phil. in Modern History at the University of Cologne with a dissertation on German Anti-Partisan Warfare in Italy 1943-1945. He served as an historical advisor for law enforcement agencies and offices on war crimes investigations in Italy, Germany and Canada, and was called to testify as an historical expert at several trials in Hamburg, La Spezia, Munich, Rome, Turin and Vancouver. Since November 2005 research associate at the Martin-Buber-Institute for Jewish Studies at the University of Cologne. 2009-2011: member of the German Italian Joint Historical Commission for the History of German Occupied Italy 1943-1945. 1991-2012: Several publications on German and Italian military history, anti-partisan warfare and atrocities. Books: Wehrmacht und Waffen-SS im Partisanenkrieg: Italien 1943-1945 (Paderborn: Schöningh 2012. 466 pp./translated into Italian: I crimini di guerra tedeschi in Italia 1943-1945, Turin: Einaudi 2015, XI, 576 pp.), La Wehrmacht in Toscana: immagini di un esercito di occupazione, 1943-44. Toscana tra passato e presente (Rome: Carocci 2006. 197 pp.), Zivilisten als Feind: Die 16. SS-Panzergrenadierdivision “Reichsführer-SS” in Italien 1944/45, in: Jan Erik Schulte, Peter Lieb, Bernd Wegner (eds.): Die Waffen-SS. Neue Forschungen (Paderborn: Schöningh 2014, pp. 302-316); a contribution to chapter 4 of Jochen Böhler/Robert Gerwarth (eds.): The Waffen-SS. A European History (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2017).
Ben H. Shepherd, Reader in History at Glasgow Caledonian University. PhD thesis on German Anti-Partisan Warfare in the Soviet Union 1941-43, awarded by the University of Birmingham in 2000. Numerous journal articles and edited book chapters on German military history and anti-partisan warfare, and the following single-authored books: War in the Wild East. The German Army and Soviet Partisans (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); Terror in the Balkans: German Armies and Anti-partisan Warfare (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012; translated into Serbo-Croat); Hitler’s Soldiers: The German Army in the Third Reich (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2016; translated into Polish and available as an audio book). Co-edited books: with Juliette Pattinson, War in a Twilight World: Partisan and Anti-partisan Warfare in Eastern Europe (London: Palgrave, 2010); with Philip Cooke, European Resistance in the Second World War (Barnsley: Pen and Sword, 2013; translated into Polish and available as an audio book).