His fields of expertise include the history of Fascism with a particular focus on the Axis occupation policies. Paolo Fonzi is Adjunct Professor in Contemporary History at the University of Eastern Piedmont. The episode focuses on aspects related to gender, ethnic engineering, and violence to illustrate how food shortages shaped the interactions between occupying troops and the local population, but also the hierarchies within the latter. Despite its brevity, the occupation caused a humanitarian catastrophe, and the question of food supply also complicated the Italian authorities’ control over the territory. In this installment, we discuss this World War II occupation through the prism of food scarcity and famine. In Fascist Italy’s vision of a Mediterranean empire, Greece had a pivotal place, but several defeats on other war fronts led to the collapse of Italy’s ambitions and the occupation ended in 1943. In the spring of 1941, after a brief war ending in an embarrassing retreat for Italy one year earlier, Mussolini’s troops supported by Nazi Germany occupied various regions of Greece. A 1941 cartoon from the newspaper “The Manchester Dispatch”, mocking Mussolini’s dependency on Hitler to defeat Greece
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