Rodolfo Graziani

Biography

Rodolfo Graziani was born in 1882 in Filettino, south-east of Rome, the son of the village doctor. He studied law and entered the Royal Italian Army as a reserve officer cadet in 1903, becoming a regular officer in 1906. He served in Eritrea and in the First World War, where he became the youngest colonel in the Italian army.

In the 1920s and early 1930s he led the reconquest of Libya. As vice-governor of Cyrenaica he crushed Omar al-Mukhtar's resistance, in part by deporting the population of the Jebel Akhdar into coastal concentration camps where tens of thousands died. As governor of Italian Somaliland he commanded the southern front in the 1935–36 invasion of Ethiopia, using poison gas, and was made Marshal of Italy.

As viceroy of Italian East Africa from 1936 he ruled harshly. After a failed attempt on his life in Addis Ababa in February 1937 he ordered the reprisals remembered as Yekatit 12, in which thousands of civilians were killed, and the massacre of the monks of Debre Libanos; Mussolini replaced him at the end of the year. He became army chief of staff in 1939 and governor of Libya in 1940, but his invasion of Egypt was followed by the destruction of the Tenth Army in the British Operation Compass, and he was removed in early 1941.

In 1943 he was the only marshal to stay with Mussolini, serving as defence minister of the Italian Social Republic and commanding its forces alongside the Germans. He surrendered in April 1945. Ethiopia's attempts to try him for war crimes came to nothing, but an Italian military court sentenced him in 1950 to 19 years for collaboration, of which he served only months. He was honorary president of the neo-fascist Italian Social Movement in 1953–54 and died in Rome in 1955.