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In 1938, thanks to years of work by a remarkable female agent, MI5 ensured a package of British defence plans stayed secret.
Series
German War Documents Project: The Italian Collection (Captured Italian records):...
Catalogue reference: GFM 36
What's it about?
GFM 36
Copies of Italian documents on foreign and internal affairs covering Benito Mussolini's time in power, which were filmed after falling into Allied hands at the end of the Second World War. The collection includes Mussolini's private papers which...
Full description and record details
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Reference (The unique identifier to the record described, used to order and refer to it)
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GFM 36
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Title (The name of the record)
- German War Documents Project: The Italian Collection (Captured Italian records): Photocopies and Reports
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Date (When the record was created)
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c1920-1945
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Description (What the record is about)
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Copies of Italian documents on foreign and internal affairs covering Benito Mussolini's time in power, which were filmed after falling into Allied hands at the end of the Second World War. The collection includes Mussolini's private papers which he took with him to Northern Italy in 1943, and diplomatic papers of Count Galeazzo Ciano, his son-in-law and Foreign Minister from 1936 to 1943.
Amongst the papers are private and official documents of Mussolini, Ciano and Graziani, and those of several Italian ministries and commissions, including Mussolini's Secretariat (Mussolini's private papers or 'Archivio Segreta'), and selected documents from the Italian Ministries of Foreign Affairs, the Interior, Italian Africa, and Popular Culture.
The series also contains reports made by the Psychological Warfare Branch at the Allied Forces Headquarters in Rome in 1944-1945, and documents discovered in the German embassy in Rome.
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Arrangement (Information about the filing sequence or logical order of the record)
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Arrangement
Each group of files filmed was given a job or serial number. Each page was given a frame number, which in the prints or photocopies becomes a page number. The apparently missing job numbers (eg 55-100) belong to other material, not part of the Italian Collection, filmed in Rome at the same time.
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Held by (Who holds the record)
- The National Archives, Kew
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Legal status (A note as to whether the record being described is a Public Record or not)
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Public Record(s)
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Physical description (The amount and form of the record)
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645 file(s)
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Access conditions (Information on conditions that restrict or affect access to the record)
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Available in microform only
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Subjects (Categories and themes found in our collection (our subject list is under development, and some records may have no subjects or fewer than expected))
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Custodial history (Describes where and how the record has been held from creation to transfer to The National Archives)
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These copies, usually referred to as the Italian Collection, were loaned by the Foreign Office to St. Antony's College, Oxford between 1956 and 1990, and in some publications are referred to as the St. Antony's Collection of Italian documents.
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Copies information (Indicates existence, availability, location and format of copies)
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Microfilms of this material have been incorporated into the much larger collection of German Foreign Ministry microfilms in GFM 34.
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Publication note(s) (A note of publications related to the record)
- More detailed accounts of the various captured Italian archives will be found in:The chapter by Howard M Smyth on Italian civil and military records in Robert Wolfe (ed) Captured German and Related Records: a National Archives Conference, November 1968 (Ohio, 1974) and Howard M Smyth Secrets of the Fascist Era (Illinois, 1975). An Italian edition of the Hitler-Mussolini correspondence was published in 1946; Ciano's conversations were published in 1948 both in Italy as L'Europa verso la Catastrofe and in English translation as Ciano's Diplomatic Papers. The papers were used extensively for Sir William Deakin Mussolini, The Brutal Friendship (1962).
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Record URL
- https://beta.nationalarchives.gov.uk/catalogue/id/C8596/
Catalogue hierarchy
Over 27 million records
This record is held at The National Archives, Kew
52,941 records
Within the department: GFM
Copies of captured records of the German, Italian and Japanese Governments.
You are currently looking at the series: GFM 36
German War Documents Project: The Italian Collection (Captured Italian records): Photocopies and Reports
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