Italy says Mussolini's Nazi soldiers should be treated same as resistance fighters

The soldiers of Benito Mussolini's Nazi puppet republic should be accorded the same status as wartime resistance fighters and regular combatants, the Italian government will argue in a bill to be placed before parliament today.

The bill would recognise the 200,000 soldiers of the Italian Social Republic as "military combatants", but would make no difference to the state benefits enjoyed by several thousand of the former members still alive.

But the controversial move by Silvio Berlusconi's government will reopen old wounds, raising painful questions about the Italians' view of their past and which side they feel they were really on in the second world war. After Italy capitulated to the allies in 1943 the Germans withdrew to the north and installed the country's ousted fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini, at the head of a so-called Italian Social Republic.

With its capital at Salo, on the shores of Lake Garda, his dictatorship enjoyed an increasingly tenuous existence from November 1943 until April 1945. Harassed by the growing partisan movement, the Germans and their diehard fascist allies hit back with ferocious reprisals, often carried out by irregulars whose former members would also be covered by the law.

The lawlessness of Mussolini's beleaguered state provided the historical background for Pier Paolo Pasolini's savagely brutal 1976 movie Salo or the 120 Days of Sodom, which is banned in many parts of the world.