The armoire of shame (Italian: armadio della vergogna) is a wooden cabinet discovered in 1994 inside a large storage room in Palazzo Cesi-Gaddi, Rome which, at the time, housed the chancellery of the military attorney's office. The cabinet contained an archive of 695 files documenting war crimes perpetrated on Italian soil under fascist rule and during Nazi occupation after the September 8, 1943 armistice between Italy and Allied armed forces. The actions described in the records spanned several years and took place in various areas of the country, from the southern city of Acerra to the northern province of Trieste and as far east as the Balkans; it remains unclear, to this day, how the archive remained concealed for so long, and who gave the order to hide the files in the immediate post-war period.
Discovery
In 1994, military prosecutor Antonino Intelisano, who was at the time in charge of the trial against former SS officer Erich Priebke, accidentally uncovered the content of the wooden cabinet, which had remained stored for decades, face to the wall, in an unused room in Palazzo Cesi. Its contents had seemingly been placed in the armoire temporarily, probably in the immediate post-war months, and forgotten or (perhaps purposely) overlooked.
The armoire contained the memorandum titled Atrocities in Italy, stamped "secret", which had been compiled by the British Secret Intelligence Service, whose officers had documented the victims' accusations and painstakingly collected depositions, and consigned it to the Italian magistrates, who failed to prosecute the individuals mentioned in the files, limiting publication of details and accusations to the cases against unnamed Nazi and fascist officers.
Among the previously unknown war crimes which were then brought to justice are noteworthy: