Terror and Racial Persecution: OVRA, the Gestapo, and the Nuremberg Laws

In Italy, the secret political police OVRA, created in 1927 and answering directly to Mussolini, maintained systematic surveillance of opponents through informants and denunciation, imposed internal exile ("confino") on figures such as the writer Carlo Levi, and saw the communist theorist Antonio Gramsci imprisoned from 1926 until his death in 1937; the antifascist Rosselli brothers were assassinated by regime agents in France in 1937. The Lateran Pacts of February 11, 1929, resolved the long-standing "Roman Question" between Italy and the Holy See, creating Vatican City as a sovereign state and recognizing Catholicism as Italy's official religion in exchange for Church backing that substantially boosted Mussolini's legitimacy.