Despite the just struggle of the Ethiopians for their liberation and the enormous support they enjoyed from Diaspora Africans and the worldwide condemnation of the fascist atrocities, however, the Allied Forces were insensitive to the Ethiopian cause at least till 1940 when Italy declared war on Britain. The British then were compelled to become objective allies of Ethiopia, but not necessarily genuine supporters of the Ethiopian cause.

In January 1942, the Allied leaders labeled Hitler’s government as ‘régime of terror’ and supported the idea of trying the Nazi war criminals while they were shy in condemning the fascist régime in Italy. In point of fact, both Hitler and Mussolini founded […] governments of the fascist type, shared [the] same ideology of jingoism, and were menace[s] to world peace and as such should have been treated equally. The difference between the two was that Hitler was a menace to the very existence of European nations while Mussolini was engaged in destroying a black nation and an island of independence in colonized Africa.

Adding fuel to the fire, long after Mussolini was ousted from power and Badoglio was appointed as prime minister by King Vittorio Emanuele, the Allied leaders, particularly the British, continued to ignore all charges of war crimes against Badoglio. By some secret machinations, Badoglio, who seemed to have promised the British to keep the peace and preserve stability in Italy, had become the ‘good guy’ in the eyes of the Allied Powers.

When the War Crimes Commission was established under the auspices of Britain on October 1943, Ethiopia was deliberately excluded from the Commission, due to fear, perhaps, that Ethiopians will demand the trial of the fascist criminals. In fact, Britain’s Foreign Office made all efforts to frustrate Ethiopian demands and the lobbying efforts of friends of Ethiopia and Sylvia Pankhurst in London. The efforts of Ethiopian officials in London, for instance that of Blatta Ayale Gebre during the formative period of the Commission and later in 1949 of Ato Abebe Retta was also frustrated.

For all intents and purposes, the British Foreign Office and the War Crimes Commission wanted to confine crime charges to the wars they were engaged in, i.e. beginning 1939 and not the 1935–36 Italo‐Ethiopian war. Ultimately, however, the Foreign Office reconsidered its position and decided to include the Ethiopian demand in June 1945 and subsequently invited allies to sign the London Agreement on August of the same year.

At long last, i.e. ten years after Emperor Haile Selassie appealed to the League, Ethiopia was in a position to establish the Ethiopian War Crimes Commission on May 1946 but it had encountered two major hurdles: 1) the Allied leaders were not willing to prosecute the [Fascist] war criminals; 2) Ethiopia did not have enough professional personnel who could gather data in regards to the fascist crimes and coherently present them before the War Crimes Commission.

One factor that contributed to the second deficiency was the systematic killings of the Ethiopian educated élite of the 1920s and 1930s. Thus, after Ethiopia established its own Commission, it took another eight months when Ato Ambaye Woldemariam submitted a report to the UN War Crimes Commission on behalf of Ethiopia.

[…]

Sometimes, history is indeed cruel. Marshall Badoglio, who ordered the use of poison gas against Ethiopians, without encountering any prosecution lived honorably and dignified, and in fact rewarded, till he died in 1956. Marshall Graziani, responsible for the 1937 massacres in Addis Ababa was tried by the Italian government in 1950, not for his crimes in Ethiopia but for his collaboration with the [Third Reich]. He served less than a year in prison although the pretentious and theatrical Italian court sentenced him to 19 years behind bars.

(Emphasis added.)

Events that happened today (October 1):

1878: Othmar Spann, Austrian protofascist, stained the earth.
1936: Francisco Franco was named head of Spain’s Nationalist government. (Coincidentally, the Central Committee of Antifascist Militias of Catalonia dissolved itself, handing control of Catalan defence militias over to the Generalitat.)
1938: Pursuant to the Munich Agreement signed the day before, the Third Reich commenced the military occupation and annexation of Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland.
1939: After a month‐long siege, the Wehrmacht occupied Warsaw.
1942: USS Grouper torpedoed Lisbon Maru, not knowing that the ship was carrying British prisoners of war from Hong Kong.
1943: After the Four Days of Naples, Allied troops entered the city.
1945: Shizuichi Tanaka, the Axis’s Military Governor of the Philippines, took his own life.
1946: Nuremberg trials sentenced several leading German Fascists to death or imprisonment.
1959: Enrico De Nicola, President of Fascist Italy’s Chamber of Deputies in the early 1920s, expired.
1994: Paul Lorenzen, Fascist philosophist and mathematician, perished.