29th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (1st Italian) The new Italian Social Republic was founded on 23 September 1943 under dictator Benito Mussolini. On 2 October 1943, Heinrich Himmler and Gottlob Berger devised the "Programm zur Aufstellung der italienischen Milizeinheiten durch die Waffen-SS" ("Program for the deployment of Italian militia forces by the Waffen-SS") which was approved by Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. In October 1943, 15,000 volunteers started training at Truppenübungsplatz Münsingen, but 9,000 of them were unsuitable and released for training in police units, the Black Brigades or for labor. On 23 November 1943, 13 Miliz-Battalions pledged their loyalty before being moved to "SS-Ausbildungsstab Italien". The
Italian Fascism Italian Society of Anthropology and Ethnology in 1882 and the Lombrosian doctrine is currently considered pseudoscientific. Mussolini and other Fascists held antipathy to Nordicism because of what they viewed as an inferiority complex of people of Mediterranean racial heritage that they claimed had been instilled into Mediterranean people by the propagation of such theories by German and Anglo-Saxon Nordicists who viewed Mediterranean peoples as racially degenerate and thus in their view inferior. However, traditional Nordicist claims of Mediterraneans being degenerate due to having a darker colour of skin than Nordics had long been rebuked in anthropology through the depigmentation theory