Structurally, the CIAF had a presidency and four subcommissions for the Army, Navy, Air Force and "General Affairs". The first representative of the army was General Carlo Vecchiarelli, of the navy Admiral Ildebrando Goiran and of the air force General Aldo Pellegrini. The French were represented at Turin by a delegation of their own and four subdelegations corresponding to the subcommissions. A Mixed Delegation was sent to Corsica, where it was sidelined after the Italian occupation of Corsica in November 1942, when a Political and General Affairs Office was established there subordinate to the Fourth Army. General Affairs was concerned mainly with protecting Italian emigrants in France. On 4 February 1941, it began establishing Civil Assistance and Repatriation Delegations or DRAs in French cities. These were originally staffed by consular officials acting as reserve officers, but on 15 January 1943 they were converted into consular offices subordinate to the liaison office of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs at the headquarters of the Fourth Army. On 15 April, the General Affairs subcommission was suppressed. It had been instrumental in repatriating 70,000 Italians between October 1940 and April 1943.
History
On 5 November 1940, a subcommission for Administration of Occupied Territories was set up. It appointed civil commissioners in the occupied communities of Bessans, Bramans, Fontan, Isola, Lanslebourg, Menton, Montgenèvre, Ristolas and Séez; they remained active down to the Italian armistice with the Allies. Later, another subcommission for Armaments supervised French weapons factories between the Italian border and the Rhône, and placed some under joint control of French companies and the Italian war production office, Fabbriguerra. On 19 February 1942, a permanent Italo-French Economic Commission was set up in Rome, where it held monthly meetings. The head of the Italian delegation was Amedeo Giannini and of the French Joseph Sanguinetti. It was distinct from the Subcommission for Economic and Financial Affairs established under Tomasso Lazzari in Turin. SCAEF was in charge of the spoils of war, policing the alpine border, Italian rights in French colonial harbours, maritime traffic and Italian property in France. Another subcommission was set up in Turin to foster trade between Italy and German-occupied France, and yet another body was working at the Italian embassy in Paris to the same end. Finally, Teodoro Pigozzi of FIAT had been appointed commissario commerciale to France by the Ministry of Foreign Trade and Currency Exchange. These various bodies did not coordinate their work effectively. The work of the CIAF was complicated by the re-opening of the Italian embassy in Paris on 4 February 1941 and the appointment of an ambassador, Gino Buti, on 20 February 1942. Although Buti's instructions required him not deal with issues covered by the armistice, the French took advantage of his presence to bypass the CIAF. After occupation of unoccupied France in November 1942, the CIAF retained control only of the original occupied territory. By early December 1942, the CIAF was moribund and the leader of the French delegation, Admiral Émile-André Duplat, asked President Arturo Vacca-Maggiolini whether it in fact still existed. Both Italy and Germany resolved to maintain their armistice commissions for legal purposes, although they would not be subordinated to the requirements of the occupying forces. In these unusual circumstances, Vacca-Maggiolini was forced to justify his role to General Vercellino on 31 December 1942, and it was not until 10 March 1943 that the CIAF's residual role was clarified by Chief of the General StaffVittorio Ambrosio, who on 20 March abolished the separate subcommissions of the service branches.
In Africa
The Italians also established a presence in France's colonies. A General Delegation was sent to Algiers and a Mixed Delegation to Djibouti. These contained a variety of subcommissions and control sections. The first of the French anti-Jewish laws, the Statuts des juifs, was published in Tunisia by a decree of Bey Ahmad II, countersigned by Resident-General Jean-Pierre Esteva, on 30 November 1940. The CIAF protested the damaging effects of this decree on the Italian property owners, many of them Jewish, in Tunisia. On 27 May 1942, General Bianini, head of the CIAF post in Tangier, died of his wounds after an assassination attempt by an Algerian.
