Can past wartime experiences exert a lasting influence on political behavior beyond those who lived through them? We argue that memorialization—the public creation and preservation of historical memories—plays a crucial role in transmitting wartime legacies across generations. We demonstrate that these legacies are more enduring and politically consequential when memories are localized, meaning they are explicitly linked to historical local people, places, or events through a mechanism that we term localization. We test this argument through a mixed-methods study of the political legacies of armed partisan resistance during the Italian Civil War (1943–45). First, we employ a novel instrumental variable strategy to estimate the causal effects of organized armed resistance on contemporary measures of anti-fascist mobilization, including grassroots activism against neo-fascist propaganda and electoral support for anti-fascist parties. Leveraging spatial features of the Italian Civil War, we conduct multiple robustness checks to validate the exclusion restriction assumption that underlies our estimates. Second, we conduct a survey experiment targeting Italian municipalities that hosted partisan bands and similar municipalities that did not. This allows us to test whether localized memorialization has stronger attitudinal and behavioral effects on anti-fascism compared to generic, non-localized memorialization. Third, we provide novel qualitative evidence from a carefully selected case study, offering process-level insights into how localization shapes the transmission and mobilization of wartime memories over time. Our findings underscore the significance of localized memory in sustaining political legacies and mobilization, offering broader implications for understanding the enduring political effects of wartime experiences.