Italian Jewry survived the war proportionately better than most European Jewish communities, but the country’s record is more complicated than the simple statistic suggests. Around 47,000 Italian Jews lived under the Italian Fascist regime in 1938, the year Mussolini introduced antisemitic legislation. Around 8,000 of them were murdered in the Holocaust. The mortality rate of around 17 per cent is among the lowest in occupied Europe. The reason has two parts: the Italian government did not deport its Jews while it controlled its own territory, and the German occupation that followed Italy’s switch to the Allied side in September 1943 was too short and too partial to capture more of the Jewish population than it did.
The community before 1938
Italian Jewry was old, small and well integrated. Roman Jewry traced itself to before the Roman Empire and was the oldest continuously settled Jewish community in Europe. Communities at Venice, Florence, Milan, Turin, Trieste and Livorno were each centuries old. The community had been emancipated under the unification of Italy in the 1860s and had taken a leading role in Italian public life thereafter. Italian Jews were prominent in the army, the civil service, the academy, the arts and the professions. Several Italian Jews held senior positions in the Fascist Party itself. Mussolini’s mistress for several years, Margherita Sarfatti, was Jewish.
The Italian Racial Laws, 1938
In 1938 Mussolini, drawing closer to Hitler, introduced the Italian Racial Laws on the Nuremberg model. The laws excluded Jews from the civil service, the army, the universities, the schools and the professions. Mixed marriages were forbidden. Foreign Jews who had taken Italian citizenship since 1919 had it revoked. Around 6,000 of the 47,000 Italian Jews emigrated in the following two years. The remaining 41,000 stayed because they had nowhere to go and because most of them, like the German and Austrian Jews of an earlier generation, could not believe what was about to happen.
The Racial Laws were unpopular with much of the Italian public and were enforced loosely. Italian civil servants and teachers in many cases ignored them. Italian universities continued to grant degrees informally to Jewish students who had been formally expelled. Italian local authorities sometimes refused to apply the registration requirements. The legal apparatus was in place; the social and administrative apparatus was not.
The Italian zone of occupation
From 1941 onwards, Italian forces occupied parts of southern France, Croatia and Greece. In each of these zones, the Italian military authorities consistently refused to deport Jews to the Germans. The Italian Second Army in Croatia under General Mario Roatta sheltered around 5,000 Croatian Jews from the Ustasha in 1942 and 1943. The Italian commander in southern France was equally obstructive. The Italian commanders gave various reasons for their refusal: that the deportations would damage Italian military prestige, that the orders had not been confirmed by Rome, that the Jews under their protection were Italian responsibility. The cumulative effect was that the Italian zones of occupation became, briefly, the safest territory in occupied Europe for Jews. Several thousand Jewish refugees from elsewhere reached Italian territory in 1942 and 1943, drawn by the unofficial protection.
The German occupation, 1943 to 1945
Italy switched sides on 8 September 1943. German forces occupied northern and central Italy within days. The German occupation was severe and immediately threatened the Italian Jewish community. Mussolini was rescued by German commandos and installed as the head of a puppet republic at Salo on Lake Garda. The Italian Social Republic, as it was called, formally cooperated with the German deportation programme.
The deportations from Italy began in October 1943 and ran until the end of the war. The largest single deportation operation was conducted in Rome on 16 October 1943, when 1,259 Jews were rounded up by the SS in a few hours. Of those, 1,023 were sent to Auschwitz and 16 returned. The Roman story is covered in detail on the page on The Jews of Rome under Jewish Communities Before the Holocaust. Smaller round-ups followed in Milan, Florence, Venice, Trieste, Genoa, Bologna and other northern cities. Around 8,000 Italian Jews were deported, including those caught in the Italian zones of occupation that the Germans had now taken over.
The hiding
Around 35,000 Italian Jews survived the war by hiding. The Catholic Church played a substantial role in this. Convents, monasteries and Vatican properties across central and northern Italy sheltered Jewish families through the German occupation. The exact role of Pope Pius XII has been the subject of long historical argument and is covered on its own page elsewhere on this site. The practical role of Italian Catholic religious institutions in sheltering Jews was real and saved a substantial fraction of the community. Italian non-Catholic communities, particularly the Waldensian Protestants of Piedmont, also sheltered Jewish refugees in significant numbers.
The Italian general public, in many cases, also sheltered Jewish neighbours. Italian antisemitism, real but never deeply rooted, did not produce a population willing to denounce Jews to the Germans on the scale that occurred in the Netherlands or France. The post-war Italian record of denunciation is comparatively small. The Italian record of sheltering, by ordinary people, is comparatively large.
The fascist record
The Italian Social Republic at Salo cooperated with the German deportations. Italian fascist police forces, particularly the Republican National Guard, conducted round-ups alongside the Germans and provided most of the personnel for the Italian transit camp at Fossoli, near Modena, from which trains went to Auschwitz. The Italian fascist police also operated the only Italian camp with a crematorium, the Risiera di San Sabba in Trieste, where around 2,000 prisoners were murdered. The Italian fascist record on the Holocaust is a matter the post-war Italian republic has had difficulty discussing fully.
The post-war record
The Italian Jewish community recovered after the war but was reduced. Around 28,000 Italian Jews live in Italy today, with the principal communities in Rome, Milan, Turin and Trieste. The Italian state has formally acknowledged the Racial Laws and the wartime deportations. The Centro Primo Levi at the Italian Cultural Institute in New York and the Centre for Contemporary Jewish Documentation in Milan are the main institutions of Italian Holocaust memorialisation. Primo Levi, the Italian Jewish chemist who survived Auschwitz and became one of the foremost Holocaust writers in any language, was Italian Jewry’s most eloquent post-war voice.
See also
Sources
- Susan Zuccotti, The Italians and the Holocaust, Basic Books, 1987
- Michele Sarfatti, The Jews in Mussolini’s Italy, University of Wisconsin Press, 2006
- Renzo De Felice, The Jews in Fascist Italy, Enigma Books, 2001
- USHMM: Italy