Giovanni Palatucci

Giovanni Palatucci was the deputy police commissioner of Fiume, the Italian Adriatic port now called Rijeka in Croatia, from 1937 to 1944. He was thirty four years old at the time of the September 1943 German occupation of northern Italy following the Italian armistice with the Allies. He was a Catholic, a member of the Italian Fascist Party in the routine pre-war sense, a graduate of the University of Naples law faculty, and a career civil servant. After September 1943 he was the senior Italian police officer in Fiume responsible for, among other things, the registration and deportation of the local Jewish community to the German extermination camps. The standard postwar Italian account, repeated for sixty years, was that Palatucci had used his position to save several thousand Jews by destroying or falsifying the registration records, and that he had been arrested by the Germans in September 1944, deported to Dachau, and died there of pneumonia and exposure on 10 February 1945, aged thirty six. He was named Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem in 1990. The Vatican opened a beatification process in 2002.

The case has been the subject of a serious historical reassessment in the past twenty years. The 2013 study by the historian Marco Coslovich, drawing on archival material from the Italian state archives, the Croatian state archives and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, argued that the postwar Italian account had been a substantial overstatement and that the historical Palatucci had not in fact been a major rescuer. Coslovich’s study, supported by parallel work by the historian Anna Pizzuti and by the USHMM’s own internal review, found that the documentary record showed Palatucci to have been a regular Italian police official who had carried out the deportation orders he received, that the Fiume Jewish community had been effectively destroyed during his tenure, and that his arrest in September 1944 had been on charges of irregular contacts with the Yugoslav resistance rather than for protecting Jews. The USHMM removed Palatucci from its educational materials in 2013 pending further review. The Centro Primo Levi in New York issued a statement in 2013 calling for a wider reassessment of the case.

Yad Vashem responded to the reassessment by reviewing its 1990 designation. After several years of review the institution published a public statement in 2017 that the original recognition would not be revoked but that the file would be updated to acknowledge the historical complexity. The position is unusual: Yad Vashem has never previously revoked a Righteous designation, and has now confirmed by review that it would not start with this case, but the institution has also acknowledged that the original 1990 evidence was thin and that the popular Italian narrative had filled in much that was not in the documentary record.

The most likely truth, on the present state of the evidence, is that Palatucci was a low-ranking Italian official in difficult circumstances who probably saved an unknown number of individual Jews in his personal capacity through small irregular acts of kindness, including, in some documented cases, advance warning of an arrest, false residence documents for individual Jewish refugees, and the destruction of some files that might otherwise have produced specific arrests. He was probably not the wholesale rescuer of five thousand Jews that the postwar Italian narrative had made him out to be. He was almost certainly not, however, an active perpetrator of the deportations in the way some of the more revisionist accounts have suggested; the evidence for active culpability is no stronger than the evidence for active rescue. The case is the case of an ordinary man who did some small good things in difficult circumstances and was murdered for unrelated reasons by the Germans, and who was then claimed after the war by various Italian institutions, the Catholic Church, the police service and the city of Fiume, for symbolic purposes that the historical record could not fully support.

Palatucci is included on this site because his case sits in an instructive place in the literature on the Righteous. The case is a reminder that the postwar canonisations were sometimes constructed on incomplete evidence, that the moral cleanliness of the rescue narrative was sometimes more comforting than the messy reality, and that the Italian relationship with its own wartime past has often been mediated by rescue stories that are partly true, partly invented, and that have served the wider purpose of telling Italians that they were on the right side of the war when many of them, in the strict factual sense, were not. The honest historical reckoning, which is the work of the past twenty years and is still in progress, is harder than the postwar narrative but is closer to the truth. The story of the destruction of the Fiume Jewish community, of around six hundred deportees of whom fewer than one hundred returned alive, is the more important story than the story of the deputy police commissioner who probably did some small things to mitigate it.

See also

Sources

  • Marco Coslovich, Giovanni Palatucci: Una verità scomoda, Aracne, 2008; updated edition 2013
  • Anna Pizzuti, online research project on Italian wartime police archives, Centro Studi Sereni, ongoing
  • United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, internal review of the Palatucci file, 2013
  • Yad Vashem, file on Giovanni Palatucci, Righteous Among the Nations, 1990, with 2017 update
  • Michele Sarfatti, The Jews in Mussolini’s Italy: From Equality to Persecution, University of Wisconsin Press, 2006
  • Centro Primo Levi, New York, statements and ongoing research project on Italian wartime police