Transcript Italy and the Nazis

Italian Fascist leader Benito Mussolini (center) with
his top aides. Italy, 1920s.
— National Archives and Records Administration,
College Park, Md.
In October 1922, King Victor Emmanuel III appointed the leader of the Italian Fascist Party,
Benito Mussolini, as prime minister of Italy. Over the next seven years, the Fascists established
and consolidated a one-party dictatorship. In two ways, Mussolini failed to establish an absolute
dictatorship, however. The Monarchy remained independent of the Fascist Party and continued
in theory to be commander-in-chief of the armed forces. Moreover, though Mussolini was the
recognized leader of the Fascist Party, his leadership remained nominally subject to the approval
of a Fascist Grand Council.
The Italian Jewish community, one of the oldest in Europe, numbered about
50,000 in 1933. Jews had lived in Italy for over two thousand years. By the
1930s, Italian Jews were fully integrated into Italian culture and society.
There was relatively little overt anti-Semitism among Italians. Although
there were fanatical anti-Semites among the Fascist leaders, such as Achille
Stararce and Roberto Farinacci, Italian Fascism did not focus on antiSemitism. Until 1938, Jews could join the Fascist Party.
Roberto Farinacci
Achille Starace
Anti-Semitic Legislation
In part under pressure from Nazi Germany and in part fearing that
their “revolution” was not perceived as “real” in the Italian
population, the Fascist regime passed anti-Semitic legislation
beginning in 1938. This legislation covered six areas:
1) definition of Jews;
2) removal of Jews from government jobs, including teachers in the public
schools;
3) a ban on marriage between Jews and non-Jews;
4) dismissal of Jews from the armed forces;
5) incarceration of Jews of foreign nationality; and
6) the removal of Jews from positions in the mass media.
Although reflected in harsh language on paper,
Italian authorities did not always aggressively
enforce the legislation, and sometimes
interpreted provisions for making exceptions
broadly. Even in the internment camps, Jews of
foreign nationality lived under bearable
conditions: families stayed together and the
camps provided schools, cultural activities, and
social events. Nevertheless, for many
individual members of a highly integrated
Jewish minority which had had reasonably
good relations with non-Jewish neighbors,
colleagues, and business associates, the
psychological insult and real economic
disadvantages of discrimination eroded the
quality of life, prompting thousands to
emigrate, primarily to the Americas, between
1938 and 1942.
Italy After Joining The Axis
Alliance
Having formally joined the Axis in 1939, Italy declared war on
Britain and France in June 1940, entering World War II as
Germany's ally. The Fascist regime hoped to establish a new
“Roman” Empire, encompassing the Mediterranean Sea and
beyond into North and East Africa and into the Levant (Syria and
Lebanon). Italy invaded France in June 1940 and occupied a small
strip of land on the Franco-Italian border as part of the armistice
agreement with Vichy France in June 1940. In the autumn of 1940,
Italy attacked Greece and invaded British-influenced Egypt from
bases in Libya, which Italy had conquered from the Ottoman Turks
in 1911. After Italy sustained disastrous defeats in both campaigns,
however, the Germans deployed troops in the spring of 1941,
conquering Greece and Yugoslavia, and driving the British out of
Libya. Italy received the Adriatic coastlines and the corresponding
hinterland of Yugoslavia and Greece as occupation zones in the
spring of 1941.
Despite its alliance with Germany, the Fascist
regime responded equivocally to German
demands first to concentrate and then to
deport Jews residing in Italian occupation
zones in Yugoslavia, Greece, and France to
killing centers in the German-occupied Poland.
Italian military authorities generally refused to
participate in mass murder of Jews
or to permit deportations from Italy or Italian-occupied territory;
and the Fascist leadership was both unable and unwilling to force
the issue. Italian-occupied areas were therefore relatively safe for
Jews. Between 1941 and 1943, thousands of Jews escaped from
German-occupied territory to the Italian-occupied zones of France,
Greece, and Yugoslavia. The Italian authorities even evacuated
some 4,000 Jewish refugees to the Italian mainland. Incarcerated in
southern Italy, these Jewish refugees survived the war.
The Fall of Mussolini and the Italian Surrender
In general, the Italian population did not approve of either the
German alliance or the Italian entry into the war. Italian military
defeats, the virtual military dependence on German arms, and the
failure of the Axis offensive in Egypt in the summer and autumn of
1942 further undermined the legitimacy of the Fascist regime. The
collapse of the North African front, culminating in the Axis
surrender in Tunis on May 13, 1943, and the successful Allied
landings in Sicily on July 10 induced the Fascist Grand Council to
issue a vote of no-confidence on Mussolini's leadership on July 25,
1943. King Victor Emmanuel III used the Council vote as an excuse
to arrest Mussolini and appoint Marshall Pietro Badoglio, a former
Fascist general, as prime minister. Though announcing Italy's
commitment to the Axis alliance, Badoglio secretly negotiated with
the Allies during August, reaching a cease-fire agreement on
September 3, concurrent with successful Allied landings in southern
Italy.
German Invasion of Italy
On September 8, 1943, Badoglio announced Italy's
unconditional surrender to the Allies. The Germans, who
had grown suspicious of Italian intentions, quickly
occupied northern and central Italy. German forces also
occupied the Italian zones in Yugoslavia, Greece, and
France. SS paratroopers freed Mussolini from prison and
installed him as the head of a pro-German Italian Social
Republic (Repubblica Sociale Italiana; RSI), based in Salò
in northern Italy. The German occupation of Italy
radically altered the situation for the remaining 43,000
Italian Jews living in the northern half of the country. The
Germans quickly established an SS and police apparatus,
in part to deport the Italian Jews to Auschwitz-Birkenau.
German-occupied Italy:
Camps and Deportations
In October and November 1943, German authorities rounded up Jews in Rome, Milan, Genoa, Florence, Trieste, and
other major cities in northern Italy. They established police transit camps at Fossoli di Carpi, approximately 12 miles
north of Modena, at Bolzano in northeastern Italy, and at Borgo San Dalmazzo, near the French border, to concentrate
the Jews prior to deportation. In general, these operations had limited success, due in part to advance warning given to
the Jews by Italian authorities and the Vatican, and in part to the unwillingness of many non-Jewish Italians, including
Salò police authorities, to participate in or facilitate the roundups. For example, of approximately 10,000 Jews in Rome,
German authorities were able to deport less than 1,100. From the police transit camps in northern Italy, the Germans
deported 4,733 Jews to Auschwitz-Birkenau, of whom only 314 survived.
Deportation of Jews from Italy

The German authorities deported 506 Jewish prisoners to other camps: Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, Ravensbrück, and
Flossenbürg. The majority of these prisoners were Jewish residents of Libya, some bearing British and French citizenship.
The Italian authorities had transported these Jews from Libya to the Italian mainland in 1942 and they fell under German
control in September 1943. The Libyan Jews made up the majority of persons sent to Bergen-Belsen (out of a total of 396).
Virtually all those sent to Bergen-Belsen, including all of Jews from Libya, survived.

The German authorities deported 328 Jews from Borgo San Dalmazzo via Drancy to Auschwitz, of whom ten survived; and
1,820 Jews from the islands of Rhodes and Kos, of whom 179 survived.

In Trieste, where SS-Brigadeführer (major general) Odilo Globocnik, the director of Operation Reinhard (which aimed at
the murder of Jews residing in the so-called Government General in German-occupied Poland), became Higher SS and
Police Leader in September 1943, the Germans deported about one fourth of the prewar Jewish population. The SS and
police established the police transit camp and concentration camp La Risiera di San Sabba in Trieste, where they tortured
and murdered about 5,000 persons, most of whom were political prisoners. Using Italian and Slovene volunteers,
supervised by selected non-commissioned officers trained at the Trawniki training camp in Poland, the SS and police in
Trieste concentrated some 1,200 Jews, mostly from Trieste, in San Sabba, and deported 1,122 from San Sabba to
Auschwitz and 55 to Ravensbrück and Bergen-Belsen in the autumn and winter of 1943-1944. Of those sent to Auschwitz,
85 survived.
Surrendering Italy
In all, the Germans deported 8,564 Jews from Italy,
Italian-occupied France, and the islands of Rhodes and
Kos, most of them to Auschwitz-Birkenau. 1,009
returned. In addition, the Germans shot 196 Jews in
Italy proper, nearly half of these at the Ardeantine Cave
in March 1944. Another approximately 100 died in the
police transit camps or in prisons or police custody
through Italy. More than 40,000 Jews survived the
Holocaust in Italy.
 In late April 1945, Communist partisans captured and
executed Mussolini and his mistress, Clara Petacci.
German forces in Italy surrendered to the Allies on May
2, 1945.

Prosecution of Corroborators
Despite some tolerated revenge killings in the immediate aftermath of the war,
Italian authorities conducted relatively few trials of collaborators, even of those
who served the Germans in the Salò regime. Only in the last 10 or 15 years* have
the Italian authorities been prepared to conduct a handful of proceedings against
Nazi offenders, exclusively Germans and ethnic German auxiliaries. In 1997, an
Italian court convicted the former SS officers Karl Priebke and Karl Hass,
sentencing them respectively to fifteen and ten years in prison for their
participation in the Ardeatine Caves massacre in March 1944. More recently, in
2007, Italian authorities prosecuted Michael Seifert, an ethnic German from
Ukraine after his extradition from Canada, on charges of murder perpetrated
during his service to the Germans in the Bolzano police transit camp.
Works Cited
"Holocaust History." Italy. Web. 07 May 2012.