The Italians and the Holocaust

In her non-fiction book The Italians and the Holocaust: Persecution, Rescue, and Survival (1987), American author and historian Susan Zuccotti details the experiences of Jews in Italy under the Fascist regime of Benito Mussolini and later during the country's occupation by Nazi Germany. Despite the obvious complicity of Italian fascists in the atrocities of Nazi Germany, the author highlights numerous instances in which individuals and even some fascist officials came to the aid of Jews suffering persecution at the hands of Nazis. For The Italians and the Holocaust, Zuccotti received a National Jewish Book Award for works on the Holocaust.

Before the ascent of Nazi Germany in the years prior to World War II, Italy has a small but well-integrated minority of around 40,000 Jews. From 1922, the year Benito Mussolini seizes power, until 1938, Jews suffer little persecution at the hands of the state. Jews themselves are divided between fascists and anti-fascists, some occupying political or economic positions within the parties. While Zuccotti highlights Fascist leaders like Archille Starace and Roberto Farinacci as being personally anti-Semitic, anti-Semitism is not a part of the party policy for most of the 1920s and 1930s, nor do most Italian citizens feel strong antipathy toward Jews.

This changes in 1938 when Italy passes a set of racial laws targeting Jews and their civil rights in advance of Italy's Pact of Steel with Nazi Germany, cementing the two countries' alliance against much of the rest of Europe. Though not consistently enforced, the laws prohibit Jews from holding professional or government positions and ban miscegenation between Jews and non-Jews. Despite these laws, Italy is currently far safer for Jews than many other parts of Europe, where, as a matter of policy, occupying Nazis murder or deport Jews to concentration camps and death camps. As a result, the Jewish population in Italy increases after 1938, as the country is seen as a relative refuge despite its affiliation with Nazi Germany. Even Jews in Italian-occupied territories such as Yugoslavia and France largely avoid deportation to camps. Nevertheless, as many as 6,000 Italian Jews with the means to escape to somewhere far away from Nazi Germany's reach do so. One man who escapes Italy during this time is the prominent physicist Enrico Fermi, whose wife is Jewish. Despite the obvious hardships these statutes cause many Jews, Zuccotti contends that the majority of Italians either ignored the racial laws or pretended they didn't understand them.



In 1943, however, conditions worsen dramatically for Italian Jews. In July of that year, Mussolini's increasing unpopularity leads to the fall of the Fascist regime because of two plots—one by Parliament president Dino Grandi and another by Italy's monarch King Victor Emmanuel III. With Italy in a weakened political state, Nazi Germany invades the country, leading to Italian surrender on September 8, 1943. German troops free Mussolini, installing him as a figurehead atop a newly established Nazi puppet state known as the Italian Social Republic. Nazi Germany tasks SS officer Karl Wolff with implementing Hitler's final solution in the Italian Social Republic, comprising most of Northern and Central Italy. In November 1943 with the passage of the Manifest of Verona declaring Italian Jews foreigners, widespread efforts to arrest and deport Italian Jews intensifies. From that point on, the Italian police don't just arrest and deport Jews on the direct order of Germans, they do so automatically.

Zuccotti highlights the types of people who intervene on behalf of Italian Jews, dividing them into three categories. In the first and smallest category are people who seem to act out of pure altruism, going to great and heroic lengths to help Jews at great risk to their own lives. They stage daring escapes for Jews or forge documents on a wide scale. These individuals, Zuccotti says, are united neither by class nor political affiliation—for example, some were fascists and some were not. They seem instead only to be united by their rejection of racism on a philosophical and moral level, and by their compassion for humanity. Zuccotti also points out that among these individuals, very few are noted intellectuals, thinkers, or artists. Some are low-ranking Catholic priests, but most of them are everyday people intervening on behalf of the Italian Jewish community.

The second category comprises individuals who are less coordinated in their efforts to help Jews escape, doling out individual acts of kindness as circumstances arise. A family might take in an orphaned Jewish child. A farmer might let a Jewish fugitive hide in his barn. One of the most dramatic instances of this takes place at Villa Emma, where local families in the Modena countryside provide refuge for 100 Jewish children. When German officials go there looking for fugitives, every last villager stays quiet. Finally, Zuccotti says, there is a small group of fascist officials who, either through outright insubordination or the deliberate sowing of bureaucratic chaos, disobey the orders of German superiors to protect Italian Jews.



Of the 50,000 Jews living in Italy in September 1943, an estimated 8,000 die after being deported to death camps like Auschwitz—a horrific number, and yet one Zuccotti suggests could have been much higher if not for the heroic deeds of various Italian citizens and officials.