# UNITED STATES HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL MUSEUM

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## Italy

In October 1922, King Victor Emmanuel III appointed the leader of the Italian Fascist Party, Benito Mussolini, as prime minister of Italy. Shortly thereafter, the Fascists established a dictatorship.

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 antisemitism among Italians. Italian Fascism, in the early 1930s, did not focus on racism and antisemitism.

In 1938, in part under pressure from Nazi Germany, the Fascist Italian regime passed antisemitic laws. These laws forbade marriage between Jews and non-Jews and removed Jewish teachers from the public schools. Foreign Jews living as refugees in Italy were confined in internment camps. Here they lived under bearable conditions: families stayed together and the camps provided schools, cultural activities, and social events.

ITALIAN-OCCUPIED AREAS

Italy entered World War II in June 1940 as a German ally, hoping to establish a new Italian empire. Italy occupied territory in Yugoslavia (1941), Greece (1941), and a small portion of southern France (1942).

Although allied with Germany, Fascist Italy did not willingly cooperate in the Nazi plan to kill the Jews of Europe. Italians generally refused to participate in genocide, or to permit deportations from Italy or the Italian occupation zones in Yugoslavia, Greece, and France to the Nazi extermination camps. Italian military officers and officials usually protected Jews and Italian-occupied areas were relatively safe for Jews. Between 1941 and 1943, thousands of Jews escaped to Italy and Italian-occupied territory from German-occupied territory.

GERMAN-OCCUPIED AREAS OF ITALY

Military reversals in North Africa and the Allied invasion of Sicily and southern Italy in 1943 contributed to the overthrow of Benito Mussolini's dictatorship. King Victor Emmanuel III ordered Mussolini imprisoned. Pietro Badoglio, the new prime minister, negotiated a cease-fire with the Allies in early September 1943. German forces quickly occupied most of northern and central Italy. German paratroopers freed Mussolini from prison and installed him as the head of a pro-German puppet government located at Salo in northern Italy. German forces also occupied the Italian zones in Yugoslavia, Greece, and France.

The German occupation of northern Italy radically altered the situation for Italian Jews, most of whom lived in the north. German authorities began almost immediately to deport Jews from both the German-occupied areas of Italy and the former Italian occupation zones in southern Europe.

GERMAN-OCCUPIED ITALY: CAMPS AND DEPORTATIONS

In October and November 1943, the Germans rounded up Jews in Rome, Milan, Genoa, Florence, Trieste, and other major cities in northern Italy. Jews were interned in transit camps such as the Fossoli di Carpi camp, originally an Italian-run internment camp approximately 12 miles north of Modena, and the Bolzano camp in northeastern Italy, established in late 1943. Periodically, the Nazis would deport Jews from both Fossoli di Carpi and Bolzano to the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp.

In Trieste, Nazi authorities tortured and murdered about 5,000 people, mostly political prisoners, in La Risiera di San Sabba, which served primarily as a police detention camp. San Sabba also served as a transit camp to deport Jews from northeast Italy to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Some Jews were deported from San Sabba and several dozen Jews were killed there. Mantua, Milan, and Borgo San Dalmazzo were other assembly points for Jews during the deportations from Italy.

Under German occupation, Nazi officials deported about 8,000 Jews from Italy to Auschwitz-Birkenau and other Nazi camps. Almost 2,000 Jews were deported from Rhodes, an Aegean Sea island that had been part of Italy before the war. About 7,600 of those deported were murdered.

Because Italian authorities obstructed the deportations and many Italian Jews succeeded in hiding or escaped southward to Allied-occupied areas of Italy, more than 40,000 Jews survived the Holocaust in Italy.

In late April 1945, Communist partisans captured and executed Mussolini. German forces in Italy surrendered to the Allies on May 2, 1945.

Further Reading

De Felice, Renzo. The Jews in Fascist Italy: A History. New York: Enigma Books, 2001.

Sarfatti, Michele. The Jews in Mussolini's Italy: From Equality to Persecution. George L. Mosse series in modern European cultural and intellectual history. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006.

Steinberg, Jonathan. All or Nothing: The Axis and the Holocaust, 1941-1943. London: Routledge, 1990.

Stille, Alexander. Benevolence and Betrayal: Five Italian Jewish Families Under Fascism. New York: Summit Books, 1991.

Zuccotti, Susan. The Italians and the Holocaust: Persecution, Rescue, and Survival. New York: Basic Books, 1987.

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