Mick Hartley

It's generally believed that the Italian fascists never quite bought into the antisemitism that so motivated their Nazi allies. A new revisionist history – The Italian Executioners: The Genocide of the Jews of Italy, by Simon Levis Sullam – suggests that matters were not quite so straightforward, and that many Italians were indeed complicit if not active participants in hunting down Italian Jews, and sending them to the death camps.

Gordon Haber has a review in Forward:

Sullam’s book is squarely in the subgenre of Holocaust historiography seeking to deflate the national myths of postwar Europe. The title is an overt reference to Daniel Goldhagen’s 1996 “Hitler’s Willing Executioners,” which argued that average Germans were at best indifferent to genocide and at worst enthusiastic participants. Jan Gross’s 2001 “Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland” punctured the dearly held beliefs of Poles as either righteous warriors or hapless victims.

And now it’s Italy’s turn. “The Italian Executioners” focuses on the Italian Social Republic, also known as the Republic of Salò, a rough analogue to France’s Vichy. This was the northern half of Italy ostensibly run by Mussolini from September 1943 to May 1945 (the Allies occupied the southern half). As Salò was a Nazi puppet state, Italians found it harder to demur from arresting Jews and assisting in their deportation.

For instance: On October 16 1943, more than 1,000 Jews were arrested in Rome. To this day, we tend to blame the German occupiers. But while the list of arrestees was prepared by the Italian Ministry of the Interior’s Office for Racial Affairs, the arrests themselves were “mainly carried out by Italian police and Fascists,” with the assistance and approval of Rome’s chief of police, Pietro Caruso.

It was a similar story a few weeks later in Venice. On December 5, 1943, the Venetian chief of police issued an order for the “immediate arrest of elements belonging to the Jewish race.” Under cover of darkness, the Carabinieri, accompanied by fascist volunteers, arrested Jews in their homes. The next day, the local authorities proudly informed the Ministry of the Interior that “163 pure-blooded Jews were arrested [note the passive voice], 114 of whom are women and 49 are men.”  […]

“The Italian Executioners” is a short book. But it’s long enough to make a convincing argument for how frequently ordinary Italians, in Sullam’s words, served as “agents and accomplices of the Holocaust.” There’s an understandable tone of anger, but it’s certainly warranted, and for the most part Sullam avoids the hectoring that undermined the force of Goldhagen’s book.