Wednesday, September 10, 2008

WWII Deportation of 600,000 Italians for German Labor Camps during Salo Republic Remembered

The ANNOTICO Report

It seems strange that there have been so many books that have written about the 8,000 Refugee Jews in Italy from Germany/Austria (thereby being German/Austrian Citizens) being deported by Germans back to Germany after Italy surrendered and Germany was in Complete control

I have read Nothing about the some 8,000 Italians (of whom only 300 were Jews) were deported to Mauthausen in Austria. Only 850 came back alive.

Also, I had previously heard NOTHING about  September 8th 1944. It is a is a date that resonates with the Italian people, as a date to  to call attention to the memory of the 600,000 Italians deported to Germany after 8 September 1943 for the crime of following their conscience and disobeying the orders of the Republic of Salo?.

Most were Communists and/or Partisans, or merely expressing opposition to the Salo Gov't. Feelings are currently still divided and, resolutions expressing opinions about this Tragedy evoke feelings across the political spectrum. Comments yesterday prompted the following response.

Historians, authors, and those with an agenda, have done a great disservice to Italy and Italians for devoting almost exclusive dedication to the German/Austrian Refugees in Italy experience, and in some cases, falsely labeling it an Italian Holocaust, while completely ignoring MUCH greater Injustices having been foisted on the Italian people, than were subjected to the Jews. I also find it offensive that the enormous sympathy and HELP given to Jews, by Italians, at great risk to their own lives, nurtured and saved so many Jews from the Nazis.

8 SEPTEMBER: SORO, NOT ALL VERSIONS OF HISTORY ARE EQUAL

(AGI) Roma, 

September 8, 2008 

Antonello Soro, President of the Pd deputies, has published the following note: "the ambiguous words of the Mayor of Rome on Fascism yesterday, and today those of the Ministry of Defence, on the occasion of the commemoration of Porta San Paolo, do not help the memory but risk causing confusion and disorientation.

The Head of State has done well to call attention to the memory of the 600,000 Italians deported to Germany after 8 September 1943 for the crime of following their conscience and disobeying the orders of the Republic of Salo?.

Today, Italy is a free and democratic Republic thanks in part to their courage, to their passive resistance, to their conscientious objection. In the legitimate effort to remember the motives of all combatants, we must always maintain the capacity to discern between them. Only from the sacrifices which have brought liberty, democracy and respect for people of all religions can we today find the right direction to take, with determination and the possibility of success, in the challenges of the new century".

http://www.agi.it/italy/news/200809081543-pol-ren0045-art.html

In 1938,Fascist Italian regime passed Racial Purity Laws , basically to deal with intermarriage of Italians  and Ethiopians, and  in part under pressure from Nazi Germany, they  included antisemitic laws. These laws forbade marriage between Jews and non-Jews and removed Jewish teachers from the public schools. Italians to a large degree either ignored the laws or tried to devise ways to circumvent.

Foreign Jews living as refugees in Italy were confined in internment camps, which mostly was a blessing, because they were beyond the reach of the SS until Italy surrendered. Here they lived under bearable conditions: families stayed together and the camps provided schools, cultural activities, and social events.

 

Italy: The Republic of Salr (the Italian Social Republic) and the German occupation

Encyclopfdia Britannica Article

 

In the meantime the Germans had rescued Mussolini from his mountain prison and restored him in the north as ruler of the "Italian Social Republic," a last-ditch puppet Fascist regime based in Salr on Lake Garda.

 

The republic tried to induct those born in 1923, 1924, and 1925 into its army, but only 40 percent of young men responded. Many others deserted soon after the call-up. In a congress held in Verona in November 1943, the "Republic of Salr" seemed to take a leftward turn, calling for an end to the monarchy and a more worker-oriented ideology, but this program never went into practice. Some of the leading Fascists who had voted out the duce in July 1943, including Mussolini's son-in-law, the former foreign minister Galeazzo Ciano, were tried by a Fascist court and shot. Meanwhile, Fascist officials collaborated with the German army and essentially followed Hitler's orders as the war continued in the north and centre. Official and unofficial armed bands roamed the big cities arresting suspected partisans (members of the Resistance) and terrorizing the local population.

The German occupiers ruled through violence and the aid of the local Fascists. Throughout German-occupied Italy, Refugee Jews and oppositionists were rounded up and sent to detention camps or prisons. Many Jews were sent straight from Italy on trains to concentration and extermination camps in Poland and Germany. In all, nearly 9,000 Refugeee Jews were deported under the Germans. Only 980 returned.

Some 8,000 Italians (of whom 300 were Jews) were deported to Mauthausen in Austria. Only 850 came back alive.

The German army responded to partisan activity with violence and reprisals. A series of massacres of civilians and partisans accompanied the German occupation and gradual retreat up the peninsula. In March 1944, after a partisan bomb attack killed 33 members of the occupying forces in Rome, the German army shot 335 people (Jews, Communists, and others) in the Fosse Ardeatine, caves located outside the city. This massacre was one of the biggest of the war in Italy and has inspired controversy ever since. (In the 1990s a former Nazi captain, Erich Priebke, was arrested in Argentina and, after two dramatic trials, was convicted in Rome for his role in the massacre.)

Elsewhere the German army carried out frequent brutal and random massacres of civilians as they retreated northward, above all in Tuscany and Emilia, where German troops destroyed an entire village of some 1,800 people at Marzabotto in 1944.

In addition, the Germans deported hundreds of thousands of young men to work as forced labourers in Germany and elsewhere. Fiat workers struck against these deportations in March 1944. Many of those deported died en route.

Mussolini faded from view and appeared less and less in public, making his last speech in Milan in December 1944. As defeat became more and more likely, he made plans for his escape and tried to negotiate a deal with the Allies. In April 1945 Mussolini and his government fled to Milan, and later, disguised as a German soldier, he attempted to cross the border to Switzerland. Discovered by Communist partisans, he was shot in a small town on Lake Como. His body was taken to Milan and displayed for a time in Piazzale Loreto, along with the bodies of several other Fascist ministers and leaders, hung by their feet at a service station in front of huge festive crowds. These events have generated controversy and debate ever since. Other leading Fascists were executed across Italy during the days of liberation. Mussolini's remains, after being interred in various places, were finally buried in 1957 at his birthplace in Predappio, in the Romagna.

 

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