Fascist Italy and German Jews in south‐eastern France in July 1943

This is an electronic version of an article published in the Journal of Modern Italian Studies (© 1998 Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business); Journal of Modern Italian Studies is available online.

The purpose of this article is to make public the two Italian documents published on pp. 322–3, and to comment on their significance.

1

In 1938 the Italian government launched a ruthless persecution of the approximately 50,000 Italian and foreign Jews living in the country.¹ This policy was meant to lead to the expulsion of all Jews within roughly ten years.² When Italy entered the war on 10 June 1940, this plan could no longer be put into effect, and as a result persecution was increased. Until Mussolini’s first fall (25 July 1943), however, Italian Fascism attacked the rights of Jews, but not their lives.

When substantial parts of Croatia, Greece and later France were occupied in 1941 and 1942, the Fascist government was faced with the problem of local Jews and of Jewish refugees living in those territories. How should it proceed? Should it extend the anti-Jewish laws existing in Italy (and in annexed Dalmatia and Slovenia) to those lands? Should it expel the refugees already present there, or transfer them to Italy, or keep them in those territories? Should it bar new refugees from entering those zones, as it had already done in Italy (and in the annexed territories)? Most important of all, should it accede to the requests which, from the summer of 1942 on, were made by Berlin, Zagreb and Vichy that it hand over the Jews?

As far as the first of these points is concerned, Rome basically did not extend its legislation, and allowed the laws of Vichy and Zagreb to continue to be partially applied; on the second point, it pursued a policy of neither expelling Jewish refugees nor transferring them to Italy; as to the third point, its policy was to prohibit new entrants, but it was not always carried out.³ As to the fourth and last point (i.e. the requests that it hand over the Jews), historians have argued that up to 25 July 1943 Rome had always refused those requests, or had granted them verbally but opposed them in practice. These observations, and the fact that Berlin, Zagreb and Vichy were — each in its different way — involved in the Shoah, have led many Italian and foreign witnesses and historians to assert that these refusals were the consistent result of an intentional policy, and even that Italy (or a group of senior Italian officials) had been actively engaged in saving the Jews.⁴

This second statement is misconceived. Only the granting of requests to hand over the Jews might be considered an active step; refusing those requests was no more than an obvious and logical continuation of the anti-Jewish policy (the attack on the rights of Jews, but not their lives) implemented in the peninsula since 1938. Actually, when Mussolini in August 1942 wrote that he had no objection (‘nulla osta’) to handing over the Jews in occupied Croatia,⁵ this was taken by the Germans to mean that he granted their request, but what he really meant was: ‘Personally I agree, but it’s up to Italian authorities in charge to decide whether to hand them over or not’;⁶ diplomatic and military authorities, however, chose not to make a decision (and did not hand them over).

As far as Rome’s intentions are concerned, I am convinced that they were not clear at all. Both in Croatia and in France (and according to some indications in Greece as well), Italian authorities between the summer of 1942 and the spring of 1943 began to take a census of the ‘pertinenze nazionali’ of Jewish refugees (i.e. to ascertain which country they belonged to) and to intern some or all of them. These operations actually led to a postponement of the final decision regarding the refugees. One must, however, keep in mind that they were also an essential first step towards applying — at a later stage — a different treatment to the various national groups.

A different treatment, after all, had already been applied in March 1942, when Italian occupying authorities in Pristina (the capital of Kosovo) handed over fifty-one Central European Jews to German occupation authorities in Serbia, and transferred 100–150 Serbian Jews to an Italian camp in Albania, which had been conquered by Italy in 1939. (The first group was immediately killed, but we do not know at present which Italian authorities made the decision and if they were aware of the fate awaiting those people).⁷

In the course of the second half of 1942, Italian authorities — both in Rome and outside Italy — received information about the Shoah,⁸ and this certainly caused some of them to be less compliant towards German requests; later on, however, because of the military victories of the Allies in Africa in the spring of 1943, other Italian authorities displayed an increased anti-Jewish hostility.

2

The documents that are here being made public (and which I found in an archival series of the Ministry of the Interior that had escaped the extensive ‘clean-up’ carried out after 25 April 1945)⁹ refer to this latter period and prove that monarchical and Fascist Italy deliberately took an active step that condemned Jews to death, a step that fully retains its significance, even if it was not put into effect due to the events of 25 July 1943.

This is what happened. In the south-eastern regions of France, occupied by Italy in November 1942, there were between 20,000 and 40,000 Jews, approximately half of them French and half of them foreign refugees. On 19 March 1943 Mussolini ordered a senior police official, ‘Ispettore generale’ Guido Lospinoso, to go to Nice and set up a ‘Regio ispettorato di polizia razziale’ (Royal inspectorate of racial police). His task was to superintend the treatment of Jews, that is to put an end to the illegal entry of Jews trying to escape from the French zone occupied by Germans, to take a census of Jews, at least of those with a foreign nationality, and to intern them in places far away from the coast.¹⁰ During those same months, due to a general agreement reached directly between Italy and Germany (similar to those that Germany had reached with Switzerland, Spain, Portugal, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Hungary, Rumania and Turkey), Jews having Italian citizenship and living at that time in the European territories under German rule were exempted from deportation and were transferred to Italy.¹¹ From France, in particular, there were 500 repatriations before March 1943, a further 271 repatriations from Paris and 123 from Marseille in the course of that month, and Rome expected in the following weeks the return of approximately 120 persons from the first of these cities and about forty from the latter.¹²

Lospinoso carried out the task he had been entrusted with, issuing firm denials to all requests from Germany or Vichy-France that were in contrast to the orders he had received from Rome.¹³

On 10 July 1943, however, as Lospinoso reported to Rome, two ‘German officials sent by the Commandant of Police in Marseille’ (Rolf Mühler) turned up in the offices of the ‘Ispettorato’ in Nice, talked to one of Lospinoso’s men and requested ‘the consignment by us of the German Jews currently living … in the zone occupied by our troops’, in ‘reciprocity’ for the repatriation of Italian Jews from the Marseille area. Lospinoso immediately sent a telegram to the Chief of Police in Rome (Renzo Chierici), stating that ‘the request is new [for] this office, that treats German subjects in the same way as other foreign subjects’. These last words might be an indication that he was against handing them over; in any case, he ended by asking for instructions.¹⁴

On 15 July Chierici answered Lospinoso: ‘Please comply with the request from the German Police for the handing over of German Jews’.¹⁵

No further Italian document explains the reasons behind this order. From the point of view of diplomacy between friendly countries, the exchange appeared logical. The German-Italian agreement for the repatriation of Italian Jews, however, did not provide for any reciprocity. Moreover, correspondence between Mühler and his chief in Paris (Helmuth Knochen) shows that the latter was unaware of the former’s initiative;¹⁶ therefore the suggested exchange must be considered a move undertaken locally, and independently, by the German police in Marseille. Under the circumstances, Italian authorities were under no compulsion to agree to it. The Italian compliance must therefore be considered an intentional and active decision, and the reasons for it must be looked for within Italy itself.

In this respect, one must remember that — technically — there was a deep similarity between the order of 15 July 1943 and the Pristina episode, and that the order was consistent with taking the census of the ‘pertinenze nazionali’; on the other hand, one must keep in mind that during those weeks the situation of foreign and Italian Jews in Italy also suffered a serious setback. On 25 July 1943 — just before hearing of Mussolini’s ouster that day — the cabinet office of the Ministry of the Interior asked the Direzione di polizia to transfer to the province of Bolzano (from which all foreign Jews had been expelled in 1939) the 2,000 internees (four-fifths of whom were foreign Jews) detained in the concentration camp of Ferramonti in Calabria.¹⁷ Since the reasons for this decision are unknown, we can but point out that Ferramonti is in the extreme south of Italy, while Bolzano was the Italian town nearest to the Third Reich’s borders. Moreover, in the preceding months of May–June Mussolini had decided to collect Italian Jews in four internment and forced labour camps.¹⁸

The telegram of 15 July is signed by Chierici, and we know nothing of how it came to be written and why it took five days to write; but it is hard to imagine that the Chief of Police made this decision (an important one, as witnessed by the fact that he headed his telegram ‘Polizia politica’, i.e. political police matters, and not ‘pubblica sicurezza’, i.e. general police matters) all by himself, without asking the consent — even in general terms — of the Undersecretary of the Interior Umberto Albini or of the Minister of the Interior Benito Mussolini.

I have been unable to find other Italian documents on this. Some German documents, however, indicate that something did happen. On 19 August 1943 Mühler informed Knochen that he had recently reached an ‘agreement’ with Lospinoso on the surrender of German and formerly Austrian Jews. On 28 August he added that the Italian official had previously given him some lists of Jews then living on the Côte d’Azur, but later (that is on 18 August) had requested — and obtained — that the lists be returned to him.¹⁹ Until now there has been no satisfactory explanation for this: today I believe it can be said that before 25 July Lospinoso had begun to carry out the orders he had received from Rome.

We do not know if Lospinoso, when he took back the lists on 18 August, acted on his own initiative or because of new orders from Rome (which he might conceivably have solicited); on the other hand this fact proves once again that German authorities were very respectful of the decisions made by Italians in the territories under Italian control.

To conclude, it was the landing of the Allies in Sicily and the ensuing Italian political crisis on 25 July that caused the decision to hand over the German Jews in south-eastern France to be reversed. It was the major military advance of the Allies and the complexities within Badoglio’s Italy that, for the time being, saved those Jews from the sentence of death passed on them by Mussolini’s Italy.

3

One of the reviewers of the first draft of this article raised several questions: What exactly is the author’s overall thesis? That Mussolini and Italian Fascism were actively preparing to give up foreign Jews to the Germans? Was Mussolini willing to turn over all Jews to the Germans, although Italy did repatriate some Italian Jews from France as the author says? Did Mussolini regard the Jews as expendable as part of his foreign policy towards Nazi Germany, or as an attempt to maintain partial Italian sovereignty, or as part of an attempt to ensure German support of his tottering personal power, or as part of a more intense anti-Semitism than the literature has ascribed to Mussolini?

As far as the single points that have been raised are concerned, I can say that I have no doubts at all that Rome had indeed decided to hand over German Jews in France; that I don’t know if the transfer to Bolzano of the foreign Jews interned at Ferramonti was meant to lead to their being turned over to Germany, or to their being used as hostages or as ‘human shields’ at the moment of defeat: that no document allows us to assert that during those weeks Mussolini was planning to surrender Italian Jews to Germany.

On the more general question, I must say at present that it is hard to give a definitive answer. It is, however, important to point out that, following the Allied victories in Africa and above all the Allied landing in Sicily on 10 July, two tendencies took place shape within Fascism: one (already well known) led to Mussolini’s first overthrow on 25 July, the other caused his policy to become increasingly savage. The time has come to look at Mussolini’s ‘Jewish policy’ in 1938–43 as an ongoing process rather than as a static picture.

Translated by Loredana Melissari

Documents

1

Ministero dell’Interno - Gabinetto

Ufficio del Telegrafo e della cifra  
Telegramma No. 16935  
Mentone 10 luglio 1943-XXI, ore 13,40, arrivato ore 19,30  
Ecc. Capo polizia, Roma (Gab. Ps.) [Gabinetto della Pubblica sicurezza]

N. 81. Si sono presentati questo Ufficio [Regio ispettorato di polizia razziale] due Ufficiali tedeschi inviati da Comandante polizia Marsiglia tale Muhler che desiderano trattare la consegna da parte nostra degli ebrei tedeschi che si trovano nella zona occupata nostre truppe sia già in residenza forzata sia ancora liberi [,] e ciò per reciprocità dato che ebrei italiani residenti in zona occupata dai tedeschi vengono come è noto dai tedeschi consegnati a nostre autorità per rimpatrio Regno. Richiesta riesce nuova questo Ufficio che tratta sudditi tedeschi stregua altri sudditi stranieri [,] per cui prego E.V. compiacersi darmi istruzioni circa seguito da dare alla richiesta di cui trattasi.

Ispettore generale polizia Lospinoso

Ministry of the Interior - Cabinet

Office of Telegraphs and Ciphers  
Telegram No. 16935  
From: Menton 10 July 1943-XXI, sent at 13.40 hours, received 19.30 hours  
To: His Excellency, the Chief of Police, Rome (Office of Public Security)

No. 81 Two German officials sent by the Commandant of Police in Marseille, Mühler, came to my office to discuss the consignment by us of the German Jews currently living either under forced domicile [residenza forzata] or at liberty in the zone occupied by our troops, and this in reciprocity given that the Italian Jews resident in the German occupied zone are as is known handed over to our authorities for repatriation to Italy. The request is new [for] this office that treats German subjects in the same way as other foreign subjects, therefore I request Your Excellency to give me instructions as to how I should respond to the request.

Inspector General of Police Lospinoso

2

Ministero dell’Interno

Dispaccio telegrafico No. 45361 (cifrato 13.30)  
Roma, 15 luglio 1943-XXI  
Comm. Dr. Lospinoso, Ufficio P.S. confine Mentone-Ponte Unione

500\. Pol. Pol. [Polizia politica] A telegramma 81 dieci corrente [10 July] vogliate aderire richieste Polizia tedesca per consegna ebrei tedeschi.

Capo polizia Chierici

Ministry of the Interior

Telegraphic Dispatch no. 45631 (ciphered 13.30 hours)  
Rome, 15 July 1943-XXI  
Comm. Dr Lospinoso, Border Public Security Station: Menton, Ponte Unione

500\. Pol. Pol. Re telegram 81 sent 10th current month, please comply with the request from the German Police for the handing over of German Jews.

Chief of Police Chierici

Appendix

The documents in this appendix have been known to historians for some time; they are the correspondence exchanged in July–August 1943 between the German Police Commander in Marseille (Mühler) and his chief in Paris (Knochen).

They are now being published in translation by the Journal of Modern Italian Studies, because they are the only other source available to date on the subject of this article. Actually my research, which led to the discovery of the Italian documents, was in part prompted by the ‘agreement’ mentioned by Mühler in his telegram of 19 August.

Examining these German documents and comparing them with the Italian ones would require a separate study. The following points should, however, be emphasized:

1. the apparently opposite way in which Lospinoso and Mühler reported on the meeting of 10 July to their respective chiefs (obviously Rome based its decision on the former’s report);
2. the lack of bureaucratic efficiency and the failure to apply the hierarchic rule on Mühler’s part (and the opposite behaviour — or at least so it would seem — on the part of Lospinoso);
3. after 25 July 1943, Mühler’s ingenuousness and Lospinoso’s adroitness.

Document 1²⁰

Marseille 10 July 1943  
Sicherheitspolizei - SD [Sicherheitsdienst]

Einsatz Kommando Marseille  
IVB 18/Mo/Kr  
TGb No. 8423/43  
To : Bds [Befehlshaber der Sicherheitspolizei] IVB - Paris  
Subject: Measures of the Italians against the Jews  
Ref: None

To establish greater clarity regarding the treatment of the Jewish question in the territories occupied by the Italians and to improve coordination between the measures envisaged by the Italian services and our own, a meeting should have been held on 7.7.43 at the offices of the Chief of Italian Police in Nice, Dr Barranco (office: Villa de Nobili, boulevard Cimiez, Nice), with members of our services.

However, Dr Barranco has explained that for a month and half a special police for Jews (Polizia razziale) has been established under the direction of Inspector general Le Spinoza [= Lospinoso] with an office at 32 boulevard Cimiez in Nice, which had sole responsibility for all Jewish affairs.

Spinoza [= Lospinoso] did not come to a meeting that had been arranged with him by telephone but sent in his place an assistant, Commissar Luceri Tommaso, who is Vice-Questore of the Italian Race Police. Tommaso [Luceri] declared at the outset that he had no authority to make decisions relating to Jewish affairs and that we must wait for a second meeting with Spinoza [= Lospinoso] which could take place shortly.

The ways in which these discussions are being held strengthens once more the impression that the Italian authorities wish to use every means at their disposal to ensure that the measures they envisage applying to the Jews do not replicate the measures used by German authorities. From what we have learned from Tommaso [Luceri], the Italian Race Police have already carried out a census of some 22.000 Jews of all nationalities in the Riviera zone. They have already begun to assemble them in so-called places of obligatory residence (residenza forzata). The Italian attitude towards Judaism is typified by the fact that they have chosen as places of forced residence some of the most renowned spas such as Megeve, Saint-Gervais and Castellano. For those Jews considered as dangerous, in other words who are politically active, they have set up a concentration camp at Sospello.

From the numerous reports in our possession it appears indisputable that the Italian authorities, now as in the past, make a public display of their friendly attitude towards the Jews. In many cases, Jews arrested for whatever reason by the French police have had to be immediately released because of pressure from the Italians.

In enemy propaganda the varied treatment of the Jewish question is frequently cited as evidence of the alleged beginnings of discord or even an already far advanced discord within the Axis camp.

Further developments will be reported.  
Mühler SS-Sturmbannführer and Kommandeur.

Document 2²¹

19.8.43  
EK [Einsatz Kommando] Marseille No. 6450  
To: Bds IVB, Paris  
Subject: Meeting with Lospinoso  
Ref.: None

On 18.8.43 at the request of Lospinoso, the Italian Inspector General for Jewish Affairs in the zone of southern France occupied by the Italians, a meeting was held in our offices here [in Marseille]. Lospinoso explained that the recent unofficial discussions with the chief of the Toulon delegation that had resulted in an agreement were no longer binding because of the change of government in Rome. It had previously been agreed that all German and formerly Austrian Jews in that zone should be handed over to our commando. It was also proposed that the orders of the RSHA [Reichssicherheitshauptamt] on measures regarding the Jews in the German occupied territories should be applied equally in the zone occupied by the Italians.

Lospinoso intends to go to Rome on about 20 August 1943 for four or five days and he will explain what we want to the competent minister. After his return from Rome Lospinoso will let us know the outcome of his discussions. I will keep you informed immediately by telex.

Sipo SD EK Marseille IVB SA 18 BA/Str  
Kr [Kommandeur] Mühler  
SS-Stubaf

Document 3²²

Paris 26 August 1943  
Bds/Hi  
To : Sipo(SD) - Einsatz Kommando  
For the attention of SS Sturmbannführer Mühler, Marseille  
Subject: meeting with Lospinoso  
Ref.: Your telex no. 6450 of 19.8.43

I have taken note of your telegram and I am astonished that negotiations are taking place with an authorized Italian representative without my service being informed of this. I request a detailed account and an appraisal of L [Lospinoso]. The reports are incomplete: because no signed agreement has been concluded at this point with the Italians regarding issues relating to the Jewish question, there can be no question of a change in a negative sense. I therefore request that you inform me in details of L’s [Lospinoso] arguments.

Dr Knochen  
SS Standartenführer and Oberst of Police

Document 4²³

28.8.43  
EK Marseille No. 6730  
To: Bds  
For the attention of SS  Standartenführer and Oberst of Police Dr Knochen, Paris  
Subject: meeting with Lospinoso  
Ref.: Your telex no. 57485 of 26.8.43

Lospinoso himself asked to discuss with me the Jewish question in the Italian occupied zone. The conversation was by no means of an official character. L [Lospinoso] simply wanted some information on certain fundamental points before he travelled to Rome. However, I believe that the real reason L [Lospinoso] came to my office was quite different. Lospinoso communicated to my service a little while ago some lists of Jews living on the Côte d’Azur, saying expressly that he would not want the lists to be returned to him. In the meantime he must have received another order from his superiors, because he now asked me to return the lists to him. He vaguely promised to let me have the lists again after his journey to Rome. As I emphasized in my telegram of 19.8.43 the meeting took a very general character.

Sipo-SD EK Marseille  
Kdr Mühler  
SS-Stubaf

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