The Italian Executioners: The Genocide of the Jews of Italy

by Simon Levis Sullam, David I. Kertzer (Foreword by), Oona Smyth (Translator), Claudia Patane (Translator)

Overview

A gripping revisionist history that shows how ordinary Italians played a central role in the genocide of Italian Jews during the Second World War

In this gripping revisionist history of Italy’s role in the Holocaust, Simon Levis Sullam presents an unforgettable account of how ordinary Italians actively participated in the deportation of Italy’s Jews between 1943 and 1945, when Mussolini’s collaborationist republic was under German occupation. While most historians have long described Italians as relatively protective of Jews during this time, The Italian Executioners tells a very different story, recounting in vivid detail the shocking events of a period in which Italians set in motion almost half the arrests that sent their Jewish compatriots to Auschwitz.

This brief, beautifully written narrative shines a harsh spotlight on those who turned on their Jewish fellow citizens. These collaborators ranged from petty informers to Fascist intellectuals—and their motives ran from greed to ideology. Drawing insights from Holocaust and genocide studies and combining a historian’s rigor with a novelist’s gift for scene-setting, Levis Sullam takes us into Italian cities large and small, from Florence and Venice to Brescia, showing how events played out in each. Re-creating betrayals and arrests, he draws indelible portraits of victims and perpetrators alike.

Along the way, Levis Sullam dismantles the seductive popular myth of italiani brava gente—the “good Italians” who sheltered their Jewish compatriots from harm. The result is an essential correction to a widespread misconception of the Holocaust in Italy. In collaboration with the Nazis, and with different degrees and forms of involvement, the Italians were guilty of genocide.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691179056
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	08/28/2018
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	208
Product dimensions:	5.60(w) x 8.60(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Simon Levis Sullam is associate professor of modern history at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. His previous books include Giuseppe Mazzini and the Origins of Fascism.

Table of Contents

Foreword David I. Kertzer vii

Prologue An Evening in 1943 1

1 The Ideological Context of Genocide 9

2 The Dynamics of Genocide: Interpreting Actions, Motivations, and Contexts 29

3 The Beginning of the Persecutions 59

4 The Seizure of Jewish Property 67

5 December 1943: Arrests and Deportations from Venice 76

6 Hunting Down Jews in Florence 92

7 At the Border: Jews on the Run 101

8 A City without Jews: Brescia 109

9 Informing 118

Conclusion Amnesties, Repression, and Oblivion 131

Acknowledgments 143

Notes 145

Glossary 175

Index 179

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"[A] devastating historiographical counterblast. . . . The picture Levis Sullam paints is layered and locally inflected, rich with regional variation and human stories. . . . The result is an important, proportionate, by turns angry and moving corrective: a call to complete the picture of Italy's Holocaust, to set alongside the stories of witnesses and righteous rescuers, the portraits of the perpetrators."—Robert Gordon, Times Literary Supplement

"[A] vigorously revisionist history."—The Economist

"[A] trailblazing book."—Janet Levy, Jerusalem Post

Editorial Reviews

08/27/2018
In this short, powerful book, Italian modern history professor Sullam (Giuseppe Mazzini and the Origins of Fascism) details an inconvenient truth about Italians’ role in the Holocaust: between 1943 and 1945, “thousands of Italians participated in the destruction of the Jews, delivering more than six thousand victims to their deaths.” That complicity with the Nazis followed logically from five years of government-sponsored persecution of Italy’s Jews. After anti-Semitic laws were introduced in 1938, “antisemitism had become a matter of ordinary governance,” including civil servants compiling lists of Jews that would eventually facilitate deportations to death camps. Ideologist-turned-legislator Giovanni Preziosi, who headed the General Inspectorate of Race, charged with looking after “the national character,” told Mussolini that “the total elimination of the Jews” should be their “first task.” Sullam makes extensive use of survivor testimony and primary source documents, such as Preziosi’s writings, to buttress his contentions. He explains that several factors contributed to the suppression of Italian culpability in the Nazi atrocities, including the 1946 amnesty that prevented prosecution for crimes committed by the Fascists and his country’s self-serving desire to view itself more positively, enabled by historians who “systematically offered a benevolent representation of the role of Italians in the ‘final solution.’ ” This is an illuminating addition to Holocaust history. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

One of the Best Jewish Books of 2018 (Howard Freedman, Jewish News of Northern California)

From the Publisher

"Although this is a relatively short book of 142 pages of text, author Simon Levis Sullam has provided enough research, data and accounts to put the lie to the idea of the ‘good Italians,’ though surely there were some, and has produced a serious indictment and revisionist history of Italy’s collaboration with Germany in committing genocide."

New York Journal of Books

"[A] vigorously revisionist history."

The Economist

2018-06-27
A tight, focused history of "the Italians who contributed to the genocide of the Jews" during World War II.About 9,000 of Italy's 47,000 Jews were deported to Nazi extermination camps after 1943. This is minuscule compared with tiny Belgium or Holland, but the details are no less shameful. In this short academic—but not turgid—monograph, Sullam (Modern History/Ca' Foscari Univ. of Venice; Giuseppe Mazzini and the Origins of Fascism, 2015) carefully documents Italian government complicity in the Holocaust. After the war, Italy joined other European nations in suppressing information about their complicity. According to the author, "Italy boasts dozens of centers for the study of the Resistance but few for the study of Fascism. Yet the Resistance lasted a year and a half and involved only limited parts of the country and a small minority of Italians. By contrast, the Fascist regime lasted two decades, covered the whole country, and involved millions." Mussolini paid little attention to anti-Semitism until 1938, when, responding to Hitler's hectoring, he promulgated Italy's racial laws, which restricted Jews' civil rights and banned them from public office. Little happened until after the 1943 Allied invasion, when Mussolini was driven from office. The Nazis restored him but took over governing and quickly announced that it was time to round up the Jews. Finding Jews required the close cooperation of local governments. In nations that refused—e.g., Denmark and Bulgaria—Jews weren't deported. Sadly, Italian officials went along, and Sullam delivers precise details of the bureaucratic maneuvering and tactics of various regions, the individuals who carried them out, and their postwar fates. Few were prosecuted, and almost all convicted were amnestied.Stories of individuals rescuing Jews fill popular histories of that period, but Sullam's fresh, pointed research makes it depressingly clear that most Italians kept quiet and officials followed orders.

Kirkus Reviews