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Defying Evil How the Italian Army Saved Croatian Jews During the Holocaust

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Defying Evil How the Italian Army Saved Croatian Jews During the Holocaust DEFYING EVIL HOW THE ITALIAN ARMY SAVED CROATIAN JEWS DURING THE HOLOCAUST By Benjamin Wood History Publishing Company Palisades, New York Copyright ©2012 by Benjamin Wood All rights reserved. No part of the publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or trans- mitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—without prior written consent from the History Publishing Company. Published in the United States by History Publishing company LLC Palisades, New York www.historypublishingco.com ISBN-10: 1-933909-27-7 ISBN-13: 9781933909-27-1 LCCN: 2012933032 SAN: 850-5942 Wood, Benjamin, 1964- Defying evil : how the Italian Army saved Croatian Jews during the Holocaust / by Benjamin Wood. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. LCCN 2012933032 ISBN 9781933909271 (pbk.) ISBN 9781933909288 (e-book) 1. Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)--Croatia. 2. Italy. Army--Officers. I. Title. D804.3.W66 2012 940.53'18 QBI12-600031 Printed in the United States on acid free paper 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 First Edition For my father and step-father, both of whom loved history. TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION.....................................................................9 1. • • • WAR COMES TO CROATIA................................................... 13 2. • • • REFUGE IN THE ITALIAN ZONE OF OCCUPATION...............43 3. • • • MUSSOLINI’S TREATMENT OF JEWS AT HOME AND ABROAD........................................................................95 4. • • • THE ITALIAN WITHDRAWAL..............................................153 5. • • • FIGHTING WITH THE PARTISANS......................................185 CONCLUSION.....................................................................209 INTRODUCTION THE STORY OF ITALY’S RESCUE AND DEFENSE OF CROATIAN JEWS IS unique in the history of World War II and the Holocaust. Officials at the highest level of Fascist Italy defied their ally Nazi Germany to protect Jews who were not even citizens of their own country. Unquestionably, thousands of Croatian Jews would have been mur- dered had it not been for the heroic efforts of members of the Italian Military and Foreign Ministry between April 1941 and July 1943. Why and how did Italians in positions of power risk their careers, reputations, and, in some cases, their very lives to protect a persecut- ed minority? In occupied Croatia in the summer of 1941, individual Italian soldiers found themselves intervening to save the lives of Jews and Serbs who were being murdered by Croatian Fascists. Over the next two years, these isolated acts would develop into a conspiracy at the highest levels of the Italian government and military to save Jews from deportation and death at the hands of the Nazis. Benito Mussolini’s officers and statesmen were able to rescue Jewish men, women, and children first from the Ustasha (the Croatian Fascists) and then from the Nazis for several reasons. Unlike Adolf Hitler, who rarely took the advice of his generals or allowed subordinates to disagree with him on matters of policy, Mussolini could be influenced by members of the Commando Supremo (Supreme Command) which included the army’s most sen- 9 10 • • • DEFYING EVIL ior generals as well as civilian officials. Significantly, Mussolini was far from an anti-Semite (although, ever the political opportunist, he did pass anti-Jewish laws in 1938 in an effort to draw closer to Germany). Mussolini had known and respected Jews including many who had served in the Italian army. In the end, he would not allow himself to become involved in the evil of the Holocaust. Of additional assistance to the Italians’ efforts was the fact that the Nazis permitted Italy a free hand over the areas of Europe it occupied during the war. Until 1943, Italy was treated as a full part- ner rather than as a puppet regime. Hitler had always had great respect for Il Duce (“the Leader,” as Mussolini was known), and viewed Mussolini as a mentor and key theorist of Fascist philosophy. This admiration allowed the Italian dictator a degree of freedom unequalled in Nazi dominated Europe. Throughout the period from 1941 to 1943, the German Foreign Ministry, led by Joachim von Ribbentrop, continually pressured the Italian government to surrender Jews who had fled into Italian areas of occupation. The Jews would have been sent to Auschwitz, the same destination to which the Germans were already deporting thousands from their zone of occupied Croatia. The mercurial Mussolini allowed himself to be swayed by subordinates in the Army and Foreign Ministry to resist Germany’s demands. Hitler, while undoubtedly annoyed, nevertheless did not violate Il Duce’s “sphere of influence” by moving troops in to seize the refugees who sought Italian protection. The fact that Italian soldiers and statesmen saved Jews in Croatia does not of course absolve Italy of the atrocities it commit- ted against civilians prior to and during the Second World War. The 1935 Italian invasion and subsequent rule of Ethiopia were brutal. Within the Balkans, Slovenes and Communists partisans suffered terribly at the hands of the Italians. Yet Italy deserves great credit for its actions on behalf of the Jews. Approximately 3,500 Jewish men, women, and children owe their lives to the Italians. Although the motivations for some Italians were somewhat questionable, the overriding tenet was a sense of humanitarianism. Many Italian officers, when told by their INTRODUCTION • • • 11 German counterparts that they would have to hand over Jews, sim- ply refused, declaring that such an action was beneath the dignity of the Italian army and a violation of Italian honor. The courage and compassion the Italians displayed in challenging Nazi authority and standing up for a powerless minority provide a true bright spot in a very dark chapter of history. 1 War Comes to Croatia BY THE SPRING OF 1941, ADOLF HITLER WAS THE MASTER OF Europe. A year and a half earlier, after Hitler signed a nonaggression pact with the Soviet Union, his armies had begun the Second World War by annihilating Poland with a Blitzkrieg (lightning war) attack. The next year France fell to the Wehrmacht (army forces of Nazi Germany). What the German Army had been unable to do in four years of fighting during the First World War, it accomplished in six weeks in 1940. The countries of Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg and Norway fell in quick succession. Following a desperate air bat- tle in the fall, England alone held out against the Nazis. Fascist Italy too had been aggressively expanding its control over foreign lands. Benito Mussolini sought to create a new Roman Empire and in 1935 attacked Ethiopia. This was followed in 1939 by the invasion of Albania and in 1940 by a much more difficult cam- paign against Greece. By March of 1941, the eyes of the two dicta- tors were fixed upon the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. The “Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes” had been established in 1918 at the end of World War I (the name changed to Yugoslavia in October 19291). The country was formed through the 13 14 • • • DEFYING EVIL Treaty of Versailles by stripping each of the defeated Central Powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Turkey) of territory. The former Austro-Hungarian provinces of Slovenia, Croatia-Slavonia, Dalmatia, and Bosnia-Hercegovina, were united with Montenegro and the Kingdom of Serbia, (including Macedonia, Vojvodina and Kosovo) to form the new nation. The capital was established at Belgrade and the Serbian king became the titular head of state. Yugoslavia therefore was comprised of a patchwork of national- ities and ethnic groups. The population numbered approximately 16 million in 1941 and included some 6.5 million Serbs, 3.75 million Croats, 1.5 million Slovenes, 900,000 Macedonians, 800,000 Muslims, 400,000 Hungarians, 250,000 ethnic Germans, 400,000 Montenegrins and some 400,000 additional minorities including Czechs, Slovaks, Romanians, Jews and Gypsies.2 From the beginning, many Croats resented Serbian economic and political domination and yearned for independence. As a result, a Croatian terrorist movement, the Ustasha (from the verb Ustati meaning “to rise up”), sprang up in 1929 and in 1934, its members succeeded in assassinating the Yugoslav King Alexander I. Following the King’s murder his son ascended to the throne as King Peter II. Since Peter was only eleven years old at the time, his cousin, Prince Paul, became Regent and head of state until the Axis invasion of 1941. On March 25, 1941, under enormous pressure from Nazi Germany, the Yugoslav government of Prime Minister Diagisa Cverkovich was forced to become a signatory to the Tripartite Pact. Originally signed by the governments of Germany, Italy, and Japan on September 27, 1940, this treaty bound the three states together economically, politically and militarily. The three nations acknowl- edged spheres of influence; Germany was to be master of Europe, Italy would take control of the Mediterranean, and Japan would create a new order in the Far East. Should any one of the three be attacked by a nation not already involved in the European war or the Sino- Japanese conflict, the other two were honor bound to aid the third. Between November 1940 and March 1941, the countries of Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria also joined the Tripartite Pact. WAR COMES TO CROATIA • • • 15 On March 26, one day after Prime Minister Cvetkovich added his signature to the Pact, huge demonstrations, organized mainly by the Communist Party, erupted in Belgrade condemning the govern- ment’s actions. The following day, a small group of Yugoslav air force officers in a bloodless coup d’etat, ousted the regent, Prince Paul. In the wake of the removal of his cousin, King Peter II assumed control of the government and named a new Prime minister Adolf Hitler, upon hearing of the Serbian public’s opposition to being drawn into the Axis orbit and seeing an opportunity to destroy a creation of the German-loathed Treaty of Versailles, began plan- ning the invasion of Yugoslavia.
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