When Courage Prevailed: The Rescue and Survival of Jews in the Independent State of Croatia 1941-1945 by Esther Gitman

Author:Esther Gitman [Gitman, Esther]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: World War II, rescuers, European History, Jewish History, Holocaust, Esther Gitman, Croatia
ISBN: 9781610830478
Publisher: Paragon House
Published: 2011-09-27T04:00:00+00:00

5

The Rescue of the Jews by the Italians, 1941–1943

On the day Italy capitulated—September 8, 1943—the head of that country’s legation in Zagreb ignored explicit directives from the Ustaše to leave all their files and documents behind before leaving Croatia. Carefully and systematically, Roberto Ducci removed hundreds of documents related to the rescue of Jews by the Italians. In 1944, he relied on these documents to publish a short article under the pseudonym Verax, thus revealing the story of the Italian Army’s rescue of thousands of NDH Jews.1 The Italian Foreign Ministry published its own memorandum on the rescue of Jews by the Italian Second Army a few months after the end of World War II.2

Initially, neither of these rescue stories was considered reliable, or even credible; after all, Italy was Germany’s major ally. Moreover, historians who were familiar with the retributions the Nazis inflicted upon those who betrayed them doubted that Italy would have dared to derail one of Germany’s main objectives: resolution of the Jewish Question. In 1951, however, French historian Jacques Sabille substantiated Verax’s story in a published article, “The Attitude of the Italians toward the Persecuted Jews of Croatia,” based on eleven documents from the period of July 24, 1942, to April 10, 1943, that he had uncovered in the German Foreign Ministry archives. Sabille’s findings, published in a book he coauthored with Leon Poliakov, became a watershed in research on the rescue of Jews by Italian non-Jews.3

More than six decades later, however, questions remain, such as: Why did generals and administrators in Italy’s fascist regime choose to risk their careers to rescue a few Jewish refugees? Italian officials already had evidence that Jews were being slaughtered in 1941; why did they wait until the summer of 1942 to actively participate in their rescue? And why in 1942, despite mounting pressure from the Ustaše and Nazi Germany to extradite the Jews in their zones of occupation, did the Italian officials flex their muscles and refuse to oblige? These are but a few questions addressed in this chapter.

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