A British Boy in Fascist Italy by Peter Ghiringhelli

Author:Peter Ghiringhelli
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780752496771
Publisher: The History Press
Published: 2013-05-06T00:00:00+00:00

14

RACE LAWS AND

PERSECUTION OF THE JEWS

Although I did not know it at the time, Italian officers of the calibre of Croce were few and far between. Matters might have been different had Marshal Badoglio acted swiftly and given decisive orders to the army to resist the Germans. The result of his indecision and flight to Brindisi with the king on 9 September, left the armed forces in chaos and many units just remained in their barracks waiting for orders that never came. The result was that around 800,000 were quickly disarmed by the Germans and taken away in long cattle wagon trains to detention camps in Germany and Poland, their status much lower than that of regular prisoners of war. The same inertia affected many Allied POWs detained in Italian camps; the many who decided to sit tight, expecting a rapid, unopposed advance of Allied forces, were simply rounded up and taken off to Germany. General Montgomery, as he then was, issued an order to the head of MI9, the military intelligence service for escaped prisoners of war in occupied Europe, which was secretly communicated to the Italian POW camps: they should ‘Keep fit and stay put’ and await the arrival of Allied troops – aptly described by one historian as ‘rather stupid advice’,1 it proved to be very helpful to the Germans.

As soon as the puppet government of Salò was set up, everyone from the age of 12 had to have new identity cards, and those issued before 25 July 1943 were declared invalid. These new Republican Fascist cards were in Italian and German. They also stated which race you belonged to – Razza: Ariana – which seemed a bit superfluous since no ID cards were issued to Jews. My father obtained ID cards for my mother and me, which gave my mother’s birthplace as Pianlavagnolo and mine as Musadino instead of Leeds. These were probably issued by Callogero Marrone; a very minor detail compared with the hundreds of Jewish lives that this brave man saved.

A life-long anti-fascist, Marrone was the head of the Varese Register Office, and from there he issued a large number of false identity cards to Jews and anti-fascists. He was betrayed (it is believed by a Fascist employed in his office) and arrested by the SS on 4 January 1944. He was held for nine months in a succession of prisons, first in Varese, where he was badly tortured in an effort to get him to reveal the National Liberation Committee network, but he refused to say a word. Then he was taken to a prison in Como for daily interrogation; and on to the notorious San Vittore prison in Milan after a failed attempt by Partisans to free him. After this the SS seem to have given up interrogating him and he was sent to the Bolsano-Gries transit-concentration camp, run by the Butcher of Trieste, Odilo Globocnik.2 There he managed to get a letter smuggled out on a scrap of paper, writing in

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