The Italian Executioners by Levis Sullam Simon; Kertzer David I.; Smyth Oona

Author:Levis Sullam, Simon; Kertzer, David I.; Smyth, Oona
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2018-02-12T16:00:00+00:00

Six

HUNTING DOWN JEWS IN FLORENCE

The first Florentine roundup took place at dawn on November 6, 1943. It was carried out by the same German military forces responsible for the Roman roundup of October 16 who had since moved northward. However, according to an eyewitness report recounted after the Liberation, the attack on the synagogue—during the course of which the temple was surrounded and invaded, rounds of shots were fired, and sacred objects and sections of the interior were destroyed—saw the involvement of “Italian Fascists in plainclothes.” According to this same account, “In the following days, the Republican fascists stripped the offices and the school of all furnishings. The archive, the books from the temple and the office, firewood, and taledoth [ritual shawls] were all sold and mostly bought as old junk by a coal merchant.”1 The attacks spread throughout the city, leading to the arrest of many of the foreign Jews sheltering with Jewish assistance organizations and—with lists of names in hand—reaching the homes of individual Florentine Jews. The roundup probably led to more than a hundred arrests, and some Fascists participated even at this stage, acting as guides for the Germans as they made their way through the city. Among those arrested were Professor Augusto Gallico, along with his wife and two children (one aged ten), captured “by German soldiers with trucks driven by Fascists.”2

A raid carried out a few weeks later saw the involvement, along with the Germans, of one of the most vicious actors of Florentine Republican Fascism: the Carità gang. On the night between November 16 and 17, the infamous gang took part in the raid on the Franciscan convent in the Piazza del Carmine where numerous Jewish women and their children had taken refuge. They were held prisoner in the convent for four days before being transferred to Verona by truck—the Fossoli camp was not yet operational—and deported from there to Auschwitz. The raid was carried out by about thirty soldiers—both German and Italian—and one of the survivors described how the Fascists guarding the prisoners subjected the women to sexual molestation and extortion.3

The deportation of the Florentine Jews and the spoliation of their property could not have taken place without the assistance of three Italian entities playing a crucial political and organizational role. They were the aforementioned Carità gang, the Office of Jewish Affairs, and the local police headquarters, all three of which received the full support of the city’s Fascist prefecture. The notorious brutality of the gang led by Major Mario Carità, or, as it was officially known, the Special Services Branch of the 92nd Legion of the MVSN, has led to the widespread belief that it acted independently. However, this group too was part of the Fascist military body of the RSI and therefore operated in close coordination with both the prefecture and the Office of Jewish Affairs. During the first months of the group’s activity, Carità drew up a political orientation document, sending it to Mussolini himself in December 1943. In it, he called for a return to Fascism’s original squadrismo (i.

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