In this revisionist history of Italy's role in the Holocaust, the author presents an 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

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.

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.

How did Italy treat Jews during World War II? Historians have shown beyond doubt that many Italians were complicit in the Holocaust, yet Italy is still known as the Axis state that helped Jews. Shira Klein uncovers how Italian Jews, though victims of Italian persecution, promoted the view that Fascist Italy was categorically good to them. She shows how the Jews' experience in the decades before World War II - during which they became fervent Italian patriots while maintaining their distinctive Jewish culture - led them later to bolster the myth of Italy's wartime innocence in the Fascist racial campaign. Italy's Jews experienced a century of dramatic changes, from emancipation in 1848, to the 1938 Racial Laws, wartime refuge in America and Palestine, and the rehabilitation of Holocaust survivors. This cultural and social history draws on a wealth of unexplored sources, including original interviews and unpublished memoirs.

For more than 50 years, Giacomo Debenedetti's October 16, 1943 has been considered one of the best accounts of the shockingly brief roundup of 1000 Roman Jews from the oldest Jewish community in Europe for the gas chambers of Auschwitz. Completed a year after the event, Debenedetti's intimate details and vivid glimpses into the lives of the victims are especially poignant because Debenedetti himself was there to witness the event, which forced him and his entire family into hiding. This collection also includes Eight Jews, the companion piece to October 16, 1943, which was written in response to testimony about the Ardeatine Cave Massacres of March 24, 1944. In this essay, Debenedetti offers insights into the grisly horror and into assumptions about racial equality. Both of these works appear together, giving American readers a glimpse into the extraordinary mind of the man who was Italy's foremost critic of 20th century literature.

Mussolini's Children uses the lens of state-mandated youth culture to analyze the evolution of official racism in Fascist Italy. Between 1922 and 1940, educational institutions designed to mold the minds and bodies of Italy's children between the ages of five and eleven undertook a mission to rejuvenate the Italian race and create a second Roman Empire. This project depended on the twin beliefs that the Italian population did indeed constitute a distinct race and that certain aspects of its moral and physical makeup could be influenced during childhood. Eden K. McLean assembles evidence from state policies, elementary textbooks, pedagogical journals, and other educational materials to illustrate the contours of a Fascist racial ideology as it evolved over eighteen years. Her work explains how the most infamous period of Fascist racism, which began in the summer of 1938 with the publication of the "Manifesto of Race," played a critical part in a more general and long-term Fascist racial program.

One woman's discovery-and the incredible, unexpected journey it takes her on-of how her grandparent's small village of Campagna, Italy, helped save Jews during the Holocaust. Take a journey with Elizabeth Bettina as she discovers-much to her surprise-that her grandparent's small village, nestled in the heart of southern Italy, housed an internment camp for Jews during the Holocaust, and that it was far from the only one. Follow her discovery of survivors and their stories of gratitude to Italy and its people. Explore the little known details of how members of the Catholic church assisted and helped shelter Jews in Italy during World War II.