Geographies of the Holocaust

3. Retracing the “Hunt for Jews”: A Spatio-Temporal Analysis of Arrests during the Holocaust in Italy

In July 1943, after a serIes of mIlItary defeats and amid growing domestic unrest, Italian Fascist leader Benito Mussolini was deposed from power and arrested. The new Italian government, headed by Marshal Pietro Badoglio, remained formally allied with the Germans, but also secretly began negotiations with the Allies, who were quickly approaching the Italian mainland from the south. Although the Badoglio government did not undo the system of anti-Semitic measures put in place during the previous years, Jews in Italy were nonetheless hopeful that their trials would soon be over. This was not to be. 3 Retracing the “Hunt for Jews” A Spatio-Temporal Analysis of Arrests during the Holocaust in Italy Alberto Giordano and Anna Holian 53 On September 8, 1943, the Allies announced that an armistice with Italy had been signed. In response, German forces quickly occupied the country. They released Mussolini and installed him as the head of a new Fascist government, the Italian Social Republic (Repubblica Sociale Italiana, or RSI). However, real power now lay in the hand of the Germans. The German occupation signaled the beginning of the Holocaust in Italy.1 Persecuted by Mussolini’s Fascist government, which had passed a series of racial laws in 1938, Jews in Italy were now also subject to deportation and extermination. This chapter examines the history and geography of the Holocaust in Italy, focusing in particular on the arrest process. It is part of a larger project that aims to discover, describe, and explain the spatio-temporal patterns of the Holocaust in Italy. Although the history of the Italian Holocaust has in recent years become the focus of some scholarly and popular interest, no study to date has examined this event from an explicitly spatial perspective. In broad outlines, the spatial and temporal progression of the Holocaust in Italy is well established. On account of local history studies, the specific forms the Holocaust took in numerous Italian towns and cities are also well known. However, there has been little systematic and especially quantitative analysis on the regional or national scale. We still know relatively little about the patterns that characterized the actions of the German and Italian forces. How were the arrest, internment, and deportation of Jews carried out across time and space? What were the key spatial and temporal variations? How, and to what extent, did German and Italian practices differ? Similarly, we know little about the patterns that characterized the actions and spatio-temporal trajectories of the victims. How did Jews in Italy respond to the threat of arrest? How did their trajectories vary by age, gender, and nationality? These are the questions that drove our research. To answer them, we drew on existing records of the Holocaust in Italy, most important a database containing thousands of records on individual victims, which we used to create a comprehensive historical GIS of the Holocaust in Italy. Our analysis is quantitative: we use spatial analytical techniques to reach an understanding of the geographical and temporal patterns of arrests. The questions we pose are both geographical and historical: specifically, our goal is to understand how these patterns varied according to the identity of both the victims and the perpetrators. The History of the Holocaust in Italy Jews constituted a tiny minority of the Italian population, about 0.1 percent in the late 1930s. At the time of the racial census of August 1938, about 58,400 people of Jewish descent lived in the country, including Giordano and Holian 54 about 10,400 foreign-born Jews; the numbers for those who declared themselves Jewish by religion were somewhat lower, about 46,600 in total, including about 9,400 foreigners.2 Most Jews lived in the northern and central parts of Italy, primarily in the cities. Large communities existed in Rome, Venice, Trieste, Florence, Ferrara, Turin, and other urban centers. The Italian Jewish population was traditionally secular and very integrated; intermarriage was common, and by 1938 one in three adult Jews was married to an individual of another religion. The rise of Fascism to power in 1922 did not initially spell disaster for Italy’s Jewish population. Although there were some committed anti-Semites within the Fascist movement, until the late 1930s they had little impact on the platform of the movement itself. Moreover, anti -Semitism was marginal to the worldview of Mussolini. In particular, Mussolini did not share the biological racism of the Nazis. Many Jews...