“Unraveling the Mystery: Why Italy Escaped a Post-War Reckoning for Its Atrocities”
Almost 1500 of those subdued individuals eventually died at Rab, bringing its death rate to 18% – a higher mortality than that of the infamous Nazi camp at Buchenwald.
It should be mentioned that Roatta had also concentrated at Rab some 1,000 Jewish civilians, which he actually went to great lengths to protect from the Germans and the Ustasha, the Croatian fascist militia. Because of this, these Jewish prisoners allegedly enjoyed better living conditions than the other inmates.
Roatta was just one of several officers and civil servants, many of them card-carrying Fascists, who actively sought to shield Jewish civilians from falling victim to the industrialised slaughter carried out by the Nazis. In fact, much like Nazi Germany’s other ally in Japan who went to some effort to take in Jewish refugees, the Fascist Party did not espouse anti-semitic beliefs at least at its inception. Throughout the 1920s and most of the 1930s, many Italian Jews supported the regime, with 171 serving as officers in the armed forces, and 279 as officers in the Blackshirt militia.
That said, as Rome and Berlin got cosier, in September 1938 Mussolini decreed the first in a series of infamous Racial Laws, which severely curtailed the rights and personal liberty of Italian Jews. Of the approximately 46,700 Jews living in Italy as of 1938, 7,129 would be eventually arrested. The vast majority of them would be deported to concentration camps in Germany and Poland, And only 1,016 would survive the end of the war.
