“He welcomes us affably with a slight smile. He is serene, seated at his desk. He motions to us to advance as we stand hesitatingly on the threshold. It was the first time I was to see the face of Il Duce up close…
“On hearing my affirmation of the unshakable loyalty of Italian Jews to the Fatherland, His Excellency Mussolini looks me straight in the eye and says with a voice that penetrates straight down to my heart: ‘I have never doubted it.’”
– Ettore Ovazza, Fascist Party member and prominent member of the Turin Jewish community, 1929
Eighty years after his death at the hands of Italian partisans, Benito Mussolini remains an enigma. Often derided as an overly dramatic buffoon, a tyrannical caricature, and more often cast in the same light as Adolf Hitler, he ruled Italy for more than two decades with an iron hand, introducing the concept of fascism as an attempt to help the country recover from the chaos after World War I and make Italy a true world power.
In the annals of European tragedy, the story of Italy’s Jews under fascism is a tale of paradox and betrayal – an elegy for a community that once believed itself inseparably Italian. At the heart of this drama stands Mussolini, the duce (“leader,” derived from Latin dux and related to “duke”) of a modern Roman Empire, a man who began his reign with Jewish friends and patrons, and ended it as Hitler’s willing accomplice, overseeing the racial degradation of the very people who had helped raise him to great heights.
It is a story that defies easy categorization. Mussolini was no Hitler. He did not emerge from the fever swamps of antisemitic pamphleteering or the beer halls of conspiracist madness. In his early years, Il Duce was not only indifferent to antisemitism – he seemed to scorn it. And yet, by 1938 he would sign the infamous Racial Laws that excluded Jews from Italian life; and, in his final act, he collaborated with Nazi Germany in the deportation and extermination of Italian Jews.
To understand how this betrayal came to pass, one must begin not with the fascist regime but with the Jews of Italy themselves – among the oldest communities in Europe.
A loyal history
Jews have lived in the Italian Peninsula since Roman times. Over the centuries, they endured ghettos and papal decrees, but their fortunes rose dramatically in the 19th century. With the unification of Italy under the House of Savoy, and particularly the influence of Piedmontese liberalism, Jews were emancipated and embraced as full citizens of the new Italian state.
For the first time, they were able to leave the ghettos and participate in civilian life in Italy, many rising to the top of their fields. They served in parliament, ran banks, taught in universities. Many espoused Italian nationalism with fervor, seeing in it a civic creed to replace religious tribalism. During the Risorgimento (unification) and beyond, Jewish patriots fought for Italy’s independence. This deep-rooted loyalty was a point of pride – but ultimately, a source of their undoing.
Italian prime minister Luigi Luzzatti, who took office in 1910, was one of the world’s first Jewish heads of government; and another, Ernesto Nathan, served as mayor of Rome from 1907 to 1913. By 1902, out of 350 senators, six were Jews. By 1920, there were 19.
For many Italian Jews, particularly in the northern cities of Turin, Milan, and Genoa, leaving the ghettos was an opportunity to shed religiously Orthodox lifestyles and led to an increase in assimilation. By the time Mussolini took power in 1922, many felt just as Italian as they were Jewish, proud of their homeland and believing that their homeland was proud of them. Thousands of Jews volunteered to serve in WW I when Italy joined on the side of the Allies against Austria-Hungary and Germany.
Mussolini – the early years
Benito Mussolini entered the world on July 29, 1883, in the modest village of Dovia di Predappio, nestled in the province of Forli in the Romagna region. His father, Alessandro Mussolini, worked as a blacksmith and was a committed socialist. Mis mother, Rosa Maltoni, taught at a local school and was a devout Catholic.
Reflecting his father’s ideological leanings, the boy was named after the Mexican liberal leader Benito Juárez, with his middle names – Andrea and Amilcare – honoring prominent Italian socialist figures Andrea Costa and Amilcare Cipriani. In return for permitting these politically charged names, his mother insisted that her son be baptized. Benito would later be joined by two siblings, Arnaldo and Edvige.
Raised in rural surroundings, Mussolini displayed early hints of the narcissism and hunger for authority that would define his political life. Following in his father’s radical footsteps, he emerged as one of Italy’s most visible socialist agitators. In 1911, he joined a socialist-led protest against Italy’s war in Libya, railing against what he regarded as a colonialist campaign.
His fiery rhetoric resulted in five months in prison. Upon release, he took a leading role in purging the Socialist Party of its more moderate elements, such as Ivanoe Bonomi and Leonida Bissolati, whom he derided as revisionists for supporting the war.
By 1912, Mussolini had secured a seat on the National Directorate of the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) and was rewarded with the editorship of Avanti! – the party’s official newspaper. Under his leadership, the paper’s circulation catapulted from 20,000 to 100,000 copies, elevating his influence on the Italian Left.
WHEN WAR erupted in Europe in August 1914, socialist parties across the continent found themselves torn between ideology and nationalism. Italy was no exception. Nationalist fervor surged, with prominent figures like author Gabriele D’Annunzio pushing for intervention on behalf of Italian irredentism. The Liberal government rallied public support for joining the Allies. Within the PSI, however, views on the war were split. After anti-militarist demonstrations ended in bloodshed, the PSI responded with the general strike known as Red Week and formally adopted an anti-war stance.
Initially, Mussolini toed the party line. In an August 1914 editorial, he wrote emphatically: “Down with the war. We remain neutral.” But beneath the surface, his thinking was shifting. He began to see the war as a unique opportunity, for Italy and for himself. Influenced by strong anti-Austrian sentiment and the belief that Italians under Habsburg rule could achieve liberation through conflict, Mussolini began to reconsider. He argued that socialists had a role to play in dismantling the imperial monarchies of Germany and Austria-Hungary.
As he moved further toward interventionism, Mussolini began attacking his former comrades. He painted anti-war socialists as disconnected from the Italian working class, who he claimed were increasingly drawn to the idea of a “revolutionary war.” He accused the PSI of failing to grasp the national dimensions of the unfolding conflict. His public break with the party came soon after, culminating in his expulsion for supporting intervention.
With his rupture from the Socialist Party complete, Mussolini reinvented himself. He distanced himself from class-based politics and aligned instead with a brand of revolutionary nationalism that sought to transcend class altogether. In October 1914, he launched a new newspaper, Il Popolo d’Italia (“the people of Italy”), and founded the Fascio Rivoluzionario d’Azione Internazionalista (“Revolutionary Fasces (League) of International Action”).
MUSSOLINI’S NEW doctrine was rooted in the idea of a vanguard elite – not of workers but of dynamic, revolutionary individuals from any social stratum. Although he had cast off traditional socialism, he still identified with the legacy of Italy’s nationalist-socialist heroes like Giuseppe Garibaldi, and now positioned himself as a “nationalist socialist.”
These early principles would evolve into the bedrock of fascism. By the end of 1914, Mussolini’s nascent political movement had taken shape under the similar name of Fasci d’Azione Rivoluzionaria (“Fasces (League) of Revolutionary Action”). Its followers referred to themselves as fascisti.
The movement was still disorganized, unable to attract mass support, and was frequently harassed by state authorities and orthodox socialists. The animosity between interventionists like Mussolini and the socialist establishment soon spilled over into violence. These clashes helped solidify Mussolini’s belief that political violence was a legitimate and necessary tool of fascism.
When Italy joined the war, Mussolini followed through on his beliefs and volunteered for military service. He was deployed to the Isonzo (Soca) River front in the northeast, participating in the Second and the Third Battle of the Isonzo in September and October 1915, respectively.
Mussolini served approximately nine months in the trenches and contracted paratyphoid fever during that period. His combat service came to an end in February 1917, when a mortar explosion left his body riddled with shrapnel. He was evacuated from the front and was released from the hospital in August. Once recovered, he returned to his position as editor-in-chief of Il Popolo d’Italia, the platform that would become the mouthpiece for his new political vision.
Rise of fascism
When fascism emerged in the early 1920s as a viable opposition to socialism, a surprising number of Jews, relative to their small number, joined the National Fascist Party. Their support continued, in some cases right up until the passing of the racial laws in 1938.
Compared to Rome and the southern cities, where the poorer Jewish families lived, the northern cities were filled with wealthy industrialist Jews, bankers, and merchants, who were vehemently afraid of the rise of socialism.
Italy at this time was in chaos. As governments were formed and then fell, the socialists took over the streets, and strikes were prevalent in all major cities. “At the end of the First World War, Italy was in a state of total chaos and on the brink of Communist revolution,” a WW I veteran recalled years later: “Rioting, anarchy, endless strikes.
“When we, the Italian soldiers, came back from the trenches after three hard years of living and breathing the air of all the dead men around us, instead of being welcomed back with the Italian flag we were met by the red Communist ones, as well as stones and insults,” he lamented.
The fascists promised order to the anarchy that had gripped an Italy on the brink of civil war. The fascists, with the axe (fasces) as their symbol, their intimidating black uniforms, and their motto Me ne frego (“I don’t give a damn”) took to the streets to drive the trams, sweep the streets, and try to provide a visible alternative to the social disorder that was gripping post-WW I Italy.
The return of thousands of WW I veterans, scorned by the socialists, provided Mussolini with a support base. By this time, he had entered official politics and was elected to the Italian parliament, although his party was still a minority.
In the early hours of October 28, 1922, some 30,000 fascist blackshirts converged on the capital, Rome, pressing for the removal of prime minister Luigi Facta and the establishment of a fascist-led government. By that morning, as tensions rose, King Victor Emmanuel III, who wielded ultimate authority over the military, rejected the cabinet’s plea to impose martial law. This refusal led to Facta’s resignation. Mussolini, notably, remained in Milan throughout the standoff, but the king sent for him and invited him to form a new government. Mussolini was now Italy’s new prime minister.
The monarch’s decision to entrust Mussolini with power has been a subject of ongoing historical debate. Some interpret it as a miscalculation born of fear and opportunism. Mussolini had already secured strong backing from the military, landowners, and industrial elites. The king, alongside much of the conservative establishment, feared the outbreak of civil war and believed that bringing Mussolini into the fold might stabilize the situation. What they failed to anticipate was that by legitimizing the fascists, they were paving the way for a dictatorship rather than merely restoring order.
IT IS estimated that over 200 Jews took part in the March on Rome in 1922. A later census recorded nearly 600 Jewish fascists who had joined the party before Mussolini came to power.
Ettore Ovazza, a WW I veteran, Turinese Jewish banker, and Fascist Party member who took part in the march, later wrote of that time: “In the nation, political hatred spread like wildfire… The young returning home, proud of having fought with honor, many with their brave bodies wounded, were downcast and alone… Instead, suspicion, hostility, inexplicable feelings had developed against those who had, with clear conscience, served their country… This cry of anguish was heard by a man who was fully worthy of it: by Benito Mussolini.”
Slowly but surely, over the succeeding years, Mussolini and the fascists were able to strip Italy piece by piece of its civil liberties until a dictatorship was firmly in place. Political parties were outlawed except for the Fascist Party, newspapers and the media were tightly controlled, and a cult of personality was put into place. Mussolini gradually became Il Duce: The Dictator.
Many Italians, including Jews, were willing to forgo these individual freedoms for the promise to make Italy great again – many were still emotionally wounded by Italy’s failure to obtain lands promised to it after WW I at the Treaty of Versailles. Mussolini promised them a vision to restore the glory of the Roman Empire and make Italy the Mediterranean’s great power, based on the fascist concept of spazio vitale – “living space for Italians” (similar to the Nazis’ lebensraum).
Jews were included in that vision, too.
“Look, you were born under a lucky star; look at the New Italy passing by,” Ovazza would tell his newborn son just months after the March on Rome.
Mussolini’s mistress
There is one clear example to point to Mussolini’s lack of antisemitic fervor and how little he seemed to believe in the racial supremacy of Italians earlier in his career. Perhaps no figure embodied the entanglement of Jewish intellect and fascist ambition more vividly than Margherita Sarfatti, Mussolini’s Jewish mistress.
Margherita Grassini, as she was born, came from a prominent Venetian Jewish family, the daughter of Emma Levi and Amedeo Grassini, a successful lawyer and businessman.
Raised in a grand palazzo (“palatial building”) along Venice’s Canal Grande, Margherita received private tutoring but grew disillusioned with her privileged upbringing. Drawn to socialist ideals, she left home at 18 to marry an older man, Cesare Sarfatti, a Jewish lawyer from Padua who shared her political views. The couple moved to Milan in 1902, where they became central figures in the city’s cultural scene. Their weekly salons at 93 Corso Venezia attracted leading artists and intellectuals, including Mussolini.
Margherita began a romantic relationship with Mussolini in 1911 while working as an art critic for Avanti!, which Mussolini was editing at the time. She wielded considerable influence on Mussolini for almost two decades. After her husband’s death in 1924, she authored a biography titled The Life of Benito Mussolini (published as Dux in Italy). The book’s insider perspective made it a bestseller, with 17 editions, translated into 18 languages.
By the 1930s, Margherita’s relationship with Mussolini had deteriorated as he distanced himself from her and pursued younger women. Converting to Catholicism in 1930, she fled Italy in 1938 amid growing antisemitism, taking with her 1,272 of Mussolini’s letters. She settled first in Switzerland, then in South America, where she wrote for El Diario in Montevideo, Uruguay.
She returned to Italy in 1947 after the war and re-established herself in the art world. While her surviving children endured the war in Italy, her sister and brother-in-law were arrested and died en route to Auschwitz.
Mussolini’s relationship with the Jews
Mussolini himself acknowledged the contribution of Italian Jews in the early years of his regime. In 1929, the same year he met Ettore Ovazza – the head of a Turinese Jewish delegation – he publicly recognized the importance of Jewish participation in Italian society and framed Jewish culture as essentially Mediterranean, in line with his early view of Italy’s place in a broader Latin and cultural sphere. At the time, Mussolini considered the Jews native Italians, a people who had lived on the Italian Peninsula for millennia and were woven into the national fabric.
The fascist leader frequently referenced the deep historical roots of Italy’s Jewish community, sometimes claiming that some Jews had lived in Rome since the time of its ancient kings. That, he said, meant they were essentially Italian and should be left in peace.
In addition to Margherita, other Jews were also deeply embedded in the regime. Ovazza launched the newspaper La Nostra Bandiera (“our flag”) in 1935 to highlight Jewish support for fascism and the loyalty of Italian Jews to the regime. He regularly found himself at odds with Jews of Zionist persuasion, and found it conflicting how Jews could possibly have any other loyalties (such as an attempt to found a homeland) other than to Italy.
Prominent Jewish figures inside the state apparatus included Giorgio Morpurgo, a senior army officer; aviator Aldo Finzi; Renzo Ravenna, the mayor of Ferrara and confidant of fascist leader Italo Balbo; and Guido Jung, who converted to Christianity in 1938, perhaps under pressure. Margherita, for her part, distanced herself from Mussolini as the regime turned decisively toward racial antisemitism.
At the same time, Italy during the early 1930s became a surprising refuge for Jews fleeing persecution in Germany. Up to 11,000 Jewish refugees entered the country in the first half of the decade, including thousands from Germany. Despite the growing presence of fascist authoritarianism, Italy was, for a time, a relatively safe haven.
The regime even entertained cooperation with Zionist leaders, proposing initiatives to encourage Italian Jewish emigration to Palestine. The idea, from Mussolini’s perspective, was to foster a cadre of pro-Italian Jews in the British Mandate – a way to undermine London’s influence in the Middle East and increase Italy’s strong position in European politics.
IN 1934, at the request of Zionist leader Vladimir Jabotinsky, Mussolini’s government helped establish a naval training school for Jewish cadets in Civitavecchia, a major seaport 60 kilometers (37 miles) west-northwest of Rome – a curious footnote in the history of the Israeli Navy.
For much of the 1920s and into the early 1930s, Mussolini firmly denied that antisemitism had any place in Italian fascism. In one early newspaper article, he wrote that fascism would never elevate a “Jewish question” and stated clearly: “Italy knows no antisemitism, and we believe that it will never know it.”
He went on to express hope that Italian Jews would not behave in a way that would give rise to such sentiments. In a 1930s interview with German-Jewish writer Emil Ludwig, Mussolini dismissed antisemitism as a “German vice” and declared that there was no Jewish question in Italy because a healthy government would never permit one to arise.
On more than one occasion, Mussolini even went so far as to mock Nazi racial theory, particularly the notion of a superior Aryan race, calling it idiotic and unscientific.
“National pride has no need for the delirium of race,” Mussolini stated.
The regime also took a unique stance toward Ethiopian Jews – the Beta Israel community – after Italy’s conquest of Ethiopia in 1935. Italian authorities enacted laws to protect this Jewish minority from persecution by local Christians and Muslims. They even encouraged cultural links between Italian Jews and their Ethiopian counterparts.
Filosseno Luzzatto, one of the first European scholars to study the Falasha (Ethiopian Jews), was an Italian Jew, and his mid-19th century ethnographic work remained influential. Other Italian colonies, such as Rhodes and Libya, would see greater destruction to their Jewish communities during the Holocaust.
Mussolini and the Catholic Church
Italian antisemitism during the fascist era cannot be understood without first confronting the Catholic Church’s long and troubled history with the Jewish people and how that tension evolved amid Italy’s political unification and its uneasy accord with Mussolini.
For centuries, the Catholic Church had held both theological and political sway over vast swaths of the Italian Peninsula. From the Middle Ages through to the 19th century, the Papal States operated as a powerful temporal entity, with Rome at its center.
That dominance ended with the Risorgimento, and it can be argued that the biggest loser during the unification of Italy was the papacy and its loss of both land and influence within the country. In 1870, the Kingdom of Italy annexed Rome and the remaining papal territories, effectively stripping the Vatican of its political sovereignty. The pope, furious at the loss, declared himself a “prisoner in the Vatican,” refusing to recognize the legitimacy of the new Italian state.
The bitterness from this episode colored church attitudes toward the new secular Italy – and toward liberalism, nationalism, and, often, Jews, whom church doctrine had long scapegoated as obstinate nonbelievers. Catholic antisemitism, deeply rooted in notions of deicide and spiritual inferiority, remained embedded in clerical thought well into the modern era. Though racial antisemitism as developed in Germany was not native to Catholic theology, suspicion of Jews as a political and cultural “other” persisted through the early 20th century.
By the 1920s, fascism’s rise presented the Vatican with both a threat and an opportunity. Mussolini was an atheist and former socialist (and it can be argued that he had even more anti-Catholic than any antisemitic feelings), but he also promised order, anti-communism, and the restoration of traditional values.
In 1929, the two sides reached a historic compromise: the Lateran Accords. These agreements, signed by Mussolini on behalf of the Kingdom of Italy and Cardinal Pietro Gasparri for the Holy See, recognized Vatican City as an independent state, granted the church financial compensation for its lost lands, and declared Catholicism the state religion of Italy.
This pact transformed the relationship between church and state, giving the Vatican institutional legitimacy and influence in fascist Italy. But it also placed the church in a moral bind. While it gained protection and prestige, it did so at the price of accommodating – and at times enabling – a regime that would turn sharply antisemitic by the late 1930s.
THROUGHOUT THE 1920s and early 1930s, the church’s stance regarding Jews was a mix of theological disdain and political caution. Catholic newspapers and clergy often echoed conspiratorial rhetoric, portraying Jews as agents of liberalism, communism, or materialism. The Vatican itself rarely intervened publicly on behalf of Jews, though it did occasionally caution against extreme nationalism and racial ideology.
When the fascist racial laws were introduced in 1938, the church’s response was muted and conflicted. Pope Pius XI did issue a quiet but powerful rebuke of racism in a July 1938 speech at the Propaganda Fide college, declaring that all humans belonged to a single race. In September of that year, he went further, telling a group of Belgian pilgrims, “It is impossible for a Christian to take part in antisemitism… Spiritually, we are all Semites.”
However, institutional Catholic resistance to the racial laws was inconsistent. While individual clergy, such as cardinal Schuster of Milan, condemned the laws as a heresy and a danger akin to Bolshevism, others sought accommodation or remained silent. The Vatican did not publicly denounce the racial legislation or the growing violence against Jews. Nor did it excommunicate fascist leaders or propagandists.
Pius XI died in February 1939, just as he was preparing a powerful encyclical, Humani generis unitas (“humans of all kinds united”), which was expected to explicitly condemn racism and antisemitism. His successor, Pius XII, who came under derision for decades for his lack of speaking out against the Holocaust, chose not to publish it. As war broke out and Nazi racial ideology spread, the church prioritized diplomacy and the preservation of Catholic institutions over public confrontation with fascist regimes.
By aligning with Mussolini in 1929, the church had gained temporal sovereignty and safeguarded its institutional interests. But in doing so, it entangled itself with a state that would ultimately betray Italy’s Jews. Catholic antisemitism in Italy during the 1920s through 1940s was not of the genocidal Nazi variety, but it was a centuries-old prejudice that paved the way for silence, indifference, and complicity at a critical moment in history.
Beginning of the end
For Italy’s Jews, the beginning of the end began with the election of Adolf Hitler as German chancellor in January 1933, although relations between the two fascist powers were not always positive. The two countries almost came to war over Austria before Mussolini eventually threw his lot in completely with the German Führer.
By 1932, an estimated 10,000 Jews were members of the Fascist Party – around one in five of Italy’s 47,000-strong Jewish community. But Mussolini’s protection was conditional. By this time, the cult of the Duce had firmly taken over the optimism of a few years before. Mussolini now appeared in military garb as opposed to the statesman’s suit of his earlier political career. He also reverted to a populist type, with speeches declaring the future greatness of the Italian people and its rejuvenated empire.
Within the fascist ranks, there were voices who had long pushed antisemitic rhetoric from the fringes. Figures such as Roberto Farinacci and Giovanni Preziosi represented a more virulent strain of fascism.
Preziosi, in particular, was responsible for publishing one of the earliest Italian editions of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in 1921, alongside an almost simultaneous version from Umberto Benigni, a cleric and editor. These works had little impact initially; but as the 1930s progressed, their ideas gained traction, especially after Italy’s political alignment with Nazi Germany.
As early as 1934, signs of exclusion began to surface. The regime began targeting anti-fascist Jews in the press, often lumping them together with Zionists. One particular incident was trumped up by the fascist press as an example of the Jewish lack of loyalty to the regime.
On the streets of Turin in March 1934, Jewish intellectuals, driven as much by moral clarity as political urgency, became central figures in an underground anti-fascist network known as Giustizia e Libertà (“justice and liberty”). Among them were Leone Ginzburg and Carlo Levi. Together with other dissidents, they secretly published pamphlets, smuggled ideas, and plotted resistance.
These were small but powerful acts of subversion against Mussolini’s tightening choke hold on Italy. Though quickly crushed by ruthless crackdowns, the media jumped on the occasion, with Turin’s La Stampa front-page headline reading, “Arrest of Jewish anti-fascists working with exiles abroad.”
BETWEEN 1936 and 1938, antisemitic rhetoric increasingly appeared – not just in editorials but in graffiti, public discourse, and academic journals. Scholars in fields like eugenics, anthropology, and demographics began promoting race-based theories. The ground was shifting.
The first major shift in fascist thinking came in July 1938 with the publication of the “Manifesto of Race” by pseudo-scientists, which can be broken down into several distinct ideas:
- Human races exist
- There are great and small races
- The concept of race is purely biological
- The population of modern Italy is of Aryan origin, and its civilization is Aryan
- It is a myth that other peoples have mingled with the Italian population in modern times
- There now exists an Italian race
- The time has come for Italians to proclaim themselves racists
- It is necessary to distinguish between European Mediterranean people and other peoples like Africans and Orientals
- Jews do not belong to the Italian race
- The European physical and psychological traits of Italians must not be altered in any way.
In September 1938, the transformation became official state policy: Italy promulgated its racial laws.
While these did not explicitly call for extermination, they systematically stripped Jews of their civil rights. Jews were expelled from public education, the military, and most government positions. Marriage between Jews and non-Jews was outlawed. Jews were barred from hiring non-Jewish employees. Economic participation became nearly impossible.
Many Italian fascists – particularly those with ties to Germany – embraced these measures. Farinacci and Preziosi were instrumental in pushing them through. But others, like Italo Balbo and Dino Grandi, strongly opposed the laws. Balbo, a decorated fascist and military leader, considered antisemitism foreign to the movement and rejected it outright.
HOWEVER, UNTIL the racial laws were enacted, many Jews continued to identify with the regime. A large number of Turin’s Jews, led by Ovazza, declared their loyalty, while the Jews of Florence publicly reaffirmed it, attacking the Union of Italian Jewish Communities as an instrument of international Jewry and Zionism.
“We want to place a wall between the Italian fascists of the Jewish religion and international, Masonic, democratic Judaism… because the political activity of the Union of Italian Jewish Communities has always been inspired to support arbitrarily [the] international Zionism, which is absolutely antithetical to Mussolinian and fascist Italy.”
For many Jews who had grown up under fascism and Mussolini’s rule, the idea that they were suddenly outsiders was horrifying and nearly impossible to accept. Consequently, few could immediately grasp the full scale of the disaster heading their way.
While some Italian Jews actively supported fascism, others fiercely resisted it. A number of Jewish intellectuals and activists joined the underground resistance after the laws were passed. Among the most notable were the Rosselli brothers, Carlo and Nello, as well as Franco Momigliano, Leone Ginzburg, and Ennio and Emanuele Artom. Jewish Italians would come to stand on both sides of the regime’s trajectory – as its supporters and its most dogged opponents.
In the immediate aftermath of the 1938 racial laws, a curious and tragic legal fiction emerged within fascist Italy: the category of ebrei discriminati, or “discriminated Jews.” These were individuals, such as Ovazza himself, who, despite being Jewish according to the regime’s definitions, had distinguished themselves in service to the state – particularly as early adherents of fascism, veterans of the WW I, or longtime party members.
This class of Jews, many of whom had marched on Rome in 1922 or held prominent posts within the regime, petitioned for – and in some cases, received exemptions from – certain racial restrictions. The logic was chillingly bureaucratic: While the state deemed Jews as a collective to be a threat to the racial integrity of the nation, it allowed for individual dispensations on the basis of loyalty, service, or merit.
These exceptions were not blanket absolutions. They did not erase Jewish identity in the eyes of the law, but they postponed its consequences. It was a distinction without real protection.
FIGURES LIKE Ovazza, who remained defiantly loyal to Mussolini even as antisemitic policies intensified, embodied this paradox. He and others genuinely believed that their ideological devotion and nationalist credentials would shield them. Some went so far as to argue that they were “Italian first, Jews second,” hoping that Mussolini would draw a line between patriotic Jews and the nebulous, conspiratorial “international Jewry” portrayed in fascist propaganda.
For a time, the regime played along. Discriminated Jews were permitted to retain certain civil rights, maintain employment in some restricted professions, and in isolated cases, remain within state institutions. But these exceptions were neither consistent nor durable. They relied entirely on the goodwill – or indifference – of local prefects and bureaucrats. As Italy drew closer to Nazi Germany, the space for such ambiguity began to vanish.
The very existence of the discriminati laid bare a fundamental contradiction within Italian fascism’s racial ideology: a tension between nationalism and biological racism. Mussolini’s regime had not grown organically from antisemitic roots, and many within its ranks still viewed the racial laws as an unfortunate concession to their German allies. The discriminati were a compromise – a legal gray zone in a country still pretending it could differentiate between “good Jews” and “bad Jews.”
But in the face of history, the distinction collapsed. When Germany occupied northern Italy in 1943 and the Italian Social Republic began actively collaborating in the Final Solution, the ebrei discriminati lost whatever special status they had briefly held. The fascist regime no longer made exceptions; loyalty was no longer currency. The state that had once offered bureaucratic loopholes now offered only deportation orders.
What began as a belief in conditional inclusion ended, for many, in betrayal. The category of discriminated Jews was a delay rather than a shield, and the illusion that fascism could be embraced without consequence by Jews who believed in Italy, who believed in Mussolini, or who believed in their own exceptionalism, was extinguished by the time the Germans took over half the country.
The end is nigh
Unlike Hitler, who remained in charge of an ever-shrinking Reich and ended up shooting himself in his bunker just two days after Il Duce’s death, Mussolini’s time in power was brought to an end by his own people.
Following Italy’s entry into WW II in 1940 on the side of the Nazis, the situation for Jews deteriorated further. Refugees were interned in camps such as Campagna and Ferramonti di Tarsia. Italian officials in territories under Italian occupation, particularly in Croatia and France, often refused to hand Jews over to the Nazis. German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop even complained to Mussolini that Italy’s military leaders lacked “a proper understanding of the Jewish question.”
Everything changed after July 1943, when Mussolini was deposed amid military disaster after disaster. The Grand Council of Fascism met that month after the Allies had landed in Sicily and begun bombing raids on Rome. Mussolini was deposed by his own Fascist Party and, on July 25, 1943, he was sacked from office by King Victor Emmanuele III.
To many, it was a dark and somber occasion – the end of two decades of fascist rule and Mussolini’s bid to make Italy a world power. For many others, however, it signified a potential end to the war, the suffering, and Italy’s racist policies.
While the Holocaust had been kept out of Italy for the duration of the war under Mussolini, the irony is that his fall helped to accelerate the genocide that was to occur.
Italy surrendered to the Allies. Germany then invaded the north and established the Italian Social Republic (Salo Republic) – a Nazi puppet regime led by Mussolini himself, who had been rescued from prison in a daring Nazi raid.
The new fascist authorities in the north now completely aligned themselves with German policy and declared Jews to be enemies of the state. A police directive issued on November 30, 1943, ordered the arrest of Jews and the confiscation of their property. Italy’s collaboration with the Final Solution had begun.
THE SS took command. Odilo Globocnik, responsible for mass murder in Poland, was brought to Italy. Wilhelm Harster oversaw deportations from Verona. Theodor Dannecker, a key figure in the deportation of Greek Jews, was put in charge of the Italian operation.
From Rome to Florence to Genoa, Jews were rounded up and deported to Auschwitz. Others were sent via the Risiera di San Sabba concentration camp. In the Rome Ghetto, local collaborators like Celeste Di Porto betrayed hiding places; 26 Jews she denounced were executed in the Fosse Ardeatine massacre.
In total, 10,000 Jews were deported from Italy. Of those, at least 7,700 perished.
As the SS established itself throughout northern Italy, and with the Allies pushing their way up from the south, key German personnel with backgrounds in Eastern Europe’s extermination machinery assumed control. The apparatus of genocide – once unimaginable in Italy – had now been imported wholesale.
For fascist stalwart Ettore Ovazza, who had defended the regime against his fellow Jews and stood stoic and alone by the end, history would make no exceptions.
In early October 1943, just weeks after the Nazi occupation of northern Italy, Ovazza was in hiding with his wife, Nella, and their children, Riccardo and Elena, in Gressoney-Saint-Jean, a quiet alpine village near the Swiss border. They had liquidated their possessions, hoping to flee to safety in the Swiss canton of Valais. Riccardo attempted the crossing first, disguising himself among a group of Croatian prisoners. But the Swiss border police turned him over to the Germans. He was arrested at Domodossola, then taken to the village of Intra, to a girls’ elementary school that had been converted into a base by the SS battalion of the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler, under the command of Obersturmführer Gottfried Meir.
There, the SS tortured him until he revealed his family’s hiding place. Then they killed him and burned his body in the school’s furnace.
Two days later, on 11 October, an SS unit arrived in Gressoney and captured the rest of the Ovazza family. They, too, were brought to Intra, executed, and their bodies incinerated – the same furnace, the same erasure. Some reports suggest that greed played a role and that the family’s gold and jewels were a motive as much as ideology. But by then, the distinction hardly mattered.
Ettore Ovazza did not die in a camp. He did not perish in Auschwitz or Bergen-Belsen. He died in the land he had loved, the land he had fought in war for, and at the hands of the movement he had served. And in that final, brutal moment, the lie was laid bare: Fascism would never see loyalty, Jewish or otherwise, as anything but temporary.
MUSSOLINI HIMSELF would survive just 18 months longer. By the final days of April 1945, as Allied forces advanced into northern Italy and the Salò Republic crumbled around him, Il Duce was on the run. Alongside his latest mistress, Clara Petacci, he made a desperate bid for escape dressed as a German soldier, heading toward the Swiss border with the hope of catching a flight to Franco’s Spain.
But on April 27, just outside the lakeside village of Dongo near Lake Como, their convoy was intercepted by Italian partisans. Mussolini was quickly identified and arrested.
As news of his capture spread, the Allies began requesting that Mussolini be handed over to Allied authorities. But that was not the path history took.
On April 28, just one day after their arrest, Mussolini and Petacci were executed by firing squad in the village of Giulino di Mezzegra. The next morning, the bodies of Mussolini, Petacci, and other members of his entourage were loaded into a van and transported to Milan. At 3:00 a.m., the corpses were dumped in Piazzale Loreto.
What followed was a public reckoning, raw and unfiltered. The bodies were subjected to kicks, spit, and stones from the gathering crowd. In a moment choreographed to humiliate and deter, the corpses were hoisted upside down from the roof of a nearby service station.
The era of Mussolini ended not in glory or even in formal justice, but in blood and fury on the streets of Milan. For a man who had once promised to restore Rome’s imperial greatness, his final chapter came as a public warning. Stripped of dignity, hung by the heels, and a symbol of the wreckage fascism had brought to Italy, his reign brought misery and pain to millions, particularly by the end.
For nearly two decades, millions of Italians, and thousands of Jews, believed in Mussolini as the man to make things right for Italy: a man for whom history beckoned, and a man who would never betray them as loyal Italians. In the end, they were wrong. ■