The European Theatre of World War II, also known as the European

War, was a huge area of heavy fighting

across Europe fromGermany's invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939
until the end of the war with the German unconditional surrender on May
8, 1945 (V-E Day). The Allied forces fought the Axis powers on two fronts
(theEastern Front and Western Front) as well as in the
adjoiningMediterranean and Middle East Theatre.

AXIS ALLIANCE IN WORLD WAR II

The belligerents during World War II fought as partners in one of two
major alliances: the Axis and the Allies. The three principal partners in
the Axis alliance were Germany, Italy, and Japan. These three countries
recognized German hegemony over most of continental Europe; Italian
hegemony over the Mediterranean Sea; and Japanese hegemony over East
Asia and the Pacific.
Although the Axis partners never developed institutions to coordinate
foreign or military policy as the Allies did, the Axis partners had two
common interests: 1) territorial expansion and foundation of empires
based on military conquest and the overthrow of the post-World War I
international order; and 2) the destruction or neutralization of Soviet
Communism.
On November 1, 1936, Germany and Italy, reflecting their common
interest in destabilizing the European order, announced a Rome-Berlin

Axis one week after signing a treaty of friendship. Nearly a month later,
on November 25, 1936, Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan signed the socalled Anti-Comintern Pact directed at the Soviet Union. Italy joined the
Anti-Comintern Pact on November 6, 1937. On May 22, 1939, Germany
and Italy signed the so-called Pact of Steel, formalizing the Axis alliance
with military provisions. Finally, on September 27, 1940, Germany, Italy,
and Japan signed the Tripartite Pact, which became known as the Axis
alliance.
Even before the Tripartite Pact, two of the three Axis powers had initiated
conflicts that would become theaters of war in World War II. On July 7,
1937, Japan invaded China to initiate the war in the Pacific; while the
German invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, unleashed the
European war. Italy entered World War II on the Axis side on June 10,
1940, as the defeat of France became apparent.
Mussolini
The key factors used by Benito Mussolini to gain the trust of the
Italian people were militarism and nationalism. Nationalism is
devotion and patriotism to your country with constant glorification
and promotion of the countrys values and culture. This constant
promotion of the countrys values led to absolutely unjustifiable
decisions that were perceived as setting standards for a countrys
people, but actually inhumane acts. Mussolini promoted the cultural
and political values of the Italian Fascists by using lots of propaganda
across Italy. This large amount of propaganda displayed across the
country is important because it made the Italian population become
more focused on fascism and military power, which strengthened

Mussolinis power in his dictatorship. Mussolini used nationalism to

promote the growth and need of militarism in Italy along with Italian
Strength. He used the patriotism from his country to give Italy the
idea that if they want to become a force as big as they were during
the Roman Empire that they would need to have a strong military and
constantly promote Italian values. To promote this ideal, Mussolini
ordered children from ages 16-65 to enroll in the New Empires
Military. This new side of Mussolini showed to the Italian people and
the rest of the world that he was serious about making Italy the force
it was back in the days of the Roman Empire. This use of militarism to
enforce national superiority and strength was important because it
made Italy become a large threat to neighboring countries and also
threatened the balance of power and created a potential for war.
These nationalistic, militaristic, and fascist values enforced and
promoted by the Italians where what eventually led to Italy joining the
axis powers and going to war against the allied powers.

In October 1922, King Victor Emmanuel III appointed the leader of the
Italian Fascist Party, Benito Mussolini, as prime minister of Italy. Over the
next seven years, the Fascists established and consolidated a one-party
dictatorship.
In two ways, Mussolini failed to establish an absolute dictatorship,
however. The Monarchy remained independent of the Fascist Party and
continued in theory to be commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces.
Moreover, while Mussolini was the recognized leader of the Fascist Party,
his leadership remained nominally subject to the approval of a Fascist
Grand Council.
The Italian Jewish community, one of the oldest in Europe, numbered
about 50,000 in 1933. Jews had lived in Italy for over two thousand years.
By the 1930s, Italian Jews were fully integrated into Italian culture and
society. There was relatively little overt antisemitism among Italians.
Although there were fanatical antisemites among the Fascist leaders, such
as Achille Stararce and Roberto Farinacci, Italian Fascism did not focus on
antisemitism. Until 1938, Jews could join the Fascist Party.
ANTISEMITIC LEGISLATION
In part under pressure from Nazi Germany and in part fearing that their
revolution was not perceived as real in the Italian population, the

Fascist regime passed antisemitic legislation beginning in 1938. This

legislation covered six areas:
1) definition of Jews
2) removal of Jews from government jobs, including teachers in the public
schools
3) a ban on marriage between Jews and non-Jews
4) dismissal of Jews from the armed forces
5) incarceration of Jews of foreign nationality; and
6) the removal of Jews from positions in the mass media
Although reflected in harsh language on paper, Italian authorities did not
always aggressively enforce the legislation, and sometimes interpreted
provisions for making exceptions broadly. Even in the internment camps,
Jews of foreign nationality lived under bearable conditions: families
stayed together and the camps provided schools, cultural activities, and
social events.
Nevertheless, for many individual members of a highly integrated Jewish
minority which had had reasonably good relations with non-Jewish
neighbors, colleagues, and business associates, the psychological insult
and real economic disadvantages of discrimination eroded the quality of
life, prompting thousands to emigrate, primarily to the Americas,
between 1938 and 1942.

WORLD WAR II
Having formally joined the Axis in 1939, Italy declared war on Britain and
France in June 1940, entering World War II as Germany's ally. The Fascist
regime hoped to establish a new Roman Empire, encompassing the
Mediterranean Sea and beyond into North and East Africa and into the
Levant (Syria and Lebanon). Italy invaded France in June 1940 and
occupied a small strip of land on the Franco-Italian border as part of the
armistice agreement with Vichy France in June 1940. In the autumn of
1940, Italy attacked Greece and invaded British-influenced Egypt from
bases in Libya, which Italy had conquered from the Ottoman Turks in
1911.
After Italy sustained disastrous defeats in both campaigns, however, the
Germans deployed troops in the spring of 1941, conquering Greece and
Yugoslavia, and driving the British out of Libya. Italy received the
Adriatic coastlines and the corresponding hinterland of Yugoslavia and
Greece as occupation zones in the spring of 1941.
ITALIAN-OCCUPIED AREAS
Despite its alliance with Germany, the Fascist regime responded
equivocally to German demands first to concentrate and then to deport
Jews residing in Italian occupation zones in Yugoslavia, Greece, and
France to killing centers in the German-occupied Poland. Italian military
authorities generally refused to participate in mass murder of Jews or to
permit deportations from Italy or Italian-occupied territory; and the
Fascist leadership was both unable and unwilling to force the issue.

Italian-occupied areas were therefore relatively safe for Jews. Between

1941 and 1943, thousands of Jews escaped from German-occupied
territory to the Italian-occupied zones of France, Greece, and Yugoslavia.
The Italian authorities even evacuated some 4,000 Jewish refugees to the
Italian mainland. Incarcerated in southern Italy, these Jewish refugees
survived the war.
THE FALL OF MUSSOLINI AND THE ITALIAN SURRENDER
In general, the Italian population did not approve of either the German
alliance or the Italian entry into the war. Italian military defeats, the
virtual military dependence on German arms, and the failure of the Axis
offensive in Egypt in the summer and autumn of 1942 further
undermined the legitimacy of the Fascist regime.
The collapse of the North African front, culminating in the Axis surrender
in Tunis on May 13, 1943, and the successful Allied landings in Sicily on
July 10 induced the Fascist Grand Council to issue a vote of no-confidence
on Mussolini's leadership on July 25, 1943. King Victor Emmanuel III
used the Council vote as an excuse to arrest Mussolini and appoint
Marshall Pietro Badoglio, a former Fascist general, as prime minister.
Though announcing Italy's commitment to the Axis alliance, Badoglio
secretly negotiated with the Allies during August, reaching a cease-fire
agreement on September 3, concurrent with successful Allied landings in
southern Italy.
On September 8, 1943, Badoglio announced Italy's unconditional
surrender to the Allies. The Germans, who had grown suspicious of
Italian intentions, quickly occupied northern and central Italy. German

forces also occupied the Italian zones in Yugoslavia, Greece, and France.
SS paratroopers freed Mussolini from prison and installed him as the
head of a pro-German Italian Social Republic (Repubblica Sociale ItalianaRSI), based in Sal in northern Italy. The German occupation of Italy
radically altered the situation for the remaining 43,000 Italian Jews living
in the northern half of the country. The Germans quickly established an
SS and police apparatus, in part to deport the Italian Jews to AuschwitzBirkenau.
GERMAN-OCCUPIED ITALY: CAMPS AND DEPORTATIONS
Roundups
In October and November 1943, German authorities rounded up Jews
in Rome, Milan, Genoa, Florence, Trieste, and other major cities in
northern Italy. They established police transit camps at Fossoli di Carpi,
approximately 12 miles north of Modena, at Bolzano in northeastern Italy,
and at Borgo San Dalmazzo, near the French border, to concentrate the
Jews prior to deportation.
In general, these operations had limited success, due in part to advance
warning given to the Jews by Italian authorities and the Vatican, and in
part to the unwillingness of many non-Jewish Italians, including Sal
police authorities, to participate in or facilitate the roundups. For
example, of approximately 10,000 Jews in Rome, German authorities were
able to deport less than 1,100. From the police transit camps in northern
Italy, the Germans deported 4,733 Jews to Auschwitz-Birkenau, of whom
only 314 survived.

Deportations
The German authorities deported 506 Jewish prisoners to other
camps: Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, Ravensbrck, and Flossenbrg. The
majority of these prisoners were Jewish residents of Libya, some bearing
British and French citizenship. The Italian authorities had transported
these Jews from Libya to the Italian mainland in 1942 and they fell under
German control in September 1943. The Libyan Jews made up the
majority of persons sent to Bergen-Belsen (out of a total of 396). Virtually
all those sent to Bergen-Belsen, including all of Jews from Libya, survived.
The German authorities deported 328 Jews from Borgo San Dalmazzo
via Drancy to Auschwitz, of whom ten survived; and 1,820 Jews from the
islands of Rhodes and Kos, of whom 179 survived.
In Trieste, where SS-Brigadefhrer Odilo Globocnik, the director
ofOperation Reinhard (which aimed at the murder of Jews residing in the
so-called Government General in German-occupied Poland), became
Higher SS and Police Leader in September 1943, the Germans deported
about one fourth of the prewar Jewish population. The SS and police
established the police transit camp and concentration camp La Risiera di
San Sabba in Trieste, where they tortured and murdered about 5,000
persons, most of whom were political prisoners. Using Italian and
Slovene volunteers, supervised by selected non-commissioned officers
trained at theTrawniki training camp in Poland, the SS and police in
Trieste concentrated some 1,200 Jews, mostly from Trieste, in San Sabba,
and deported 1,122 from San Sabba to Auschwitz and fifty-five to
Ravensbrck and Bergen-Belsen in the autumn and winter of 1943-1944.
Of those sent to Auschwitz, eighty-five survived.

In all, the Germans deported 8,564 Jews from Italy, Italian-occupied

France, and the islands of Rhodes and Kos, most of them to AuschwitzBirkenau. 1,009 returned. In addition, the Germans shot 196 Jews in Italy
proper, nearly half of these at the Ardeatine Cavesin March 1944. Another
approximately 100 died in the police transit camps or in prisons or police
custody through Italy. More than 40,000 Jews survived the Holocaust in
Italy.
POSTWAR
In late April 1945, Communist partisans captured and executed Mussolini
and his mistress, Clara Petacci. German forces in Italy surrendered to the
Allies on May 2, 1945.
Despite some tolerated revenge killings in the immediate aftermath of the
war, Italian authorities conducted relatively few trials of collaborators,
even of those who served the Germans in the Sal regime.
Only in the last ten or fifteen years* have the Italian authorities been
prepared to conduct a handful of proceedings against Nazi offenders,
exclusively Germans and ethnic German auxiliaries. In 1997, an Italian
court convicted the former SS officers Karl Priebke and Karl Hass,
sentencing them respectively to fifteen and ten years in prison for their
participant in the Ardeatine Cave massacre in March 1944. More recently,
in 2007, Italian authorities prosecuted Michael Seifert, an ethnic German
from Ukraine after his extradition from Canada, on charges of murder
perpetrated during his service to the Germans in the Bolzano police
transit camp.

*Article last updated on March 23, 2010

Further Reading
De Felice, Renzo. The Jews in Fascist Italy: A History. New York: Enigma
Books, 2001.
Sarfatti, Michele. The Jews in Mussolini's Italy: From Equality to Persecution.
George L. Mosse series in modern European cultural and intellectual
history. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006.
Steinberg, Jonathan. All or Nothing: The Axis and the Holocaust, 1941-1943.
London: Routledge, 1990.
Stille, Alexander. Benevolence and Betrayal: Five Italian Jewish Families Under
Fascism. New York: Summit Books, 1991.
Zuccotti, Susan. The Italians and the Holocaust: Persecution, Rescue, and
Survival. New York: Basic Books, 1987.