Resisting Evil: Italians and the Holocaust
The March 1995 edition of The Genocide Forum reminded us of the relative absence of antisemitism in Italy and the lack of enthusiasm on the part of Italians in supporting Hitler's program of exterminating the Jews of Europe. Professor Huttenbach wondered as to why Italian Jewish writers failed to acknowledge this "extraordinary exceptionality" after the war; a question he first raised at Hebrew University's annual Holocaust Conference in December 1994. What follows is an attempt to address these questions and suggest readings in the hope of stimulating further research.
The most important scholarly study of official Fascist policy toward the Jews is Meir Michaelis' Mussolini and the Jews: German-Italian Relations and the Jewish Question in Italy, 1922-1945. (Oxford, 1987). Michaelis concludes that the antisemitic laws of 1938 were not a logical development of Fascism, nor imposed directly by Hitler, but a decision made by Mussolini in the context of the alliance with Nazi Germany. Mussolini sought to "Fascistize" Italian Jews by absorbing them into the "totalitarian" state; the relative lack of antisemitism in the Fascist hierarchy, with the important exceptions of Roberto Farinacci and Telesio Interlandi, made this policy fairly successful. No Fascist official was permitted to attack the Jews before the Rome-Berlin Axis of 1936. Mussolini's policy, in fact, was diametrically opposed to Hitler's. In the mid-1930s though, in the context of the Ethiopian War and the alliance with Nazi Germany, this policy began to change and radical antisemites were conceded more power. Gene Bernardini's "The Origins and Development of Racial Antisemitism in Fascist Italy" ( Journal of Modern History, 49 [Sept. 1977]: 431-453) is a concise study of the evolution of official antisemitism. The most important work in Italian is Renzo De Felice's Storia degli ebrei italiani sotto il Fascismo (3rd ed. Turin: Einaudi, 1972).
Italian Jews were split over the regime; many who had been assimilated into bourgeois society believed Fascist propaganda that Mussolini was the last safeguard against Bolshevism. For others, Fascism was a way to explicitly prove their nationalism and some even became important figures in the regime's hierarchy: Aldo Finzi and Guido Jung were, respectively, under-secretary of the interior and minister of finance in Mussolini's regime. On the other hand, Italian Jews were very prominent in the antifascist resistance: Giuseppe Modigliani, Claudio Treves, Umberto Terracini, Emilio Sereni, Carlo Rosselli, and Carlo Levi were only a few that struggled against the dictatorship.
Susan Zuccotti's The Italian and the Holocaust: Persecution, Rescue, Survival (Basic Books, 1987) is the best popular treatment of the subject, combining solid scholarship and an accessible writing style. She focuses on the very human drama and concludes that it was the character of Italian Jews themselves that helped them survive, along with the common decency and humanity of other Italians. H. Stuart Hughes' Prisoners of Hope: The Silver Age of the Italian Jews, 1924-1975 (Harvard, 1983), a fine work of cultural history, examines the literature of Italian Jewish writers for insights into that world. Alexander Stille's Benevolence and Betrayal: Five Jewish Families Under Fascism (Simon & Schuster, 1991) traces the family history of Jews that supported and fought against the regime. It clearly shows how the Italian Jewish community (or more accurately, communities) perceived Fascism. What these three works have in common is an implicit recognition of the lack of antisemitism in Italy. This interpretation has recently been challenged by Lynn Gunzberg in her book, Strangers at Home: Jews in the Italian Literary Imagination (University of California, 1992), where she argues that there has been a long tradition of subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) antisemitism in Italy, especially in the domain of popular culture. Indeed, since the early 1980s, Italian intellectuals have been forced to re-examine their culture, as to whether there may be a subterranean current of antisemitism. Yet most would probably agree with the assessment forged by the scholar of ancient Jewish history and the classical age, Arnaldo Momigliano, who pointed out that the Jewish tradition had formed an integral part of Italian culture since the time of imperial Rome and the beginning of Christianity. In the modern age, the Jews had been emancipated with the unification of Italy (1861) and developed a national consciousness along with Christian Italians. From his prison cell during the fascist tyranny, the Marxist Antonio Gramsci agreed with Momigliano's interpretation. The extent of this assimilation into Italian culture is most evident in Gardens and Ghettos: The Art of Jewish Life in Italy (ed. Vivian B. Mann. University of California Press, 1989), the catalog of an exhibit organized by the Jewish Museum in New York.
If we are to accept this relative lack of antisemitism, the next question which poses itself is: from where did this human decency spring? Professor Huttenbach is correct in stating that it will require a "Dante-like mind" to escort us through this bewildering paradox of human fears, dignity, hatred, compassion and courage. Perhaps a clue can be found in the relationship between the Italian citizen and the state. Unlike Germany, where a completely different socialization process unfolded, Italians have traditionally fostered an adversarial and confrontational relationship with the organs and institutions of the modern nation-state. Undoubtedly, one of the historical causes of this relationship was the long period of domination by foreign powers. This divorce between the state and its subjects has led to a cultural phenomenon labeled by anthropologists as "amoral familism" which holds that the individual will act only in the immediate, short-term interest of his family and will assume that all others will act in the same way. "Amoral familism" can be used to explain the apparent lack of civic consciousness in Italy, but has been criticized for confusing cause and effect, and it cannot account for the selfless behavior of those that risked all in protecting the Jews. Concrete, personal relations count for more than the abstract idea of a contract between individual and the state. Yet we should not forget that no less an authority than Primo Levi, in the afterword to The Reawakening (Macmillan, 1965), commented that "The deeply rooted consciousness that one must not consent to oppression but resist was not widespread in Fascist Europe, and it was particularly weak in Italy."
While the official role of the Vatican and its failure to speak out against the racial laws and the Holocaust has been acknowledged, the activities of individual men and women of the Catholic Church have been also been documented. Perhaps the most famous case was recounted in The Assisi Underground (Stein and Day, 1987) by Padre Rufino Niccacci who retells how most of the Jews in the city of St. Francis were rescued. But for every success story there is a tragic counterpart: Robert Katz's Death in Rome (Macmillan, 1967) chronicles the murder of scores of Jews in the Ardeatine Caves massacre (24 March 1944) carried out by Nazi officials with the help of Italian fascists, in retaliation for a partisan attack in Rome.
As to why there has been a silence on the part of Italian Jews concerning the common humanity displayed during the Holocaust; that must be answered by the writers themselves. A search through the literature and a run through the various databases proved fruitless. The most famous Italian Jew to survive the Holocaust, Primo Levi, has little or nothing to say on the topic. Interestingly enough, when captured, Levi admitted to being "an Italian citizen of the Jewish race" rather than admitting his role as a partisan, feeling that the former was a lesser crime in the eyes his enemies.
Vittorio Segre's Memoirs of a Fortunate Jew (Adler & Adler, 1985) is a look at Italian Jewish life before the racial laws of 1938 and does not address the Holocaust directly. The most well-known of these portraits of Jewish life in Italy is Giorgio Bassani's The Garden of the Finzi-Contini (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977) where the antisemitic laws are almost tangential to the plot. The paradoxical behavior of the fascist officials in parts of occupied Europe such as south-eastern France, Croatia and Greece was first documented in 1955 by Leon Poliakov and Jacques Sabille in Jews Under the Italian Occupation (Fertig, 1983) which reproduces several dozen key documents. Known for his powerful and poetic account of domestic exile in Christ Stopped at Eboli , Carlo Levi offers a psychological analysis of Fascism in Of Fear and Freedom (Farrar, Strauss 1950); a more accurate and telling translation of the original would be ("Fear of Freedom") and the disturbing "return to normalcy" in post-war Berlin in Under the Linden Trees (1967).
Still, we are no closer to answering the fundamental question: why Italy? Since the survivors themselves have not offered an explanation, perhaps it would be presumptuous to attempt one here. Although the common experience of persecution and oppression do not necessarily generate solidarity, it may be that a shared tradition of exile - and the radical humanism that it can engender - prevented gentile Italians from falling into the moral abyss of the Holocaust.
In a forthcoming biography of Albert Speer, the former minister for armaments and war production in the Third Reich claimed to be ignorant of the fate of the Jews in the extermination camps. How is it possible that Italians knew the truth and sought to thwart deportations, while Speer, a master of detail and organizational skill, held that there was no way to know the radical evil taking place in eastern Europe? Although historians are understandably wary of speaking and writing about "national characteristics," it seems that there was a profound moral difference between Italians and their German allies. This case of empathy and mass civil disobedience represents the difference between a culture that because of historical, philosophical and cultural traditions worships the state and one that recognizes its tremendous destructive potential.
Stanislao G. Pugliese
Hofstra University
National Socialism was not Fascist
FASCISM was!
There has been a pervasive confusion of terminology that has tended to make Nazism synonymous with Fascism. The practice began in the Soviet Union toward the beginning of World War II. Increasingly, Soviet propaganda referred to the war as "antifascist." It was, of course, a convenient simplification, a way of lumping all of the USSR's enemies into one conceptual package. And through the prism of Stalinist thought, such an equation was consistent with its basic premise: the Second World War, "the great patriotic war," had been a titanic clash between two mutually exclusive systems, the Soviet Union and the Axis - Hitlerian Germany and Mussolini's Italy. According to Stalin's view, both embodied militant, expansionist nationalism, and both Nazism and Fascism were vehemently anti-Marxist because they represented bourgeois capitalism at its most anti-democratic, and hence its most aggressive.
During the 1960s, terminological obfuscation regarding political systems distasteful to New Left intellectuals further clouded the differences between Nazism and Fascism. Most liberal/New Left polemicists entirely dropped the term Nazism and exclusively used the epithet Fascism. For them, it was not an appellation for past regimes in Europe, but a label to hang onto "rightist" contemporary practices, policies and governments. Fascism became a means of pointing an accusatory finger at the actors in a US-dominated world, at multi-corporate entities, at mega-banks, at US-supported dictators in Vietnam and in Panama, at oil-rich sheiks, even at "unreconstructed" colleagues who refused to accept a politically correct interpretation. "Fascist" - with all its historic echoes, by then including images of Hitler - became a damning epithet to hang around someone's neck who, for example, did not oppose the Vietnam war, and, more recently, who opposes abortion, sympathizes with the National Rifle Association, is against immigration, etc. The corruption of the term went as far as its application to authoritarian practices in communist countries. The result has been a diminution in the level of academic discourse and public debate.
Worse, it has blurred the fundamental distinction(s) between German National Socialism and Italian Fascism. Though they share similar premises - a romantic (past-oriented) nationalism, an anti-democratic political philosophy, and a heavy reliance on military power as a primary tool in lieu of diplomacy to advance state interests, as well as a common fear of communism - they nevertheless are fundamentally distinct from each other, even in the above categories. Whereas Fascism was essentially conservative - it preserved the monarchy and all primary social institutions, including the aristocracy and the church - National Socialism, despite its superficial appeal to a mythical past and commitment to preserving German society and culture, was a radical and revolutionary force. By means of its policy of "Gleichschaltung" (synchronization), it destroyed old institutions and constructed new ones. The latter, such as the SA, the SS, the Gestapo, were to be the avant-garde of a brand new Germany. They were to be the transformers of German social institutions, such as the family, to be infused by them with a new German national consciousness, a radically new psychology of self and of the national collectivity, strictly along racial lines.
National Socialism was first and foremost a doctrine of race; Fascism was not. While Nazism made race its central teaching for reordering domestic, social, and public life - first all over Germany, later throughout Europe - race played only a tertiary role in Fascist thought and policy. Too often forgotten is Fascist Italy's incomprehension of Hitler's racist antisemitic policy in the 1930s, when the two countries evolved into uneasy allies. Mussolini's high-ranking advisors, though typically tainted by some form of Catholic anti-Judaism, could not comprehend the Nazi obsession with race in general and with racist antisemitism in particular.
What one must keep in mind, therefore, is that subsuming Nazism into Fascism tends to lessen the primacy of the racist component in the former and exaggerate it in the latter by means of the fallacy of a bogus synonymity. In understanding and teaching the Holocaust, one must be extra careful not to adopt inadvertently the terminological trap equating Nazism with Fascism. The Final Solution rested squarely on a philosophy of race, in which the world's population is first compartmentalized into racial categories and then ranked according to higher and lower levels of humanity. This scheme was then wedded to a quasi-Darwinian philosophy of history, pitting races against each other in mortal existential combat, and justified by a pseudo-morality laying the foundations of a genocidal crusade on the part of the higher races against the lower ones, all in the name of a worthy cause, the preservation of the German (Aryan) race and, through it, of human civilization itself.
There is none of this universalist global vision in Fascism. At best, Italian Fascism was a glorified Italian nationalism, based on a limited geographic ambition - Italian hegemony of the Mediterranean littoral (Abyssinia excepted). It had none of the apocalyptic racism that characterized National Socialism.
But what of other "Fascist" regimes: Franco's Spain or Horthy's Hungary? To begin with, they never patterned themselves totally after Italy's model; furthermore they never referred to themselves as Fascist. To be sure, Franco looked at Mussolini, as Horthy did to Hitler. But their regimes were distinctly different from both. The two terms, National Socialism (Nazism) and Fascism, ought to be strictly reserved to Germany and Italy, respectively. Teachers and students of the Holocaust who must confront the phenomenon of Hitlerian Nazism are best served by not mixing up terminology and, thereby, denying themselves the necessary accuracy of specificity with which to deal with the Final Solution. Put simply, Mussolini's Italy would have been incapable of launching a racist policy of the scale of Nazi Germany. The obvious proof is that it did not do so, for all its sundry abuses of human rights, including its assault with poison gas of Abyssinia. Fascism was never a variation of National Socialism any more than the latter was a branch of the former.
Henry R. Huttenbach
The Holocaust and The Liberal Arts
A recent conference on "Teaching the Holocaust" held in Jerusalem last December raised, but left unanswered the question: "Should the Holocaust be taught as a Liberal Arts core course?" A year's teaching the Holocaust as a basic required course while I was a visiting professor at Stockton State College in New Jersey forced the issue into the open. Not surprisingly, there was no agreement at the Jerusalem gathering. In brief, there were three basic views: 1) the Holocaust should be a core requirement; 2) the Holocaust should be an elective course; and 3) the topic of the Holocaust ought to be integrated into every introductory course.
The latter view has been most eloquently expressed and forcefully promoted by Franklin Littell. For years he has argued that "study of the Holocaust... is an imperative for all academic disciplines." Every student," he continues, "should confront the story and the lessons of the Holocaust, which penetrated every sector of our culture..."
He has predicated this broad and challenging conclusion on a simple but shattering negatively phrased premise, namely, "the Holocaust is not just a Jewish affair." The event, the deed, Littell persists, should not be parochialized; the killing of the Jews in the European heartland is, above all, an issue primarily of those who committed genocide, of those in whose name it was done, of those whose institutions failed to resist, and of the civilization in which the extermination took place. This in no way marginalizes the Jews as victims and what the Final Solution signifies to them. It merely insists that the accountability for the crime, the responsibility for its happening at all rests, squarely on the shoulders of those directly and indirectly associated with the genocidists.
The key issues of direct participation, collaboration, cooperation, contribution, neutrality, observing, failing to assist the victims, restrictive immigration laws, suppression of information, etc., all concern the non-Jewish world. As Littell knows: the fundamental issue is an ethical one, the exercise of power against or for the victims. All non-Jews had some power; the Jews had none.
The SS did not have to shoot: some refused and none was punished. There was opportunity in the early years to protest effectively, as against euthanasia, but none did for the Jews. Doctors were not required to perform brutal experiments; yet they did. Lawyers and judges were not forced to pervert the law; but they did. No one suggested the Jewish pupils be humiliated; nevertheless, countless teachers did so. The government did not insist on the use of slave labor by German businesses; however, the leading firms did so in the pursuit of profits. Ukrainians, Poles, Latvians, etc. voluntarily joined in the mass-killings; none compelled them. Belgium collaborators, the Paris police, the Vichy, Slovak and Croatian governments, all went ahead of German orders to subject Jews to Nazi laws and policies. The concentration camps were not consciously liberated by military design. Quotas remained mercilessly and inflexibly fixed; and borders hermetically sealed. The churches were, at best, mute. The Red Cross remained silent in the face of knowledge. And then, of course, there is the denial of yesteryear and of today, the lying, the new antisemitism.
All these issues, and more, need to be discussed in seminaries, schools of law and medicine, in philosophy, political science, and history departments. Not to mention the arts: the film makers, the writers, the playwrights, the painters, the composers, the musicians, the sculptors and the artists who made the monumentalia of Nazi art, the aesthetics of evil. This too should be told to future citizens of the creative arts, in the conservatories and academies. The youth should and must be confronted so their education to give expression to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is not fatally flawed by a blind-spot, by unnecessary ignorance.
Yet, how to translate Littell's majestic vision? Is it practicable? Is it a realizable pedagogical goal? Can the Holocaust be effectively converted into units and credits? Will the educational bureaucracies cooperate? Is there sufficient public support? Are there enough crusaders besides Littell and a few devoted followers? Can this goal be achieved with a grass-roots approach? Or must it be accompanied by a political, top-down policy? And finally, is it correct?
Is a fragmented Holocaust, distributed piece-meal across the curriculum spectrum the answer? Or is it but short-term solution in the absence of a bona fide Holocaust core? Which returns one to the original question: Should the Holocaust be a required core course within liberal arts education?
It is time, perhaps, to convene a high-powered assembly of scholars, teachers, administrators and educational policy makers to address this issue on a national and international level, since it is not just an American problem but a civilization-wide challenge wherever European values are the underpinnings of society and government.
Henry R. Huttenbach