Alessandra Farkas "The Alleged Hero" the original article on Giovanni Palatucci

This is the English translation of the original article published in Corriere della Sera on 23 May 2013.  Farkas' article has gone through dozens of news services over the last month.  I have taken this version from the 14 June 2013 edition of The Times of Israel.

THE ALLEGED HERO

Palatucci, shadows cast on the life of the “Italian Schindler”

Said to have saved over 5,000 Jews in a region where there were not even half that
number. Myth or sensational hoax?
_______________________________________________________________
From our correspondent ALESSANDRA FARKAS

NEW YORK – His Wikipedia page remembers him, in at least ten different languages, as “the Italian police commissioner who saved thousands of Jews from being deported to Nazi extermination camps during the Second World War and for this was deported to the Dachau Concentration Camp, where he died.” “For his actions, Giovanni Palatucci was decorated with the ‘Medaglia d’oro’ award for civil merit, and honored as one of the ‘Righteous Among the Nations’ by Yad Vashem (September 12, 1990) and ‘Servant of God’ by the Catholic Church,” according to the free encyclopedia.

2009 stamp issued in Palatucci's honour.

ITALIAN SCHINDLER OR FRAUD? – But if we heed the growing chorus of historians and scholars who for years have been studying the most celebrated of “righteous” Italians, the myth of Palatucci is nothing more than a sensational fraud orchestrated by the alleged hero’s friends and relatives who claimed he had saved over 5,000 Jews in a region where there
lived less than half that number of Jews. The hypothesis of a massive rescue mission by Palatucci had already been categorically denied by the Italian Ministry of Internal Affairs in a memorandum dated July 1952 and later by Yad Vashem’s Institute of the Righteous commission in 1990. At a round table discussion organized by the Centro Primo Levi at the Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò in New York, the ex-director of Yad Vashem, Mordecai Paldiel explained that under his supervision, in 1990, Palatucci was recognized “Righteous Among the Nations” for having helped “just one woman,” Elena Aschkenasy, in 1940, and that the commission “did not find any evidence or testimony that he might have assisted anyone outside of this case.”

PRIZES, RECOGNITIONS AND BIOGRAPHIES – And yet in 1955 the Union of the Italian Jewish Communities recognized him and in 1995 the Italian government decorated him with the “Medaglia d’oro” award for civil merit. During the ecumenical ceremony for the Jubilee on May 7, 2000, Pope John Paul II included him among the martyrs of the 20th century. 

The diocesan phase of the canonization process concluded officially naming the hero who died in Dachau in 1945, at the age of 36, a “Servant of God.” But who conducted the historical research on which these recognitions were based? What spawned the myth of the “Italian Schindler”? The official biographies – the latest of which, Giovanni Palatucci: un giusto e martire cristiano by Antonio De Simone and Michele Bianco with a preface by Cardinal Camillo Ruini – speak of thousands of Jews being sent to the internment camp in the town of Campagna where they would have been protected by Bishop Giuseppe Maria Palatucci, Giovanni’s uncle. The notorious internment camp that the Bishop himself, in 1953, called a “vacation spot.” “Impossible,” replies Anna Pizzuti, editor of the database of foreign Jewish internees in Italy (www.annapizzuti.it), “no more than forty Fiume residents were interned in Campagna. A third of the group ended up in Auschwitz.”

THE DROWNED AND THE SAVED – The biographies then recall the 800 Jewish refugees who in 1939 secretly boarded a Greek ship, the Agia Zoni, that departed from Fiume on March 17, 1939 headed for Palestine and that is said to have been personally organized by the heroic commissioner. But from the diary of the group’s guide preserved at Yad Vashem and the documents of the port authority collected in the Italian State Archives, it becomes clear that it was actually an operation of the Jewish Agency of Zurich, carried out under the strict watch of Palatucci’s superiors who not only exacted a painful process of extortion but also sent back to the border the neediest refugees, the stateless and those who came from Dachau.

FROM REALITY TO MYTH – From the archives we find that Palatucci was an officer of public security at the police headquarters in Fiume from 1937 to 1944, where he worked in the immigration bureau and was in charge of the census of Jewish citizens on the basis of which the Prefecture applied Mussolini’s Racial Laws. Precisely in Fiume the census was conducted so thoroughly and the laws applied with such zeal that it provoked international protests and a reaction from the Ministry of Internal Affairs itself. According to the monograph by Silva Bon Le Comunità ebraiche della Provincia italiana del Carnaro Fiume e Abbazia (1924-1945) and the data collected in the Libro della Memoria by Liliana Picciotto, during Palatucci’s brief regency the percentage of Jews deported from Fiume was among the highest in Italy. The family portrait recently published by Silvia Cuttin, Ci sarebbe bastato, clearly and accurately depicts the tragic experience of the Jews of Fiume.

Palatucci, seated centre, with colleagues in the Fascist Police HQ Fuime 

(before September 1943 - portrait of the King is still in place)

A ZEALOUS AND WILLING FASCIST – In Giovanni Palatucci, Una Giusta Memoria Marco Coslovich reconstructs the ambiguous professional profile of a vice commissioner of police who at just thirty years of age swears loyalty to the Republic of Salò. “Palatucci never served as chief of police in Fiume,” Coslovich reveals, “but as an adjunct vice commissioner under the control of superiors who were notoriously anti-Semitic.” As opposed to being in conflict with them, documentation shows that he was considered a model public servant. Considered to be “irreplaceable” by the prefect Testa, he fully enjoyed the favor of his superiors. 

Between April and the beginning of September 1944, he was regent and directly dependent to the upper echelon of Salò, Tullio Tamburini and Eugenio Cerruti. Even the historian Michele Sarfatti in the episode of the television program La storia siamo noi dedicated to Palatucci, in 2008, expressed doubts as to the plausibility of the disproportionate numbers attributed to a community that numbered just over a thousand people, furthermore, who between immigration and internment were reduced to little more than 500 by October 1943.

AN AD HOC HERO FOR ITALY IN THE AFTERMATH OF WORLD WAR II – According to the Venetian historian Simon Levis Sullam, the Palatucci affair is tied to the broader problem of how anti-Semitic persecution in Fascist Italy – and the role Italians played in it – has been represented in the 68 years since the end of the war. Co-editor of the most recent important study on the Shoah in Italy published by UTET (2012), Sullam explains: “The myth of the good Italian has constituted a source of collective self-absolution after the Second World War regarding the support offered to anti-Semitic and racist politics in the period 1937-1945, in which thousands of Italians participated directly.” Coslovich emphasizes how more than half of Palatucci’s personal dossier reflects the efforts carried out by his father, Felice, and his uncle, the Bishop, aimed at rehabilitating the commissioner who was enlisted in the Allies’ purge trials, obtaining a war pension to which the government claimed he had no right and involving the Italian government in recognizing their relative as a “savior of Jews.”

HIS UNCLE, THE BISHOP – Between 1952 and 1953, bishop Giuseppe Maria Palatucci availed himself of the collaboration of Rodolfo Grani, a Jew from Fiume of Hungarian origin whom he had met during Grani’s brief internment in Campagna. However, the historian Mauro Canali, expert in the history of the fascist police system at the University of Camerino, maintains that in the copious documentary evidence regarding Grani there is no indication that he ever met Giovanni Palatucci. Someone who did, however, meet Palatucci was the Baron Niel Sachs de Gric, also a Fiume-based Jew of Hungarian descent, a lawyer in the ecclesiastical court and representative of the Holy See for the Concordat with Jugoslavia. In 1952, the bishop sent De Gric an article for publication in the periodical Osservatore Romano with an “invitation” to sign it with his own name. The documents attributed to Grani and Sachs, whose authenticity demands to be verified and neither of which received the commissioner’s assistance, are the origin of the entire Palatucci epic. The last piece of the legend to fall is the one connected to the circumstances of his death. The arrest warrant signed by Herbert Kappler and deposited in the Central Archives of State leaves no doubt: Palatucci was accused of treason by the Germans for having transmitted to the enemy (the British) documents of the Social Republic of Salò requesting negotiations for Fiume’s independence. Not for having protected the Jews of that city.

Translated by STEVE BAKER

ALESSANDRA FARKAS

Anna Foa's article on Giovanni Palatucci from Osservatore Romano

For the sake of presenting both sides to the argument I have posted Anna Foa's article from L'Osservatore Romano.  Foa is an Italian historian who has specialised in Italian and European Jewish history.  Her position is worthy of consideration.  I look forward to reading more on the historical process undertaken by Primo Levi Center.  Without in any way wishing to trivialise the issue at stake here, the academic debate over Palatucci is a model for other historical debates and arguments.  People are not attacked or belittled; issues are addressed.  This is how we learn.

Testimonies silenced and documents gone missing

Meant to mar the Church of Pius XII

Giovanni Palatucci, police superintendent of Fiume in 1944, was arrested by the Germans and died in Dachau in February 1945. Declared Righteous Among the Nations In 1990 for helping Jews during his work at the police headquarters in Fiume, and recognized as a Servant of God by the Church, all of a sudden he was turned into a persecutor of Jews who zealously carried out the orders of the Salò [Italian Social Republic] and of the Nazis. At the origin of this shift was research sponsored by the Centro Primo Levi, New York, undertaken by an international committee of historians who analysed the existing documentation in both the Italian and Croatian archives.

I hope that the Washington Museum, which immediately deleted Palatucci’s name from its sites and exhibitions, has access to the documentation and not only to the lengthy analysis of it drafted by the Centro Primo Levi. On careful reading, this can at most downsize the number of Jews saved by Palatucci, reducing them from the 5,000 originally attributed to him to several dozen, and recasting the role he played in certain episodes. It can certainly not, however, transform him from a saviour of the Jews into a persecutor. I also hope it will be possible shortly to have access to the sources, just as the Centro’s action has made access available to their interpretation.

While waiting to be able to check the full reality of the events in the documents, I would like to mention certain elements of the issue as they emerge from the Primo Levi dossier. The dossier — on the basis of the numbers of Jews living in Fiume and the number of those from Fiume effectively interned by Fiume in the Camp of Campagna, where Palatucci’s uncle was bishop — essentially dismantles the thesis that the police officer was responsible for the mass rescue of the Jews of Fiume, that was pulled off in cooperation between Fiume and Campagna. Here too, in order to express a well-grounded opinion, we await further information, for example, on the actual routes of those Jews transferred from Fiume to Campagna.

Nevertheless the dossier tells us nothing about the individual rescues attested by those very Jews who were saved by Palatucci in the years subsequent to 1940 and during the years of the Nazi occupation. It is likewise silent about the witnesses who documented them. The dossier further informs us that the Bishop of Campagna did his utmost to improve the situation of those interned in the camp but emphasizes, as if thereby to detract from them, his proselytistic intentions; in other words the bishop would have liked to convert his prisoners. Yet let us not forget that we are speaking of a Church, especially the local Church – at that time still heavily marked by anti-Judaism – which was actively encouraging the conversion of Jews. To expect anything else would be utopian. I remember having spoken of this in these same terms to the late Fr Piersandro Vanzan, author of a biography of Palatucci (Giovanni Palatucci. Il questore giusto, Rome, Edizioni Pro Sanctitate, 2009) and a diligent propagator of Palatucci's story.

Furthermore, the dossier underscores the adherence to the Republic of Salò of the police officer Giovanni Palatucci, but tells us nothing about the possibility, supported by at least one source, that he may have acted as a member of the Committee for National Liberation under the false name of Danieli, which is another element to be evaluated or at least mentioned. We are told that the documents on his arrest do not mention the rescue of Jews but only his activities on behalf “of the enemy”, that is, the fact that he had contacts with the Allies concerning a plan to make the Fiume area autonomous. Yet I would like to know whether in Italy at the time the saving of Jews was explicitly mentioned or whether it was implicitly understood as being among the activities on behalf of the enemy.

We are basically facing the problem of the lack of documentation. Yet we find the same lack of documentation in the mass rescues of Jews that that were carried out in the convents of Rome. Do we wish to deny these on the basis of the lack of written documents to prove them? Like all such activities, Palatucci's too could only have been carried out in secret. Might he have pursued them on his own initiative, independently of the Delegation for the Assistance of Jewish Emigrants? This is an answer we are waiting for from the documents, from the comparison with other situations, but not from interpretations.

One last issue: the so-called denunciation by Palatucci of a group of Jews from Fiume. The documentation that the dossier mentions proves nothing other than that Palatucci responded to a request for information made to him by the Police Headquarters in Ravenna (would it have been possible for him not to have replied?), providing the names of these Jews but saying that he did not know where they were to be found. In other words they were already as free as birds. It is obvious that this too should be assessed on the basis of individual events, but as we read it here it is proof of nothing. Michele Sarfatti, Director of the Center for Contemporary Jewish Documentation and one of the historians said to have taken part in the research organized by the Centro Primo Levi, “I am perplexed about a sentence written by a New York Times journalist who claims that Palatucci ‘helped the Germans to identify Jews to be rounded up’. This sentence is attributed to ‘researchers’ without specifying who; but no proof of this exists”. What then explains the glaring headlines in the press about the policeman who persecuted Jews?

To conclude: the Primo Levi initiative affirms that its intention was to demolish the myth of the “good Italian”, of which the Palatucci case was an expression. But why so? If anything, the Palatucci case speaks of a “good Palatucci”, and not of “good Italians”. The myth of the good Italian had already been blown up, at least at the historiographical level, by many studies and first and foremost by Sarfatti's research. All this leaves no room for doubt that with the regulations introduced in November 1943 the Republic of Salò assumed the duty of tracking down Jews in the first person. The Nazis, after October that year, were unable to take on this task since they were occupied on the military front and in the war against the Resistance.

The impression is in fact that a different issue was involved: the Church of Pius XII; and that, in targeting Palatucci, the intention was essentially to hit a Catholic involved in rescuing Jews, a champion of the idea that the Church spared no effort to help the Jews – a well-known figure whose cause of beatification was under way. But this is ideology and not history.

It is true that first-hand historical research into the Palatucci case is scarce and that facts and figures have been subjected to hagiographic interpretations. It is moreover probable that subsequent to the research under way, the figures may change and certain events be reinterpreted. Yet at the moment, in the presence of such definitive unfounded condemnation, what is fundamental is to answer through the documentation these simple questions. Did or did not Palatucci save Jews? Did or did not Palatucci denounce Jews? We are waiting for the documents alone to provide an answer to these questions. Everything else is commentary.

23 June 2013

Anna Foa

Furore about the Italian "Schindler"

Over the last few weeks there has been considerable press given to a claim that Giovanni Palatucci, described by some as the Italian Schindler, was a Nazi collaborator.  This article appeared in Foward.  Palatucci's uncle was the bishop of Campagna in whose diocese was found an internment camp for Italian and foreign Jews.  Part of the story around Giovanni Palatucci was that he "funnelled" Jews from Fiume to Campagna where they would be safer.  It would appear that much of the received history needs to be re-examined.

The wikipedia entry on Palatucci contains a handy summary of the issues surrounding the man.  More information may be found on the ADL site and in the Sydney Morning Herald.

For a comprehensive treatment of the subject see the Huffington Post with its links.

Catholics Defend 'Italian Schindler' on Nazi Claim

Vatican Paper Rejects Charge Giovanni Palatucci Collaborated


The Vatican newspaper said on Saturday a decision by scholars to brand a wartime Italian previously praised for saving Jews as a Nazi collaborator was part of an attempt to smear the Catholic Church during the papacy of Pope Pius XII.

An article, titled “To Strike at the Church of Pius XII” and written by historian Anna Foa, said the decision to re-classify Giovanni Palatucci, a Catholic, as a collaborator was at best hasty and more study was needed.

Palatucci had been previously credited with saving around 5,000 Jews while he was police official in the city of Fiume, now part of Croatia. He died in the Dachau concentration camp in Germany in 1945 at the age of 35.

In 1990, Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial honoured Palatucci as a Righteous Among the Nations, the highest recognition for those who helped Jews during World War Two.

But earlier this week The New York Times reported that the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington was removing mention of his exploits from an exhibition after officials learned of new evidence that purports to show he was a Nazi collaborator.

In her article in the Vatican newspaper, Foa, a Jewish-Italian author and historian at Rome’s La Sapienza University, said the target of the move against Palatucci was “the Church of Pius XII”.

“The impression is that ... in targeting Palatucci the desire was essentially to hit a Catholic involved in rescuing Jews ..., ” she wrote.

“But this is ideology and not history,” she wrote.

The issue of whether the Vatican and the Church under Pius XII did all it could to help Jews had dogged Catholic- Jewish relations for decades. Pius reigned from 1939 to 1958.

Critics of Pius say he turned a blind eye to the Holocaust but his supporters say he worked behind the scenes to encourage the Church to save Jews because speaking out more forcefully would have worsened the situation for all.

Foa wrote that more documentation and study was necessary about Palatucci “from comparisons with other situations and not from interpretation”.

The New York Times article said more than a dozen scholars from the Centro Primo Levi at the Center for Jewish History in New York reviewed nearly 700 documents before concluding that Palatucci was a Nazi collaborator and not a saviour of Jews.

Among other things, the scholars concluded that Palatucci was sent to Dachau not because he helped Jews but because German occupiers accused him of embezzlement and treason. 

Giovanni Palatucci 1909-1945

The Campagna Files revisited

A few weeks ago a colleague sent me a copy of an email that had been sent by a director of a New York organisation.  I will refrain from naming my colleague or the director and the organisation because I am still waiting for a reply to my request to discuss the issue that follows.


In mid-2009 Gary Krupp, founder of Pave The Way, invited me to read through the 2,300 pages of documentation from material from the archives of the Catholic diocese of Campagna in southern Italy related to the internment camp of the same name that existed in the town from 1940 until its dissolution after the Italian armistice in September 1943.  Krupp had come to the conclusion that the documents demonstrated that Pius XII was active in efforts to assist and rescue interned Jews.


I was asked to read and review the material and then write a report of what I found.  I did this and the report was published on the website of The Anti-Defamation League as well as on Pave The Way's website.  My conclusions were different to those publicised on Pave The Way. 


I have posted the report under the "pages" heading.


In May 2012 a colleague received an email from a New York organisation disputing claims made in my article.  There have been a number of conversations, but the original author has not contacted me.  I am not interested in escalating the disagreement, but I am concerned at a particular claim that I only made reference to fifteen documents.  How this person reached such a conclusion is beyond me.  I read every page of the Campagna files - it took nearly three months - and made notes throughout.  The article itself contains 78 specific footnote references to documents out of a total of 89.


A young graduate student from Clark University, Worcester, Massachusetts, who has studied Italian internment camps, in particular, Fossoli, has written her own commentary on the article.  I am grateful for Alexis taking the time and effort to write.  I will leave it to the reader to make up their own minds.

Alexis Herr

Commentary on “Campagna: The Camp, the Bishop and the Archives”

Paul O’Shea’s article “Campagna: The Camp, the Bishop and the Archives” scrutinizes efforts made by Giovanni Palatucci (Franciscan bishop of Campagna in southern Italy) to assist Jews interned from 1940 – September 1943 in Campagna and asks how Palatucci’s work reflected upon Pope Pius XII. Palatucci attempted to help the Jewish interns where he could, which included communicating with foreign consuls, ambassadors, medical professionals, and police on their behalf. He kept the Vatican and other bishops appraised of his actions and requested whatever help they could provide. Palatucci’s correspondence with these various agencies and persons comprises a wealth of information of over 2,300 pages found in a monastery in Avellino.  The New York based Pave the Way Foundation announced the discovery of these documents and made them available on their website as “proof” that Pope Pius XII worked diligently to save Jews from Nazi tyranny. O’Shea’s examination of these documents wisely arrives at a different and more sound conclusion: “The letters tell us that the Pope not only knew of the suffering of Italian and foreign Jews, but that on at least two occasions, he acted to help alleviate their conditions. What they do not show is any pattern of action to help rescue Jews” (3).

Understanding the motivation behind Palatucci and other religious leaders’ decision to help Jews presents a challenge to historians. Scholars often try to use the actions of individuals such as priests or nuns as indicative of a wider Vatican plan to save Jews. Such minimal and polarized approaches fail to render any useful or historically verified conclusions without making erroneous concessions. The documents used for O’Shea’s article show one instance of a Bishop helping Jews and the Vatican providing financial assistance. The fact that this aid occurred prior to German occupation means that it was not in attempt to rescue Jews, and instead to help them.

Historical context proves a crucial tool when evaluating whether or not Bishop Palatucci’s assistance and the money the Vatican gave to the camp constitute “rescue.” O’Shea points out in his analysis that the camp functioned prior to Nazi occupation of the region and as such Jews interned in Campagna were not in immediate danger of deportation and annihilation.  Their internment signaled Fascist support of Nazi aims and compliance with the 1940 Fascist decree to intern Jews in Italy. Therefore, the assistance Palatucci provided during this period does not constitute rescue, as food, medical assistance, and the like, did not save Jews from Auschwitz. One could argue, however, that Palatucci’s efforts to secure visas for Jewish interns functioned as rescue. O’Shea’s article does not elaborate on whether or not Palatucci’s correspondence actually secured immigration opportunities. Further scrutiny of this point would benefit our understanding of Palatucci’s work with Jewish interns prior to German occupation.

Some scholars argue that religious leaders helped Jews out of a desire to convert them to Catholicism and therefore they view Catholic assistance as anti-Jewish. O’Shea’s examination of the vast fund of documents, however, did not alight any plan conspired between the Pope and the Bishop to convert the Campagna Jews.  O’Shea found a few references in the Campagna documents that mentioned Jews considering conversion, which may speak to Catholic proselytizing from Palatucci, but the documents themselves do not reveal an intentional plan to lure Jews in with aid and then manipulate their conversion. O’Shea posits during this period (prior to the September 1943 German occupation) that the “assistance for the Jews came primarily from the local bishop who needed no reminder from Rome to ‘do good and avoid evil’” (20). He arrives at the conclusion that the Vatican gave money to assist Jews at the camp and Palatucci worked to assist them as well out of a desire to “do good.”

A lesser historian might manipulate and misread these actions by the Vatican and Palatucci as grounds for evidence of a long-term plan by the Vatican to save Jews. Using the same evidence, Palatucci and the Vatican’s operations could also be interpreted as a Church stance against Fascism and/or Nazism. To do so, however, would be to ignore the numerous other instances of priests and the Vatican acting counter intuitive to such a claim. History is full of examples of priests and bishops behaving good and bad. To simplify the Vatican’s policy towards Jews during World War II to Palatucci’s and the Vatican’s assistance to Jews in Campagna would not only be simplistic, it would be ignorant. O’Shea and I clearly agree on this point. Using sound and fair judgment, O’Shea does not ignore the assistance Palatucci and the Vatican provided the Jews in Campagna. And, he does not claim that this assistance should be deemed rescue.

Italian religious leaders who attempted to rescue or assist Jews during the German occupation faced many dangers and at times lost their lives in the pursuit of helping others. Stories of nuns and priests hiding Jews and escorting them to safety through the Alps dominate the scholarship of Italian wartime history. Don Giovanni Tavasci, for example, helped shuttle those targeted for internment through the Italian-Swiss Alps prior to his arrest and subsequent internment at the deportation camp Fossoli di Carpi in northern Italy. Along with Tavasci, nine other priests’ decision to uphold Christian values in the face of adversity landed them in Fossoli di Carpi. Palatucci and the Vatican’s choice to provide aid to Jews in Campagna prior to occupation did not incur the same threat as the actions of those who assisted Jews post-September 1943. Palatucci’s actions focused on helping, not saving Jews.

The Campagna documents intersect with two explosive themes of Italian Holocaust history: the so-called “brava gente”, or benevolent Italians, and the debate surrounding Pope Pius XII.  For the past ten years, scholars have endeavored to correct the misinterpretation that all Italians tried to rescue and save Jews during the Holocaust. Stories of priests and nuns helping Jews weigh heavily in the “brava gente” dialogue and often contribute to the boisterous debate over historical interpretations of Pope Pius XII. Overall, there is a tendency amongst scholars and the general public to congratulate individual actions of resistance and rescue as representative of Italians and the Church as a whole. The impulse to point to the actions of one individual as reflective of the Vatican is irresponsible and does little to advance Holocaust scholarship. O’Shea conclusion is therefore important because it provides a clear reading of the available source material. In this instance, the facts show that Vatican and Palatucci did something and that something was not rescue. 

Alexis Herr