L’internement des Juifs en Italie et la géographie des camps (1940-1945)

Résumé 0

The internment of the Jews in Italy and the geography of the campsItaly is among the nations that used concentration camps. As early as the 1930s, Italy built camps in Libya where close to 50 thousand civilian internees would go on to die. However, many years went by before historians became aware of this. This could perhaps be explained by the tendency to diminish Fascist crimes when faced with the generally much more horrifying crimes committed by the Nazis. This paper describes the Fascist concentration camp system and the different forms it took, whether in terms of the internees’ living conditions, the different camps’ specificities or the roundup and detention procedures. Civil internment came under the authority of the Ministry of the Interior, which managed a total of 48 camps until 1943. Up until then, Italian internment never exclusively targeted the Jews. Its goal was not extermination and it was not directly linked to the anti-Semitic laws enacted by the regime in 1938. However, beginning on November 30, 1943, the Italian internment under the Italian Social Republic’s collaborationist Fascist regime applied to all of the Jews. The internment used roughly 50 “provincial camps” and became a cog in the Holocaust machinery.