Ferramonti di Tarsia—Italian Concentration Camp

People often think that the Nazis came up with the concept of the concentration camps. In fact, it was the British, who invented concentration camps, which were first established in South Africa by the Brits during the Boer Wars in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

During World War II, the Nazis weren’t the only ones with concentration camps either. Italy had several Camps both inside of Italy and its colonies.

Ferramonti di Tarsia was one of those camps. The camp was located in Ferramonti, a rural locality 6 km south of Tarsia, by the river Crati. The area is next to the current A2 motorway exit Tarsia Sud. It was the largest of 15 concentration camps established by Italian Fascist leader Benito Mussolini during the summer of 1940.

The Italians began building Ferramonti on 4 June 1940, less than a week before Italy entered World War II. The arrest of Jews began on 15 June, and prisoners began arriving at the camp on 20 June. From 1940–1943, more than
3,800 Jews were imprisoned at the Camp: 3,682 were foreign-born Jews, and
141 were Italians. In general, Italian-born Jews were not imprisoned unless
they participated in anti-Fascist activities.

At first, the physical conditions of the Camp were not that bad. However, as the situation of the Jews went downhill, so did the living conditions. Despite all this, Ferramonti was never a concentration camp like those that the Nazis ran. The relationship between the prisoners and camp staff was relatively peaceful. The prisoners were not tortured or executed and were allowed to receive packages, visit sick relatives, and participate in cultural activities. In fact, four couples were married at the Camp, and 21 children were born there.

Apart from a friendly fire incident in August 1943, which killed four internees, and two deaths from an explosion outside the Camp in December 1943, the only other deaths were from natural causes, and most survived their imprisonment unharmed. About seventy Chinese traders and street vendors were also placed at the Ferramonti Camp.

However, they may have had freedoms. Basically, despite the that the prisoners hadn’t committed any crimes, they were still incarcerated.

The prisoners at Ferramonti were released on 4 September 1943, six weeks after Mussolini was overthrown by his Fascist Grand Council.

Ferramonti di Tarsia was an exception.

In total, between the 1930s and 1943, more than 22,000 prisoners were murdered in the Italian Camps, and most of it took place in the colonies.

Sources

Click to access Microsoft%20Word%20-%205847.pdf

https://www.parchiletterari.com/parchi/ernst-bernhard/campo.php

Campo di internamento di Ferramonti di Tarsia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Italian_concentration_camps

Fascism vs Nazism

I want to clarify Fascism vs Nazism upfront. Both are movements that are intensely sinister and steeped in hatred. However, there are precise differences. While Nazism believes in the superiority of the Aryan Race and the inferiority of the Jews and other groups. Fascism places everything below the state or nation, whether it is an individual or spiritual belief, with no racial discrimination.

Fascism revolves around a ruler who uses absolute power to suppress the individual freedom of citizens, making the citizen a subject of the power of the State. This is achieved by fascism using violent methods for political ends. In the context of a fascist government, this often involves the State using the military against citizens.

The Italian term fascismo is derived from fascio, meaning—a bundle of sticks—ultimately from the Latin word fasces. This was the name given to political organizations in Italy known as fasci, groups similar to guilds or syndicates. According to Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini’s account, the Fasces of Revolutionary Action were founded in Italy in 1915. In 1919—Mussolini founded the Italian Fasces of Combat in Milan, which became the National Fascist Party two years later. The Fascists came to associate the term with the ancient Roman fasces or fascio littorio, a bundle of rods tied around an axe.

There were also Fascists outside of Italy. British politician Oswald Mosley was a great admirer of Mussolini.

After his election failure in 1931, Mosley went on a study tour of the new movements of Italy’s Benito Mussolini and other fascists. He returned convinced, particularly by the Fascist Italian economic program, that it was the way forward for Britain. He was determined to unite the existing fascist movements and created the British Union of Fascists.

Irish politician O’Duffy was also an admirer of Benito Mussolini, and The Blueshirts—the nickname of the political party Fine Gael, adopted corporatism as a chief political aim. They imitated some aspects of the Mussolini movement, such as the coloured-shirt uniform and the Roman salute.

Fine Gael has since left its fascist past behind, it is currently one of the coalition parties in the Irish government.

The word origin of Nazism was taken from the name of the Nazi party, which is an abbreviation of the NSDAP—Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (National Socialist Workers Party). This ideology believed that the Aryans were pureblood meant the Jews and other groups like Freemasons and Roma-Sinti were anti-national. They also persecuted Jehovah’s Witnesses and the LGBT community, predominantly homosexuals. Their belief in keeping the Aryan race pure was to eliminate or sterilize people with disabilities.

Adolf Hitler joined the tiny German Workers’ Party, founded in January 1919 in his adopted city, Munich. It was one of many nationalist groups opposing the democratic and socialist revolutions that swept Germany after World War I. He rapidly became the party’s leading figure. Late in 1920, it changed its name to the National Socialist German Workers (or Nazi) Party.

The word socialist in its name made people assume that it was a socialist party. The NSDAP struggled with the political implications of having socialism in the party name. Some early Nazi leaders, such as Gregor and Otto Strasser, appealed to working-class resentments, hoping to attract German workers from their links to existing socialist and communist parties. The NSDAP’s 1920 party program had 25 points, which included passages denouncing banks, department stores and “interest slavery,” which suggested a quasi-Marxist rejection of free markets. However, these were also typical criticisms in the anti-Semitic playbook, which provided a glimpse of the party’s overriding ideology it wasn’t a fundamental challenge to private property.

Nazism had peculiarly German roots. It can be partly traced to the Prussian tradition as developed under Frederick William I (1688–1740), Frederick the Great (1712–68), and Otto von Bismarck (1815–98), which regarded the militant spirit and the discipline of the Prussian army as the model for all individual and civic life. To it was added the tradition of political romanticism, with its sharp hostility to rationalism and to the principles underlying the French Revolution, its emphasis on instinct and the past, and its proclamation of the rights of Friedrich Nietzsche’s exceptional individual (the Übermensch [“Superior man”]) overall universal law and rules. These two traditions were later reinforced by the 19th-century adoration of science and the laws of nature, which seemed to operate independently of all concepts of good and evil. Further reinforcements came from such 19th-century intellectual figures as the Comte de Gobineau (1816–82), Richard Wagner (1813–83), and Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855–1927), all of whom greatly influenced early Nazism with their claims of the racial and cultural superiority of the “Nordic” (Germanic) peoples over all other Europeans and all other races.

Hitler’s intellectual viewpoint was influenced during his youth not only by these currents in the German tradition but also by specific Austrian movements that professed various political sentiments, notably those of pan-Germanic expansionism and anti-Semitism. Hitler’s ferocious nationalism, his contempt of Slavs, and his hatred of Jews can largely be explained by his bitter experiences as an unsuccessful artist living a threadbare existence on the streets of Vienna, the capital of the multiethnic Austro-Hungarian Empire.

There were National Socialist parties outside of Germany, for example, the NSB in the Netherlands.

The NSB (Nationaal-Socialistische Beweging-National Socialist Movement) was founded in Utrecht in 1931, a period of time when several nationalist, fascist and Nazi parties rose up. The founders were Anton Mussert, who became the party’s leader, and Cornelis van Geelkerken. The party based its program on Italian fascism and German Nazism: however, unlike the latter, before 1936, the party was not anti-Semitic and even had Jewish members.

Nazism and Fascism are related—you might say they are cousins. However, the distinct differences were they played a major part in the Holocaust. However, it should not be forgotten that both movements—were a consequence of—extreme socialism, liberalism and communism.

What amazes me is that no lessons have been learned. The 2020s are nearly a carbon copy of the 1920s.

Sources

The origins and nature of Fascism and Nazism in Europe

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/02/05/right-needs-stop-falsely-claiming-that-nazis-were-socialists/

https://www.wilsoncenter.org/publication/241-understanding-radical-evil-communism-fascism-and-the-lessons-the-20th-century

https://byjusexamprep.com/upsc-exam/fascism-vs-nazism#toc-4

https://www.britannica.com/event/Nazism

https://www.dictionary.com/e/nazi-fascist/

When they were young.

The one thing we all have in comon ,regardless of we are good or bad , at one stage of our lives we were all children.

Even the most evil men on who ever roamed the planaet started off as a child, like Joseph Mengele ,pictured above.

Below are a few more exampes of evil men when they were young.

John Wayne Gacy

Saddam Hussein

Adolf Hitler

Benito Mussolini

Jeffrey Dahmer

Ted Bundy

Donation

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Sources

https://allthatsinteresting.com/john-wayne-gacy

https://www.express.co.uk/pictures/pics/5725/Haunting-childhood-photos-most-evil-people-in-history-in-pictures

Violet Gibson,would be assassin-The Irish woman who nearly killed Mussolini

This is one of those ‘What if’ stories, a different result would have made a massive impact on world’s history.

Gibson was born in Dublin, Ireland, on August 31 1876. Her father was an Irish lawyer and politician, Edward Gibson, who was created Baron Ashbourne in 1886.

Her mother, Frances, was a Christian Scientist. Violet grew up in well-heeled Merrion Square. Her early life was one of privilege and society events as part of a large Anglo-Irish family dividing their time between Dublin and London. At 18, Violet was a debutante in the court of Queen Victoria.

In 1913, Violet moved to Paris, working for pacifist organisations. She contracted Paget’s disease; a mastectomy left a nine-inch scar on her chest. She returned to England, where botched surgery for appendicitis resulted in lifelong chronic abdominal pain.

In 1922, she suffered a nervous breakdown, was declared insane and committed to a mental institution. Two years later, accompanied by a nurse called Mary McGrath, Violet was released and traveled to Rome, where she lived in a convent. She had developed a religious mania  convinced of a divinely inspired mission to kill.

On 7 April 1926, Violet Gibson shot Mussolini, Italy’s Fascist leader, as he walked among the crowd in the Piazza del Campidoglio in Rome after leaving an assembly of the International Congress of Surgeons, to whom he had delivered a speech on the wonders of modern medicine. Gibson had armed herself with a rock to break Mussolini’s car window (not needed), and a Modèle 1892 revolver hidden in a black shawl.

She fired once, but Mussolini moved his head at that moment and the shot hit his nose; she tried again, but the gun misfired.[She was almost lynched on the spot by an angry mob, but police intervened and took her off for questioning. Mussolini was wounded only slightly, dismissing his injury as “a mere trifle”, and after his nose was bandaged he continued his parade on the Capitoline.

 

Violet was captured and beaten by a mob; the police smuggled her away before she was killed. Under interrogation, she claimed to have shot Mussolini “to glorify God” who had kindly sent an angel to keep her arm steady.

At the time of the assassination attempt she was almost fifty years old and did not explain her reasons for trying to assassinate Mussolini. It has been theorised that Gibson was insane at the time of the attack and the idea of assassinating Mussolini was hers and that she worked alone. She was later deported to Britain after being released without charge at the request of Mussolini.

Her family wrote, apologising, to the Italian government. She was declared a “chronic paranoiac” and returned to England and St Andrew’s Hospital. Violet died on May 2, 1956. Sadly, there were no mourners.

What if she would have been successful? It is strange to see the’softer’ side of Mussolini, he could have easily made sure she’d get a death sentence.

By sad coincidence, Gibson would share her last years at St Andrew’s with another notable patient of Irish origin, Lucia Joyce. That was the culmination of an even more torturous family tragedy, one begun in 1930 when, romantically rejected by Samuel Beckett, James Joyce’s daughter had first shown signs of mental illness.

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Sources

Irish Times

Irish Independent

 

The other Mussolinis

Cynical me would have probably given this blog the title “Hey, karma is a b*tch” but I am aware that my audience is bigger then just me and therefore I aim to remain unbiased.

Bruno Mussolini (22 April 1918 – 7 August 1941) was the son of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini and Mussolini’s wife Rachele.

On 7 August 1941, the 23-year-old Mussolini, commander of the 274a Squadriglia (274th Squadron), was flying in one of the prototypes of the “secret” Piaggio P.108B bomber, MM22003,near the San Giusto Airport in Pisa, when the aircraft flew too low and crashed into a house.

The Piaggio P-108 Bombardiere was a promising aircraft. Its four powerful engines and substantial 7,700-pound bomb payload gave it strategic capabilities, the only bomber produced in wartime Italy that could make that claim. However, the P-108 was produced in only limited numbers due to a lengthy development program, demands placed on Italian industrial capacity, and the scarcity of resources.

The youthful officer apparently failed to gain altitude and crashed into a house. Along with two crewmen, the pilot was killed. Five other crewmen were injured.

Just after 11 that morning, Benito Mussolini was stepping into his private elevator at the Palazzo Venezia in Rome when one of his aides rushed up. ““There’s been a crash at Pisa, Duce! Your son Bruno is wounded, and his condition is critical.” The dictator steadied himself against the sliding iron door and asked quietly, “Is he dead?” When the answer confirmed his worst fear, Mussolini was wracked with grief. He was a changed man.

The oldest son, Lieutenant Vittorio Mussolini, was heard to say some time later, “There was a Mussolini before Bruno’s death, and a Mussolini after it. Prior to August 7, 1941, despair was not part of his emotional range. The tragedy turned him into a different man whose lost stare, at times, provoked pity.”

Mussolini hurried to the Santa Chiara Hospital in Pisa and gazed for a long time at the face of his dead son. Rachele was also devastated, but she remembered the most painful aspect of the ordeal as her husband’s silence. “It was as if he had turned to stone,” she said later.

Quiet though he may have been, at times Mussolini was prone to an occasional outburst prompted by his grief. Colonel Gori Castellani commanded the 247th Squadriglia of the Regia Aeronautica, the Italian Air Force, to which Bruno and Vittorio were assigned. When the colonel came to the distraught father’s office to extend his condolences, Mussolini bellowed, “I know why you are here! I know that you and everyone are pleased that I have suffered this loss. I don’t want to hear anything from you! You can get out!”

An inquiry absolved Bruno of any fault in the fatal accident, and he was subsequently awarded the Gold Medal for Aeronautic Valor. The New York Times reported that the investigation revealed the cause of the accident to be “…the improper functioning of the gas switch, due to the great distance between the motors and the pilot’s post.”

An elaborate funeral was held at the Fascist Party headquarters in Pisa, and Bruno’s body was interred in the family crypt in the San Cassiano cemetery in the town of Predappio. Ironically, this father who deeply mourned the loss of his own son was responsible for the similar grief suffered by so many other families.

The last days of “Il Duce” Benito Mussolini

In September 1943, Nazi paratroopers staged a daring commando raid that rescued Mussolini from the Apennine Mountain ski resort where he was being detained. Hitler installed Mussolini as the figurehead of the Social Republic of Italy (known informally as the Republic of Salo), a Nazi puppet state in German-occupied northern Italy.

By April 25, 1945, however, the Third Reich was quickly losing its grip on northern Italy. With his stronghold of Milan teetering on the precipice, Mussolini agreed to meet with a delegation of partisans at the palace of Milan’s Cardinal Alfredo Schuster. There, a furious Mussolini learned that, unbeknownst to him, the Nazis had begun negotiations for an unconditional surrender.

Mussolini stormed out of the palace and fled Milan with his 33-year-old mistress, Clara Petacci, in the 1939 Alfa Romeo sport car he had bought as a gift for his girlfriend.

The following day, the pair joined a convoy of fellow fascists and German soldiers heading north toward Lake Como and the border with Switzerland. Mussolini donned a German Luftwaffe helmet and overcoat, but the disguise did little to save him when partisans stopped the convoy at the lakeside town of Dongo ,on the north western shore of Lake Como.,on April 27. For 20 years, Mussolini had built a cult of personality with his image emblazoned on posters and newspapers. Now, the familiarity of his distinctive shaved head and granite jaw, even in disguise, did him in.

A group of local communist partisans led by Pier Luigi Bellini delle Stelle and Urbano Lazzaro attacked the convoy and forced it to halt.

 

The partisans recognised one Italian fascist leader in the convoy, but not Mussolini at this stage, and made the Germans hand over all the Italians in exchange for allowing the Germans to proceed. Eventually Mussolini was discovered slumped in one of the convoy vehicles. Lazzaro later said that

His face was like wax and his stare glassy, but somehow blind. I read utter exhaustion, but not fear … Mussolini seemed completely lacking in will, spiritually dead.

The partisans arrested Mussolini and took him to Dongo, where he spent part of the night in the local barracks.In all, over fifty fascist leaders and their families were found in the convoy and arrested by the partisans. Aside from Mussolini and Petacci, sixteen of the most prominent of them would be summarily shot in Dongo the following day and a further ten would be killed over two successive nights.

Claretta Petacci, Mussolini’s mistress, was captured  with him.

Fighting was still going on in the area around Dongo. Fearing that Mussolini and Petacci might be rescued by fascist supporters, the partisans drove them, in the middle of the night, to a nearby farm of a peasant family named de Maria; they believed this would be a safe place to hold them. Mussolini and Petacci spent the rest of the night and most of the following day there.

On the evening of Mussolini’s capture, Sandro Pertini, the Socialist partisan leader in northern Italy, announced on Radio Milano:

“The head of this association of delinquents, Mussolini, while yellow with rancour and fear and trying to cross the Swiss frontier, has been arrested. He must be handed over to a tribunal of the people so it can judge him quickly. We want this, even though we think an execution platoon is too much of an honour for this man. He would deserve to be killed like a mangy dog.”

Mussolini and Claretta Petacci were executed the following day.

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Forgotten History-Rab Concentration camp

It is a popular misconception that the concentration camps were a Nazi invention, but in fact the British had already established concentration camps in South Africa during the 2nd Boer war.

It could be argued that the Indian reservations in the US were also concentration camps.

But of course the sort of camps which were established just before and during WWII were of a complete different level,than the South African camps and Native American reservations.

It seems that history has also forgotten about the concentration camps built by the Fascist regime of Italy. Although Il Duce, Mussolini is often seen as a farcical figure, he was nevertheless a very evil man following a very disturbed philosophy.

Italy is often portrayed as having been a somewhat benign fascist power during World War II, a reluctant partner of the Nazi regime. The wartime Italian Army is remembered as hapless and inefficient compared to the ruthlessly brutal German war machine

One of the camps established by the Italians was the Rab Concentration camp.

The Rab concentration camp was one of the several Italian concentration camps and was established during World War II, in July 1942, on the Italian-occupied island of Rab (now in Croatia). According to historians James Walston and Carlo Spartaco Capogeco,at 18%, the annual mortality rate in the camp was higher than the average mortality rate in the Nazi concentration camp of Buchenwald (15%). According to a report by Monsignor Jože Srebrnič, Bishop of Krk (Veglia) on 5 August 1943 to Pope Pius XII:

“witnesses, who took part in the burials, state unequivocally that the number of the dead totals at least 3500”.

In September 1943, after the armistice with Italy, the camp was closed, but some of remaining Jewish internees were deported by German forces to the extermination camp at Auschwitz.Yugoslavia, Greece and Ethiopia requested extradition of some 1,200 Italian war criminals, who, however, were never brought before an appropriate tribunal as the British government, at the beginning of the Cold War, saw in Pietro Badoglio a guarantor of an anti-communist post-war Italy.

Under the Italian army commander Mario Roatta’s watch the ethnic cleansing and the violence against the Slovene civil population easily matched the German with the summary executions, hostage-taking and hostage killing, reprisals, internments into Rab and Gonars concentration camps, the burning of houses and villages. Additional special instructions that included instruction that the orders must be “carried out most energetically and without any false compassion” were issued by Roatta.:

“if necessary don’t shy away from using cruelty. It must be a complete cleansing. We need to intern all the inhabitants and put Italian families in their place.”

Mario Roatta in his Circolare No.3 “issued orders to kill hostages, demolish houses and whole villages: his idea was to deport all inhabitants of Slovenia and replace them with Italian settlers” in Province of Ljubljana, in response to Slovene partisans resistance in the province.

Following Roatta’s orders, one of his soldiers in his July 1, 1942 letter wrote home:

“We have destroyed everything from top to bottom without sparing the innocent. We kill entire families every night, beating them to death or shooting them.”

Roessmann Uroš, one of the Rab internees, a student at the time, remembers:

“There were frequent razzias when the train taking us to school in Ljubljana from our village of Polje pulled in to the main station. Italian soldiers picked us all up. Some were released, and others were sent to (Italian) concentration camps. Nobody knew who decided, or on what grounds.“

Anton Vratusa, a former prisoner at Rab who went on to be Yugoslavia’s ambassador at the United Nations, said that there were four distinct camps at Rab and a place that prisoners darkly referred to as the fifth camp, a cemetery where the hundreds who died of cold, starvation or illness were buried.

The camp at Rab, built near the village of Kampor, was one of a number of such camps established along the Adriatic coast to accommodate Slovenian and Croatian prisoners. Opened in July 1942, it was officially termed “Camp for the concentration and internment of war civilians – Rab”

Slovenes and Croatians, many of whom were women and children, including pregnant women and newborns, suffered from cold and hunger in open-air tents, surrounded by barbed wire fence and guard towers. At its peak there were up to 15,000 internees.

Conditions at the camp were described as appalling: “filthy, muddy, overcrowded and swarming with insects”. The Slovene writer Metod Milač, an inmate at the camp, described in his memoirs how prisoners were quartered six to a tent and slowly starved to death on a daily diet of thin soup, a few grains of rice and small pieces of bread. Prisoners fought with each other for access to the camp’s meager water supply, a single barrel, while many became infested with lice and wracked with dysentery caused by the unhygienic conditions. Part of the encampment was washed away by flash flooding. Some of the Italian authorities eventually acknowledged that the treatment of the inmates was counterproductive; in January 1943, the commanding officer of the 14th Battalion of Carabinieri complained:”In the last few days some internees have returned from the concentration camp in such a state of physical emaciation, a few in an absolutely pitiful condition, that a terrible impression has been created in the general population. Treating the Slovene population like this palpably undermines our dignity and is contrary to the principles of justice and humanity to which we make constant reference in our propaganda”

By 1 July 1943, 2,118 Yugoslav Jews were recorded having been interned by the Italian army. Starting in June 1943, they were moved into a newly constructed section of the Rab concentration camp, alongside the Slovenian and Croatian section. Unlike the Slovene and Croatian prisoners, the Jewish ones were provided with proper accommodation, sanitation and services; they were provided with wooden and brick barracks and houses in contrast to the overcrowded tents sheltering the Slavic prisoners.

Historian Franc Potočnik, also an inmate in the Slavic section of the camp, described the much better conditions in the Jewish section:

“The [Slavic] internees in Camp I could watch through the double barriers of barbed wire what took place in the Jewish camp. The Jewish internees were living under conditions of true internment for their ‘protection’, whereas the Slovenes and Croatians were in a regime of ‘repression’. . . . They brought a lot of baggage with them. Italian soldiers carried their luggage into little houses of brick destined for them. Almost every family had its own little house…. They were reasonably well dressed; in comparison, of course, to other internees.”

The difference in treatment was the consequence of a conscious policy by the Italian military authorities. In July 1943, the Civil Affairs Office at the 2nd Army HQ issued a memorandum on “The Treatment of Jews in the Rab Camp”, which was enthusiastically approved by chief of the office and the 2nd Army’s chief of staff.

The memorandum’s author, a Major Prolo, urged that the infrastructure of the camp must be:

“…comfortable for all internees without risk to the maintenance of order and discipline. Inactivity and boredom are terrible evils which work silently on the individual and collectivity. It is prudent that in the great camp of Rab those concessions made to the Jews of Porto Re  to make their lives comfortable should not be neglected.”

He concluded with a clear reference to Italian awareness of the massacres of Jews that were ongoing elsewhere in German-occupied Europe:

“The Jews have the duties of all civilians interned for protective reasons, and a right to equivalent treatment, but for particular, exceptional political and contingent reasons , it seems opportune to concede, while maintaining discipline unimpaired, a treatment consciously felt to be ‘Italian’ which they are used to from our military authorities, and with a courtesy which is complete and never half-hearted.”

Some members of the Italian military also saw humane treatment of the Jews as a way of preserving Italy’s military and political honour in the face of German encroachments on Italian sovereignty; Steinberg describes this as “a kind of national conspiracy [among the Italian military] to frustrate the much greater and more systematic brutality of the Nazi state.” According to the Slovenian Rab survivor, Anton Vratuša,  “We were prisoners; they were protected people. We used their assistance”

By mid-1943 the camp’s population stood at about 7,400 people, of whom some 2,700 were Jews. The fall of Mussolini in late July 1943 increased the likelihood that the Jews on Rab would fall into German hands, prompting the Italian Foreign Ministry to repeatedly instruct the General Staff that the Jews should not be released unless they themselves requested it. The ministry also began to put in place a mass transfer of the Jews to the Italian mainland. However, on 16 August 1943 the Italian military authorities ordered that the Jews were to be released from the camp, although those that wished could stay.^[14]

The island remained in Italian hands until after the Armistice with Italy was signed on 8 September 1943, when the Germans seized control. About 245 of the Jewish inmates of the camp joined the Rab Brigade of the 24th Division of the People’s Liberation Army and Partisan Detachments of Yugoslavia, forming the Rab battalion, though they were eventually dispersed among other Partisan units.

Although most of the Jews from the camp were evacuated to Partisan-held territory,204 (7.5%) of them, the elderly or sick, were left behind and were sent to Auschwitz by the Germans for extermination.Ivan Vranetić was honored as one of the Croatian Righteous among the Nations for saving the Jews evacuated from Rab in September 1943.