Giovanni Palatucci e gli ebrei internati a Campagna. Memorie, rappresentazioni e nuove ricerche

The last police chief of Fiume under the Nazi occupation, Giuseppe Palatucci has been, since 1990, one of the “Righteous Among the Nations”. The life of the Italian policeman who died in Dachau was anything but easy. His memory, too, has been controversial. Arriving at the Questura of Fiume in 1937, on the eve of the racist laws, he was head of the Foreigners’ Office. In practice, he was responsible for regulating the influx of foreign Jews fleeing, above all from 1941 onwards, from the Croatia of the Ustaša across the border that separated the Italian occupation zone from Fiume. Only twenty years after the recognition granted by Yad Vashem, he was publicly and loudly attacked by the Centro Primo Levi in New York as a zealous Fascist of Salò, a persecutor, and not a saviour, of Jews. This collection of essays enters this debate, with the aim of strengthening the positive image of the young policeman through the examination of new sources and the refutation of many of his detractors’ arguments, but also through the scaling back of the many mythologised aspects of the story, such as the one that credited him with saving as many as five thousand Jews. Myths that over time have helped, almost throwing the baby out with the bathwater, to facilitate the work of those who wanted to call the whole story of Palatucc into question