Historian Ilaria Pavan investigated the economic consequences of the anti-Semitic campaign for Il Mulino. Even after the war, the restitution of assets was complicated
Two pairs of used socks, a bid, a worn wool sweater, a pair of used slippers, a pair of roller skates, a broken trouser strap, a pastry mold, an aluminum coffee pot, a baby coat. .. The Official Gazette, at the time of the racial laws and the requisitions of goods from the Jews, came to note everything. And just that chilling bureaucratic diligence, parallel to that of the pediatricians accomplices of Josef Mengele, takes your breath away. The amoral zeal of those half-men scattered in public offices and the filthy indifference of too many citizens who did not want to see. Or they sometimes even went so far as to ask for a share of the loot like a certain Mr. AM from Siena who went so far as to write to the provincial manager: I understand (…) that some apartments owned or otherwise occupied by Jews recently and rightly deported would be free . I ask Your Excellency to assign me one of the aforementioned lodgings, of five or six rooms…. A worm. He added: Possibly with empty walls. Without the hassle of disposing of the poor things left there by those who had been sorted to the death camps.
The book coming out for the Mill The economic consequences of racial laws by Ilaria Pavan, professor of contemporary history at the Normale, sweeps away once and for all, if there was a need, the image of a regime and a country forced to reluctantly accept anti-Jewish racism because they are forced by the Nazi ally. It did not. Not only in Europe was the Italian experience second in length only to the Nazi one, so much so that the persecutions from the summer of 1938 to the autumn of 1943 were entirely and solely desired and managed by the fascist authorities. But on the part of the state apparatus, both central and local, there does not seem to be any yielding in the diligent and rigorous application of anti-Jewish legislation and hundreds of papers and documents examined do not report any voice, not even subdued, of dissent or only of doubt or hesitation. . The only embarrassment, perhaps, was the pettiness of certain seizures which evidently added to the requisition of houses, shops and furnishings: An amber mouthpiece, three fountain pens, an empty case, a compact, a notebook …; A tea strainer, an aluminum coffee pot, a Bakelite sugar bowl, a tablecloth in bad condition … An indelible sign of the moral misery of those who kidnapped and grabbed. First of all, of course, the fascist hierarchs.
As early as December 1938 – Ilaria Pavan writes – police reports speak of the “manifest vampirism practiced by Party exponents who would use their quality to serve their own interests” and how “the rumor continued that many Aryans, hierarchs of the Pnf in the first place, they would abuse the moment of disorientation of the Jewish element struck by the government’s measures to do their business, perhaps accumulating those of the Jews themselves ”.
What was the aggregate amount of the assets in houses, land, businesses, shops, bank deposits, stocks and miscellaneous property stolen from the Israelites? Almost impossible to quantify. Too many dead, too many survivors who emigrated without wanting to have anything to do with the old homeland that had betrayed them., too many heirs overwhelmed by bureaucratic difficulties and too many others who did not even have the idea of being heirs. Of course, after the infamy of the racial laws and the complicities in the Shoah, Italy did not redeem itself even after the war.
Writes in Five Ferrara stories Giorgio Bassani: When, in August 1945, Geo Josz reappeared in Ferrara, the only survivor of the one hundred and eighty-three members of the Jewish community that the Germans had deported to Germany (…) no one in the city recognized him at first. (…) After a long time, after so much suffering that has touched everyone, and without distinction of political faith, wealth, religion, race, what did he want right now? What did he expect? After all, in Italy, Pavan accuses, the restitution of the assets never took place ex officio but following specific requests from the interested parties, in the absence of which there was no public body, bank or insurance company that returned on its own initiative what had been seized by the Nazi-fascist authorities in previous years. Even institutions such as the Credito Italiano or the Bnl came to entrench themselves behind banking secrecy and a 1950 report by the commissioner of the EGELI (Property management and liquidation body) highlighted the presence of unclaimed assets left deposited with the banks and the latter’s intention to wait for the statute of limitations to expire to confiscate them.
They did everything, the same authorities of Italy born from the Resistance and anti-fascism, so as not to return what was stolen from the persecuted minority. Above all, this is the principle of the so-called “good faith” of the buyers of Jewish goods. Established as early as the end of 1944 by the Minister of Justice of the Bonomi government, Umberto Tupini, observing that that restitution would have upset “a traditional basic principle, accepted in all modern legal systems”, the fact, that is, that the purchase in good faith “Heal any vice”. A principle, Pavan contests, is radically opposite to those contained in the legislation enacted in other European countries in favor of former racially persecuted. How could a survivor who had returned from Auschwitz with a few rags on him demonstrate the bad faith of someone who had taken everything he had, if it was the same law then in force that allowed him or even pushed him?
As far as it was written that it would end: those who sought justice were in the majority of cases inevitably defeated. Bianca Pesaro was unable to regain the resale of salts and tobaccos removed in 1939 because it had already been given to others from whom it could no longer be removed without a justified reason. Textual. The Ministry of Finance responded to several merchants who contested the request to pay taxes for the years in which they were in closed concentration camps or hidden in the cellars of friends claiming that “from anywhere the Jewish citizen could send the amount of taxes to be paid” and that the absence due to Nazi-fascist persecutions was not considered sufficient ” to justify a delay in reporting the cessation of activity “. Not to mention the Prefecture of Verona, which asked the Jewish community of Verona who survived the Holocaust for more than 90,000 lire to cover the expenses incurred for the management of assets seized from Veronese Jews, expenses including even the fee for the maintenance of the internment camp for Jews set up. after June 1940 in one of the fortresses of the city. Had they had room and board in the racial jails? They paid …
January 13, 2022 (change January 13, 2022 | 21:07)
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