Angelo Donati

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Angelo Donati, around 1930

Angelo Mordechai Donati (born February 3, 1885 in Modena ; died December 30, 1960 in Paris ) was a Jewish Italian banker , philanthropist and diplomat from the Republic of San Marino , France . During the Italian occupation of southern France in 1942/43, he organized the escape of foreign Jews, mainly to Italy and Switzerland . In 1943 he developed a plan to evacuate 30,000 Jewish emigrants from southern France to Palestine and North Africa with the support of the Italian, Vatican, British and American authorities. The rescue operation was prevented by the surrender of Italy on September 3, 1943 and the subsequent occupation of the Italian zone by the Wehrmacht .

Life

Angelo Donati was born in Modena in 1885 as one of eight children of an influential, widely ramified Jewish merchant family, whose roots go back to the second half of the 16th century.

After graduating from high school, he began an apprenticeship in banking and law studies in Modena. Before the First World War , he enrolled as a lawyer at the court in Milan and worked temporarily as a stockbroker in Turin . During the First World War he was drafted into military service in May 1915 . Until he was transferred to the Air Force in 1916, he fought as an infantryman on various fronts. In France he was used as a liaison officer who had to take over the coordination between the Italian and French armies.

After the end of the First World War, Donati went to Paris and managed various companies, including a. the Felix-Potin-Werke, Christofle Glaswaren, Dynamite Nobel and La Rinascente and founded the Banco Italo-Francese di Credito. In 1925 he was appointed Consul General of the Republic of San Marino for seven years . He then headed the Italian Chamber of Commerce in Paris as President , an office that he had to give up in 1939 due to his Jewish religious affiliation.

Shortly before the Wehrmacht marched into Paris, Donati left the city in August 1940 and fled to the unoccupied zone , first to Cauterets in the Hautes-Pyrénées , then to Marseille and finally to Nice , where he worked as director of the Franco-Italian bank. From Nice, the influential banker and diplomat, with an international network of politics and business, organized the escape of Jewish emigrants who sought protection from persecution by the National Socialists in the unoccupied zone in southern France.

France during the German and Italian occupation in World War II (1940 to 1944)

In response to the Allied landings in North Africa, German and Italian troops occupied the unoccupied zone of France on November 11, 1942 as part of Operation Company Anton . After an agreement between fascist Italy and the German Empire , eight French departments were placed under Italian administration: Alpes-Maritimes , Hautes-Alpes , Basses-Alpes (now Alpes de Haute Provence), Drôme , Isère , Savoie , Haute-Savoie and Var .

As a close confidante of the Italian Commissioner for Jewish Affairs, Guido Lospinoso , Donati was able to exert direct influence on refugee policy. Jewish emigrants were protected by the Italian military police from access by the Vichy police and from deportations , and they were provided with food cards and residence papers . Angelo Donati organized fundraising for destitute Jewish emigrants and made contact with the Comitée Dubouchage and the L'Union générale d'israélites de France . In March 1943, more than 3,500 French and foreign Jews were brought from the Mediterranean coast inland to the Italian border in Saint-Martin-Vésubie and to Savoy in so-called forced residence.

Together with the Capuchin Father Père Marie-Benoît , Angelo Donati developed a plan to evacuate the approximately 30,000 Jews who were still living in the Italian-occupied zone. The refugees were to be brought to Genoa by truck across the Alps and then evacuated to North Africa and Palestine with the help of warships . An audience with Pope Pius XII was held on July 16, 1943 through Père Marie-Benoît . made possible, who has promised to stand up for the fate of the Jewish refugees. At the same time, Angelo Donati tried his diplomatic contacts in Rome to obtain commitments from the British and American ambassadors for the implementation of his plan. After the overthrow of Benito Mussolini on July 25, 1943, he was also able to convince Mussolini's successor, Marshal Pietro Badoglio , to implement the plan at the end of August 1943 . After all the preparations were made, Donati visited his brother in Florence . With the armistice of Cassibile on September 3, 1943, Italy withdrew from the war and the Germans occupied the Italian zone in France. Most French and foreign Jews could no longer flee and were arrested and deported in raids under the command of Alois Brunner . About a thousand Jews from Saint-Martin-Vésubie managed to flee across the Alps to Piedmont, Italy .

After the Wehrmacht invaded Italy on September 8, 1943, Angelo Donati himself had to fear arrest . The SS commander Heinz Röthke telegraphed the immediate arrest of Donati. He managed to escape to Switzerland . Here he helped with his contacts in the Comitato di Soccorso in the search for deported Jews. He was able to convince the diplomats of the neutral states and the apostolic nuncio Filippo Bernardini in Bern to hand over a protest note to the German ambassador of the Reich government, which demands the immediate release of at least the old, sick, children and women from the concentration camps . He was able to agree with the Swiss Foreign Office that Switzerland would signal its readiness to accept around 1,000 young people and old people from concentration camps. He also organized the financing of the relief operation through Jewish organizations. Despite great efforts, it was only very rarely possible to liberate Jewish deportees in this way.

In the summer of 1944, Donati organized a postcard campaign aimed at clarifying the whereabouts of the deportees. Postcards with partly forged signs of life were only returned very rarely. Since 1944 Donati was involved in the Colonia Libera Italiana of Lausanne , for which he was able to obtain the support of the Italian government. Equipped with a diplomatic passport , from the beginning of 1945 he inquired in Moscow, Belgium, Holland and Germany about the whereabouts of Italian deportees in the liberated areas. Angelo Donati experienced the end of the war in Montreux .

After the end of the Second World War, the Provisional Government of France , along with the Apostolic Nuncio Angelo Roncalli and Giuseppe Saragat , allowed him to return to Paris as one of the first Italian citizens. On behalf of the Italian embassy in France, he carried out research on the fate of the Jewish deportees after the end of the war and led negotiations with the French government about the support and repatriation of the liberated Italian internees. Donati worked as General Secretary of the Italian Red Cross in France as well as envoy and from 1953 as Plenipotentiary Minister of the Republic of San Marino. Angelo Donati died after a long illness on December 30, 1960 in Paris. He was buried in the Jewish cemetery in the family crypt in Modena.

Adoption of Marianne and Rolf Spier

In August 1940 Angelo Donati's great cousin Piero Sacerdoti married Ilse Klein, a Jew from Cologne. Her cousin Hilde Spier , with her husband Carl Ludwig Spier and the children Marianne and Rolf, also fled from Germany in 1935, initially to Brussels . After the Wehrmacht marched into Belgium, Carl Spier was arrested, first in the Saint-Cyprien camp , and later deported to Gurs . Hilde Spier travels after her husband with the children to be close to him. They too were imprisoned in Gurs and later in Saint-Cyprien. In 1942 the Spier family was able to spend a short time together again under the simplest of conditions in Cap-d'Ail on the Côte d'Azur .

Here they were in mid-August 1942 during a raid by the police of the Vichy regime arrested from France immediately recognized and initially in the transit camp for foreign Jews in the barracks Auvare to Nice deported. Here the parents separated from their children after urgent advice. The now orphaned children were taken into care by a Jewish aid organization. Hilde and Carl Spier were deported to the Drancy assembly camp on September 30, 1942 , from where they were deported to Auschwitz on September 2, 1942 with Transport 27 . From the deportation train, Hilde Spier was able to throw a postcard to her cousin Ilse (Klein) Sacerdoti, asking them to look after the children. Since Hilde Spier was not registered in Auschwitz, it can be assumed that she was murdered immediately after the train arrived on September 6, 1942. Carl Spier had to do forced labor in the camp for over two years and died on February 1, 1945 on a death march after the evacuation of the Auschwitz concentration camp to the Buchenwald concentration camp .

Angelo Donati was informed immediately by Ilse Klein Sacerdoti after the arrest of the Spier family and took the children with him. Until the Germans invaded the Italian-occupied zone in September 1943, Marianne and Rolf Spier lived with Donati in a spacious apartment on the Promenade des Anglais . While Donati managed to escape to Switzerland, his butler Francesco Moraldo hid the two children in the remote Italian mountain village of Creppo in the Ligurian Alps from the raids of the German occupiers. For his selfless behavior, Moraldo was awarded the honorary title Righteous Among the Nations in 1999 .

After it became certain that Hilde and Carl Spier did not survive the Holocaust , Angelo Donati adopted Marianne and Rolf Spier after the war and moved to Paris with the children.

Marianne Spier-Donati published the memories of the flight to France and Italy in 1999 with Olga Tarcali in her autobiography Return to Erfurt.

In 2018, stumbling blocks were installed for Hilde and Karl Spier in front of their house in Cologne, where they lived before they moved to Erfurt.

Honors and commemorations (selection)

Donati vigorously refused public honors throughout his life. However, he received numerous letters of thanks from the Jewish organizations and from Jewish emigrants whom he had enabled to flee. His social and humanitarian work has been recognized by Angelo Donatis in Italy, San Marino and France with numerous high state awards, including a .:

On January 27, 2004, the City of Modena, the Cassa di Risparmio di Modena Foundation , together with the Historical Institute of Modena and the Jewish Community of Modena and Reggio nell'Emilia organized an exhibition and memorial conference for Angelo Donati.

On February 3 and 4, 2017, the city of Nice organized a commemoration in his honor. A solemn event that opened in the synagogue - in the presence of the city's highest officials - continued as part of a conference at the university and with the unveiling of a plaque on the house on the corner of the Promenade des Anglais and rue Cronstadt opposite the hotel Negresco , where Angelo had lived in 1943, was ended. The plaque commemorates Donati's efforts to find a way to rescue the Jewish refugees cornered in southern France.

Sign in memory of Angelo Donati in Nice

Serge Klarsfeld posthumously referred to Donati as a guardian angel for the Jews in 2001 .

"Juif que fuit un ge gardien pour les juifs de la zone Italienne de l'occupation en France. »

"... a Jew who became a guardian angel for Jews from the Italian zone of occupation in France."

- Serge Klarsfeld : La Shoah en France: Le calendrier de la persécution des Juifs de France: 1er septembre 1942-31 août 1944, p. 1515

Movies

  • Paolo Frajese: L 'ultimo rifugio: gli ebrei in Francia durante l'occupazione italiana , RAI, 13 November 1997
  • Paolo Frajese: Les juifs de france sous l'occupation italienne , TV5, October 31, 1999

Literature (selection)

  • Luca Fenoglio, Angelo Donati e la “questione ebraica” nella Francia occupata dall'esercito italiano , Torino, Silvio Zamorani editore, 2013 ISBN 978-88-7158-200-9
  • Madeleine Kahn: De l'oasis italienne au lieu du crime des allemands , 2003
  • Serge Klarsfeld : Les transferts de juifs de la région de Nice vers le campde Drancy en vue de leur déporpation (31 août 1942 - 30 juillet 1944) , 1993
  • Serge Klarsfeld: Nice, Caserne Auvare - La rafle des juifs étrangers par la police de Vichy le 26. août 1942 , 1993
  • Serge Klarsfeld: Le calendrier de la persécution juive en France.
  • Anny Latour: La résistance juive en France.
  • Lucien Lazare: Dictionnaire des Justes de France .
  • Georges Loinger : Organization juive de combat.
  • Silvano Longhi: The Italian Jews in Switzerland (1943–1945) , 2017
  • Léon Poliakov : La condition des juifs en France sous l'occupation italienne , 1946
  • Olga Tarcali: Return to Erfurt, 2001
  • Susan Zuccotti : Père Marie-Benoît and Jewish Rescue: How a French Priest Together with Jewish Friends Saved Thousands during the Holocaust , 2013

Web links

Commons : Angelo Donati  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f Donati, Angelo Mordechai - CDEC - Centro di Documentazione Ebraica - Digital Library. Retrieved January 19, 2019 .
  2. ↑ a b c Donati, Angelo. Retrieved January 19, 2019 .
  3. ^ Serge Klarsfeld: Vichy - Auschwitz: the "final solution to the Jewish question" in France . Darmstadt 2007, ISBN 978-3-534-20793-0 , pp. 267 ff .
  4. ↑ Wolfgang Benz , Juliane Wetzel: Solidarity and help for Jews during the Nazi era. Metropol, Berlin 1996, ISBN 3-926893-43-5 , pp. 130 ff .
  5. ^ Susan Zuccotti: Père Marie-Benoît and Jewish rescue: how a French priest together with Jewish friends saved thousands during the Holocaust . Indiana University Press, Bloomington 2013, ISBN 978-0-253-00866-4 , pp. 89-117 .
  6. ↑ TIME HISTORY / PIUS XII .: Pope Deutsche . In: Der Spiegel . tape 47 , November 18, 1964 ( spiegel.de [accessed January 19, 2019]).
  7. ^ Susan Zuccotti: Père Marie-Benoît and Jewish rescue: how a French priest together with Jewish friends saved thousands during the Holocaust . Indiana University Press, Bloomington 2013, ISBN 978-0-253-00866-4 , pp. 118-137 .
  8. ↑ Angelo Donati "L'ange de Nice". Retrieved January 19, 2019 .
  9. ^ A b Silvano Longhi: Exile and Identity: the Italian Jews in Switzerland (1943–1945) . Walter de Gruyter, Berlin 2017, ISBN 978-3-11-054088-8 .
  10. ↑ a b c Christiane Garnero Morena: Angelo Donati. In: Hommes & Migrations. 2017, accessed on January 19, 2019 (French).
  11. ↑ Giorgio Sacerdoti: If we don't meet again ...: The Siegmund Klein family between rescue and death: Letters from Germany, France, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Italy (1938 to 1945) . Prospero, Münster 2010, ISBN 978-3-941688-00-1 .
  12. ↑ Olga Tarcali: Return to Erfurt: memories of a destroyed youth . Erfurt 2001, ISBN 3-89702-399-7 , p. 53-61 .
  13. ↑ Olga Tarcali: Return to Erfurt: memories of a destroyed youth . Erfurt 2001, ISBN 3-89702-399-7 , p. 61-73 .
  14. ^ Serge Klarsfeld: Vichy - Auschwitz: the "final solution to the Jewish question" in France . Darmstadt 2007, ISBN 978-3-534-20793-0 , pp. 172-184 .
  15. ↑ Olga Tarcali: Return to Erfurt: memories of a destroyed youth . Erfurt 2001, ISBN 3-89702-399-7 , p. 76 .
  16. ↑ Commemorative Book - Victims of the Persecution of Jews under the National Socialist Tyranny in Germany 1933–1945: Gedenkblatt Hilde Spier. Retrieved January 19, 2019 .
  17. ↑ Olga Tarcali: Return to Erfurt: memories of a destroyed youth . Erfurt 2001, ISBN 3-89702-399-7 , p. 77-79 .
  18. ^ Commemorative Book - Victims of the Persecution of the Jews under the National Socialist Tyranny in Germany 1933–1945: Gedenkblatt Karl Ludwig Spier. Retrieved January 19, 2019 .
  19. ↑ Olga Tarcali: Return to Erfurt: memories of a destroyed youth . Erfurt 2001, ISBN 3-89702-399-7 , p. 95-103 .
  20. ^ The Righteous Among The Nations: Francesco Moraldo. Yad Vashem, accessed January 19, 2019 .
  21. ↑ Olga Tarcali: Return to Erfurt: memories of a destroyed youth . Erfurt 2001, ISBN 3-89702-399-7 .
  22. ↑ Angelo DonatiI, un 'Perlasca'alla Modenese. Retrieved January 19, 2019 (Italian).
  23. ↑ Donati, un angelo custode per migliaia di ebrei - Gazzetta di Modena. Retrieved January 19, 2019 (Italian).
  24. ↑ Florence Dubosc: Nice to Honor Angelo Donati, the Jewish Pope, this February. In: Riviera Buzz. January 31, 2016, accessed January 14, 2019 (UK English).
personal data
SURNAME Donati, Angelo
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Donati, Angelo Mordechai
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Jewish Italian banker, philanthropist and diplomat
DATE OF BIRTH February 3, 1885
PLACE OF BIRTH Modena
DATE OF DEATH December 30, 1960
Place of death Paris