Ettore Ovazza

Ettore Ovazza (born March 21, 1892 in Turin , † October 11, 1943 in Intra ( VB )) was a Turin banker and entrepreneur .

Life

His father, Ernesto Ovazza, an assimilated Jew , fought in the First World War as an artillery lieutenant in the Battle of Good Freit .

Ettore Ovazza took part in the March on Rome in 1922 with other black shirts . He was one of the first members of the Partito Nazionale Fascista . Being both a Jew and a fascist was not so rare in Italy in the 1920s, as Italian fascism initially did not show as pronounced anti-Semitism as German National Socialism . Even among the founders of the fascist party there were Jews.

In the Jewish community of Turin, Ovazza worked towards filling the key positions with supporters of fascism. In 1929 he met the " Duce " and was enthusiastic. From 1934 Ovazza published the newspaper La Nostra Bandiera , which called on Jews to support the government of Benito Mussolini , reminded of Italian-Jewish heroes of the First World War and agitated anti-Zionist . He volunteered for the Ethiopian War, but was not drafted. In 1935 he was honored for his commitment to the Libya colony . In 1936 he was allowed to stand as an honor guard at the burial site of the House of Savoy in the Superga in Turin .

However, the situation quickly changed when the Italian racial laws ( leggi razziali ) came into force in 1938 . Jews were prohibited from marrying non-Jewish Italians, sending their children to state schools, employing non-Jewish servants, and joining the army. The number of employees in factories owned by Jews was limited to 100, and ownership of land and real estate was prohibited. As a result, Ovazza was fired from his bank and expelled from the fascist party. His brother was expelled from the army. In 1939 Jews were excluded from all professions. Signs in the cafes of Turin rejected Jews. Jewish organizations were dissolved, and many Jews converted to Catholicism or emigrated.

The murder of the Ovazza family

prehistory

On September 8, 1943 and the following days, German soldiers occupied Italy after the Italians left the German-Italian alliance and signed an armistice with the Allies on September 8 . Just a few days later the SS had started to murder the Jews in Italy. The first mass murders of Jews in this country, namely the massacre on Lake Maggiore , had been carried out by members of several companies of the 1st Battalion of the 2nd Leibstandarte Regiment of the SS Adolf Hitler , who were stationed on the west bank of Lake Maggiore .

The murder

A short time later - at the beginning of October - 51-year-old Ettore Ovazza, his 41-year-old wife Nella, their twenty-year-old son Riccardo and their fifteen-year-old daughter Elena were staying at the Hotel Lyskamm in St. Jean in Val Gressoney in the Aosta Valley. They had previously sold their possessions and wanted to flee to the canton of Valais in Switzerland with the remaining jewelry and cash. Riccardo joined a group of Croatian refugees with some valuables and tried to be the first of the family to get to Switzerland. But he was intercepted by the Swiss border police. He was brought to Brig and put on the train to Italy. When the express train stopped at the next station, the Italian Domodossola in Val d'Ossola , near the location of the SS companies, the Secret Field Police picked up Riccardo after denouncing him and transferred him to the 2nd Company of the 1st Battalion of the 2nd Regiment of the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler under the command of SS-Obersturmführer Gottfried Meir , which was stationed in the elementary school for girls in Intra . The SS men interrogated and murdered Riccardo Ovazza on October 9, 1943. They burned his dismembered body in the heating system in the school cellar. Before that, they had forced Riccardo to reveal the whereabouts of his family. On the same day an SS unit set out in a truck for Val Gressoney and transported his family to Intra the next day.

Ovazza plaque in Verbania Intra

On October 11, the SS men also murdered Riccardo's family in the school and burned the bodies in the heater. The motive for the act was probably also greed, as the historian Lutz Klinkhammer reports.

In Austria in 1954 a trial against SS-Obersturmführer Gottfried Meir took place before the People's Court in Graz , External Senate Klagenfurt , who was charged with being the commander responsible for the murders . Meir was acquitted on November 4, 1954 for lack of evidence ; However, the court held two of its subordinates guilty, although they had since died. The following year, on July 2, 1955, the Provincial Military Court of Turin (Tribunale Militare di Torino) sentenced Meir to life imprisonment in absentia, but the Republic of Austria did not extradite him to Italy. Two attempts to resume the Austrian procedure failed in the 1960s. Meir lived undisturbed in Carinthia and worked there as the school director.

In 1983 the "Committee for the Resistance Against the Germans on Lake Maggiore" placed a marble plaque in honor of the Ovazza family in the former girls' school, which today houses the registration office.

literature

• Alexander Stille : Benevolence and Betrayal: Five Italian Jewish Families Under Facism . London 1993, ISBN 0-09-922341-4 . The book first appeared in Italian as Uno su mille: cinque famiglie ebraiche durante il fascismo . Milan 1991.
• Nicola Caracciolo: Uncertain Refuge: Italy and the Holocaust . Urbana / USA 1995. Published in Italian in 1987 as Gli ebrei e l'Italia durante la guerra 1940–1945: I fatti della storia. Documenti . Publisher Bonacci.
• Vincenzo Pinto: "Fedelissimi cittadini della Patria che è Madre comune". Il fascismo estetico e sentimentale di Ettore Ovazza (1892-1943) . Nuova Storia Contemporanea , XV, 5, 2011, pp. 51-72.

Web links

ANPI-Verbania National Association of Partisans Verbania: The appalling end of a Jewish family in Intra from October 9th to 11th, 1943. In: Partisan struggle in the Novara area, some important dates October 1943 .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Lutz Klinkhammer: Stragi naziste in Italia. La guerra contro i civili (1943-1944). Donzelli, Rome 1997, p. 73.
2. ↑ Lutz Klinkhammer: Stragi naziste in Italia. La guerra contro i civili (1943-1944). Donzelli, Rome 1997, p. 72 f.
3. ↑ See Eva Holpfer: L'azione penale contro i crimini in Austria. Il caso di Gottfried Meir, una SS austriaca in Italia . In: La Rassegna Mensile di Israel , LXIX, 2003, pp. 619-634. A summary at nachkriegsjustiz.at (English) and at cat.inist.fr (Italian). See also Giovanni Galli: 400 Nomi. L'archivio sulla deportazione novarese: un progetto in corsa . In: Sentieri della Ricerca , No. 6, 2008, pp. 21–62, here: p. 39. Archive link ( Memento of the original from March 5, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . See also three minutes per victim . In: Der Spiegel . No.  3 , 1966 ( online ).