Fossoli transit camp

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Fossoli transit camp memorial

The camp Fossoli (pronounced: Fóssoli) in the former village of Fossoli (today a northern district of Carpi ) in the province of Modena , Italy , consisted of two parts, the so-called "Campo Vecchio" (old camp) on Via dei , which covers about 9 hectares Grilli and adjoining it to the south and separated from it by a moat and fence system, the “Campo Nuovo” (new warehouse) on Via Remesina Esterna with about 6 hectares. It was in operation from 1942 to 1970 for other purposes, depending on the period. In 1944 it received special historical significance as a so-called transit camp Fossoli , also known as Dulag Fossoli , a transit camp and the starting point for many deportations of Italian Jews to German extermination camps .

Concentration camps and deportation routes in World War II

During the Second World War

Fossoli prisoner of war camp 1942

POW camp

At the instruction of VI. The Army Corps of Bologna on May 30, 1942 established the Kingdom of Italy , which was then allied with Germany in the federation of the so-called Axis Powers of World War II, a few km northeast of the town with the "Campo PG No. 73" (POW camp No. 73). The camp, later called “Campo Vecchio” (Old Camp), consisted of 191 tents from June 1942 and initially took in 1,800 British, New Zealand and Australian prisoners of war who had fallen into German hands in North Africa. French and Italian resistance fighters and hostages arrested by the Organizzazione di Vigilanza e Repressione dell'Antifascismo (OVRA) also came to Fossoli in the Italian-occupied part of France (Provence and Corsica) .

Internment camp for Italian opposition members

After the Allies landed in Sicily and the armistice of Cassibile on September 8, 1943, Italy left the Axis alliance and declared war on Germany, however, without notifying its own soldiers. Units of the Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS occupied the Italian mainland and freed the imprisoned Mussolini , who then ruled as head of the so-called Repubblica Sociale Italiana (RSI) from Salò on Lake Garda, according to the will of the occupying power, the part of Italy not yet conquered by the Allies . The prisoners of war from the North African campaign were transferred to Germany. Political prisoners and Italian soldiers who refused to join the army of the fascist Salò regime came to the "Campo Vecchio".

Warehouse plan
Camp for Jewish and political prisoners in 1944

National concentration camp for Jews

At the end of September 1943, the Italian social republic, now declared under German military protection by Mussolini, had another 60 stone barracks built in the so-called "Campo Nuovo" in addition to the 20 or so wooden barracks that were already there.

On November 14, 1943, at the meeting of the Republican-Fascist Party in Verona, all “Jews” were declared members of an enemy nation and lost their Italian citizenship. The Minister of the Interior of the Republic, Guido Buffarini Guidi , ordered the arrest of all "Jews" by the Italian authorities and their assignment to so-called provincial concentration camps ( campi provinziali ) in Police Order No. 5 of November 30, 1943 . On December 5, 1944, Fossoli was declared a "National Concentration Camp" of the RSI to intern the Jews. The security police of the RSI took over the guard. In December 1943 there were about 100 Jews in the camp.

Police detention and transit camps

The aim of the measure was the so-called final solution of the Jewish question for the German security organs, ie the further transport to extermination camps . With its strategic location on the main railway line from south to north, Fossoli was a good location for a transit camp. Logically, the German commander of the security police and SD (BdS) in Verona Wilhelm Harster (1904–1991) took over the Campo di Fossoli as a “police detention and transit camp” in early March 1944. The Italian management of the entire camp de facto no longer had any influence on this part of the camp; the 40-man Italian guards also stayed; however, six German SS men (Ukrainians) were added as "reinforcements". The Italian social republic RSI retained responsibility for the "Campo Vecchio" with the political prisoners not intended for deportation through its Modena prefecture . Guarding this part was the job of the Italian police.

In May 1944, the occupiers divided the "Campo Nuovo" created for deportations into a section for political prisoners (mostly resistance fighters ) and one for Jewish prisoners or other "inferior races". The maximum capacity was between 2500 and 3000 people. The so-called “Jewish camp” was separated from the rest of the area by a fence. SS-Untersturmführer Karl Friedrich Titho became the commander of the transit camp . SS-Hauptscharführer Hans Haage took over the management of the protective custody camp for political prisoners .

If a camp had reached capacity limits, Friedrich Boßhammer (1906–1972) , who was commissioned by Adolf Eichmann to organize the extermination of the Jews in the occupied Italian sphere of influence, in coordination with camp manager Titho, gave the order to provide a deportation train. So Boßhammer put together the first two trains to Bergen-Belsen and Auschwitz-Birkenau on February 19 and 22 - that is, when the Italian was in charge of the camp .

Between November 1943 and the end of 1944, around 5,000 prisoners, including over 3,000 Jews, passed through the Fossoli camp. The deportation trains with Italian Jews mostly had the destination Auschwitz-Birkenau (5 transports), one transport with non-Italian Jews went to Bergen-Belsen. The Italian political prisoners were deported on the orders of Boßhammer's Gestapo colleague, SS-Sturmbannführer Friedrich Kranebitter , mainly to the Mauthausen concentration camp, and some to Buchenwald and Ravensbrück. Other destinations were Dachau and Flossenbürg .

Omnibuses from an Italian company, accompanied by Carabinieri and members of the police, brought the prisoners to the train station 6 km away, where their deportation began in closed freight wagons. The chemist and writer Primo Levi was already on the second transport on February 22, 1944 (to Auschwitz) , who survived the Holocaust by fortunate circumstances and whose account of Fossoli and the deportation to Auschwitz in his book "Se questo è un uomo?" ( Is that a person? ) Is one of the most impressive contemporary documents. Otherwise, the chances of survival for the deportees were slim. Of about 1,000 Jews who reached Auschwitz on June 30th, only 180 prisoners escaped selection and thus immediate extermination. From the last RSHA transport to Auschwitz, which left Fossoli with 523 Jews on June 26, 1944, only 40 survived.

Arbitrariness and harassment, which went as far as premeditated murder, spread not only against the Jews. After a partisan attack in which seven German soldiers were killed in Genoa, ten times as many political prisoners were shot as reprisals at a nearby firing range.

On April 5, May 16 and June 26, 1944, Fossoli transports again left for Auschwitz. Others left for Bergen-Belsen on May 16 and 19. Shortly before the transit camp was closed because of the situation at the front, Boßhammer also had those Jews who had been spared as “ Jewish half-breeds ” or so-called mixed marriages transported to Auschwitz, Buchenwald , Ravensbrück or Bergen-Belsen on his own initiative .

Relocation to Bozen-Gries

In the summer of 1944 the front had advanced further from the south and the province of Modena had become the Allied operational zone. The air raids and increased pressure from the partisans made administration and control of the camp more and more difficult. Therefore, on August 2, 1944, the German leadership decided to give up the actual Dulag Fossoli and to relocate it further north to the newly established police and transit camp Bozen-Gries . On July 21st and August 6th, the rest of the remaining prisoners and the guards (around 100 people in total) were deported to Bolzano.

Fossoli continued to serve as a stopover for members of the opposition who were destined for forced labor in Germany. Because of the Allied air raids, the camp was moved to Gonzaga in November 1944 .

After the end of the war

Refugee camp

After the end of the war, the Modena police used the "Campo nuovo" from August 1945 to May 1947 as a collection point for refugees and Jewish survivors of the Holocaust who were waiting to be repatriated. According to the reports, the relationships between the people gathered there and with one another and with the outside world were not easy, as they were generally only viewed as undesirable. In the confusing conglomerate, even Jews met their former persecutors and tormentors.

"Campo Vecchio" was demolished as early as 1946 and the area was then used for agriculture.

The children of Nomadelfia

Commune Nomadelfia

In May 1947 the clergyman Don Zeno Saltini from Carpi occupied the complex for his organization “Piccoli Apostoli” and the “Nomadelfia” commune for orphans and orphans without parents was created according to his ideas. At the time of its greatest expansion it reached 700 children or 1000 people including adults. After a while the Italian government (especially the Ministry of the Interior under Mario Scelba) decided to abandon the experiment of Christianity mixed with strong social commitment (called “comunismo evangelico”). Don Zeno was forced to leave Fossoli, not least because of heavy debt. In August 1952, the municipality moved to an estate in Grosseto made available by Countess Maria Giovanna Albertoni Pirelli .

Villaggio San Marco

From 1953 until the late 1960s, the camp now known as Villaggio San Marco took in Italian resettlers who had given up their home in the Balkans under pressure from the socialist Yugoslav government of Tito in the so-called “Istrian” or “Julian-Dalmatian exodus”.

Fossoli transit camp

memorial

The opening of a memorial museum and documentation center for the deportees in Carpi in 1973 encouraged the city to purchase the site of the former Fossoli camp, which was made possible free of charge thanks to a special law in 1984. Since 1996 the "Foundation Former Camp Fossoli" has been taking care of the restoration of parts of the former "Campo Nuovo".

crime

Fossoli was not a killing camp, but an internment and transit camp, but to that extent an essential part of the National Socialist killing machine for Jews and partisans in occupied Italy. The brutal camp management led to multiple attacks and crimes, which culminated after the murder of the partisan leader Leopoldo Gasparotto in the massacre at the Cibeno shooting range a few kilometers south of the camp on July 12, 1944, in which 67 prisoners were shot by the SS. The local main responsible SS-Untersturmführer Karl Friedrich Titho and SS-Hauptscharführer Hans Haage escaped prosecution because of political considerations of the two NATO members Italy and Germany.

literature

Web links

Commons : Campo di transito (Fossoli)  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e see web link Memorial Sites Europe 1933-1945: Fossoli
  2. ↑ see web link The Camps: Fossoli of the Associazione nazionale ex deportati nei campi nazisti
  3. ↑ a b c d e f g h i see literature Juliane Wetzel: German police detention and transit camp Fossoli die Carpi and German police detention and transit camp Bozen / Bolzano-Gries
  4. ^ Carlo Moos: Exclusion, Internment, Deportation - Anti-Semitism and Violence in Late Italian Fascism (1938–1945). 2004, p. 90 f.
  5. ↑ Thomas Schlemmer, Hans Woller: Italian Fascism and the Jews 1922 to 1945 . In: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte. Issue 2, 2005, p. 193 f.
  6. ^ Klaus Voigt: Refuge on revocation . Klett Kotta 1993, Volume 2, ISBN 3-608-91160-X , p. 348 ff.
  7. ↑ Ludwig Laher : Bitter. Roman , Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen 2014, ISBN 978-3-8353-1387-3 , pp. 141f.
  8. ↑ Klaus Voigt: Refuge on Revocation , Volume 2, Klett-Cotta 1993, ISBN 3-608-91160-X , p. 370.
  9. ↑ see literature Sara Berger: Self-staging of a “Jewish advisor” in court - Friedrich Boßhammer
  10. ↑ a b see web link Il campo of the Ex-Campo Fossoli Foundation
  11. ↑ The areas concerned had a mixed population of Italians, Slovenes, Croats, Serbs and other communities. Istria including Rijeka and parts of Dalmatia including Zadar were annexed to Italy after the First World War. After the end of the Second World War it became part of Yugoslavia in the Paris Peace Treaty of 1947 with the exception of the municipalities of Muggia and San Dorligo della Valle. According to Italian assumptions, 250,000 to 350,000 inhabitants of Italian descent subsequently left the country.
  12. ↑ see web link I fucilati al Poligono di Cibeno of the Associazione nazionale ex deportati nei campi nazisti
  13. ↑ Poligono del Cibeno, Fossoli, Carpi, July 12, 1944 (Modena - Emilia-Romagna). In: straginazifasciste.it. Retrieved February 5, 2020 (Italian).

Coordinates: 44 ° 49 ′ 42 ″  N , 10 ° 54 ′ 10 ″  E