I would like to know what different scenarios would put a Sicilian person in jail if they were not Jewish. Did Mussolini agree to have his political opponents rounded-up and taken with Jews to concentration camps, or was it Germans on their own who met resistance from opposing non-political groups and put Italians in Jail not with a direct order by Mussolini, or was it a combination of both? Were political prisoners of war brought to separate camps?
I am aware many people were put into concentration camps for being a number of things like disabled, a Gypsy, gay, non-Aryian, etc. But I know Mussolini did not share the same ethnic views as Hitler, and actually, ideologically opposed sending Jews to Germany since he considered them Italian being the fascist he was. I mean, he's still awful and still allowed it, but my point is a lot of what he did was for political gain. So it would seem like he would have had an extra incentive to put political prisoners in war instead of picking out ethnic groups, disabled people, and the LGTBQ+ community.
So I'm assuming Mussolini let German soldiers organize who they wanted to take while he only actively searched for political opponents and their groups, but they were sent to concentration camps all the same. I'd like to know about these political prisoners going to concentration camps. Were they Communists? Were they bandits? Were they anti-Nazi or anti-fascists or both? Why were they fighting?
Apologies for any ignorance I'm perpetuating.
Why do I ask? I found Dachau records with my family's last name who are all from the same town my great-grandfather was born. I'm trying to figure out more about them.
Thank you!
No Italians, nor Jews in Italian-controlled areas of France, Yugoslavia or Greece, were deported prior to the armistice of 8 September 1943.
This refusal to hand over Jews was less thanks to Mussolini and more due to opposition by senior civil servants, diplomats and army officers.
Mussolini had in fact handwritten nulla osta "no objections" on a German request dated 21 August 1942, to hand over several thousand Jews in the Italian-controlled zone of Yugoslavia, but a coordinated campaign of refusal and subversion among the military and civil service ensured this simply didn't take place; until several months later, under pressure from his own cabinet, Mussolini officialy reversed his authorisation.
Italian non-compliance with German requests to deport Jews prior to the armistice is well detailed in:
Steinberg, Jonathan. All or nothing : the Axis and the Holocaust, 1941-1943 Routledge, London ; New York 1991
And in the documentary Righteous Enemy:
https://jewishfilm.org/Catalogue/films/righteousenemy.htm
After 8 September 1943, with Mussolini deposed and the Italians joining the Allied cause, the Wehrmacht swept through Northern and Central Italy, and alongside Roma and Jews began rounding up Italian gentiles (partisans, communists, trade unionists, and a great many soldiers) to be deported.
In fact most interned Italians were soliders (approximately 650,000, compared to political prisoners in the tens of thousands), although without the official designation "prisoner of war", and the protections that entailed. They were given the options to join the SS or return to Italy, swearing allegiance to the Republic of Salò (headed by Mussolini - who had been broken out of prison by German commandos - but to all intents a German puppet regime); however the vast majority refused this offer, remaining as forced labourers until they died or until the end of the war.
Source:
Avagliano, Mario - Palmieri, Marco, I militari italiani nei lager nazisti. Una Resistenza senz' armi 1943-1945 Il Mulino, Bologna, 2020.
Without knowing the specific circumstances and the period of your relative's deportation it's impossible to establish exactly why he might have ended up in Dachau.
Records on Italian citizens being transferred into the German Reich proper or into the occupied territories tend to be fragmentary, in no little part due to the enormous scope, and to the eventual collapse, of the German industry of forced labor in 1940-45 Europe.
As a main demarcation point one should oviously focus on the Italian armistice and subsequent occupation in September 1943.
Before September 1943, the influx of Italian labor force was - for the most part - voluntary, even if encouraged by both Italian and German authorities, given the struggles of the Italian war industry to reach a level of maximum occupation. There were, nonetheless, Italian citizens in occupied France who, especially the more "politically" active ones, might have been destined to forced labor interment or to deportation into concentration camps before the armistice. While Italian citizens abroad, and Italian workers in Germany, were regarded by German authorities - up until the armistice - as subjects of an allied nation, they were still subject to the German law and therefore manifestations of dissent or unruliness could be repressed, without the Italian authorities being informed, or caring much about it.
Anyways, until September 1943, the number of Italian citizens into the German concentration system and forced labor proper would have been extremely limited.
With the armistice things changed considerably.
When Italy announced its unconditional surrender to the Allies, over one million Italian soldiers were taken de facto into custody by the German military forces. Of those, about 800,000 - all those who had failed to swear loyalty to the new puppet Regime of Salò or to enlist with the German Army's auxiliary forces - were quickly transferred in the German industrial-concentration system, albeit with a specific status which usually comported a degree of separation from the other groups. Originally directed to the prison-camps proper - the Mannschafts-Stammlager - some chose to return to their military duties, while a significant majority was transferred in order to be employed in the industrial sites adjacent to the concentration camps. By December 1943 Sauckel's euphemistically named Labor Deployment Office could count already on 450,000 employed Italian "military internees"; a status revised in the Autumn of 1944, due to the severe embarassment for the allied power of Salò, by the deliberation of the OKW which granted them the new denomination of "free civilian laborers" (the casualty rate of almost 10% among them should give a measure of how significant this improvement actually was).
To the former military personnel proper, one should add civilian labor force, gathered in Italy for a vast array of reasons (the most frequent probably being the attempt to avoid conscription or the subsequent labor drafts - but a significant percentage was represented by women). According to a report compiled by the Social Republic's Ambassador in Berlin, Filippo Anfuso, there were about 150,000 Italian citizens employed as forced labor within the German Reich. It is not exactly clear here - at least not to me - if Anfuso included citizens deported from the Italian regions under direct German occupation (Voralpenland and Adriatisches Küstenland) and from France (for instance 6,000 expats were delivered to the German authorities from October 1943 to February 1944). The larger portion of Italian civilian labor force probably went through Sauckel's Office (he listed 37,000 Italian "recruits" from October 1943 to July 1944). In the meantime, German political-industrial cartels (the most notorious would probably be the IG-Farben, whose board official Fritz Ter Meer was looking to secure chemists for his Monowitz factory), in cooperation with the Fascist authorities of Salò, were actively pursuing the "recruitment" (involuntary) of qualified workforce as well - chemists and technicians especially - who, due to their status, might have enjoyed a comparatively better treatment than other workers.
As the authorities of Salò struggled to retain control of their workforce and to produce the impression of a voluntary mobilization, German demands became more urgent. In the Spring of 1944 a decree was passed which optioned military conscripts for mandatory labor; during the summer, with the extension of work hours, excess workforce was made available for transfer; in June, common criminals and, subsequently, political prisoners, were also made available to feed the extreme efforts of the German war-industry machine.
Things were made somewhat more intricate due to the presence of competing German groups which "claimed" for themselves portions of the Italian labor force, at times in direct opposition with each other. This was the case, for instance, of the Todt Organization which demanded the assignation of Italian labor force for its war-front related needs; while, at the same time, Speer's Ministry called for a militarization of the Italian production system under German supervision, and therefore objected to Sauckel's demands.
Last; Italian civilian workers, thus transferred by various means and for different reasons into Germany and German-occupied lands, could then make their way into the concentration system proper (but, again, without knowing the exact records, it's impossible to speculate on your relative path or precise status) by committing one of the many violations (missing work schedule, sexual indiscretions, indiscipline, etc.) deemed significant enough by the German authorities.
Well, After the Italian armistice with the Allied forces on September 8th 1943 hundreds of thousands of Italian soldiers were rounded up and sent into contentration camps in mainland germany, mostly to be used as "slave" labour.then there were people rounded up in Italian streets simply because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong documents: if you weren't an essential worker for the German war machine, you could be drafted into mandatory services.
Just curious, what's your family name?