Research funded by the German government and published in 2016 found the number of victims of Nazi war crimes in Italy to be 22,000, double the previously estimated figure.

However, some historians have argued that the reasons for atrocities and the brutal behaviour were more complex, often resulting from the military crisis caused by the German retreats and the fear of ambushes.

In the territories occupied by the Italian Army in France and Yugoslavia after the outbreak of World War II, Jews even found protection from persecution.

[5] SS-Obergruppenführer Karl Wolff, the Supreme SS and Police Leader in Italy was tasked with overseeing the final solution, the genocide of the Jews.

Odilo Globocnik, appointed as Higher SS and Police Leader for the Adriatic coastal area, had been responsible for the murder of hundreds of thousands of Jews and Gypsies in Lublin, Poland, before his assignment to Italy.

[10] Karl Brunner was appointed as SS and Police Leader in Bolzano, South Tyrol, Willy Tensfeld in Monza for upper and western Italy and Karl-Heinz Bürger was placed in charge of anti-partisan operations.

5 on 30 November 1943, issued by the minister of the interior of the RSI Guido Buffarini Guidi, ordered the Italian police to arrest Jews and confiscate their property.

[16][17] Approximately 14,000 Italian non-Jewish civilians, often women, children and elderly, have been documented to have died in over 5,300 individual instances of war crimes committed by Nazi Germany.

Instead of awarding them prisoner of war status they were left with a choice of joining the armed forces of the Italian Social Republic or to become military internees.

In the winter of 1944–45 the Italian military internees were designated civilians by Nazi Germany to integrate them more effectively in the forced labour required for the armament industry.

The division also looted Jewish property and had to be explicitly stopped by SS corps commander Paul Hausser on the grounds that only the security police and the SD were authorised to carry out those measures.

[32] The 16th SS Panzergrenadier Division committed the Marzabotto and Sant'Anna di Stazzema massacres, the two worst atrocities in Italy as far as number of victims goes.

The latter was part of a set of agreements which West Germany concluded with twelve countries, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Greece, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom, paying DM 876 million in what it considered voluntary compensation, without legal obligation.

Generalfeldmarschall Albert Kesselring, German commander in the Mediterranean theatre, was tried in Venice for war crimes, found guilty, sentenced to death, but released in 1952.

Eduard Crasemann, commander of the 26th Panzer Division, which was involved in the Padule di Fucecchio massacre, was found guilty of war crimes and sentenced to 10 years imprisonment.

Max Simon, commander of the 16th SS Panzergrenadier Division, involved in the Marzabotto and Sant'Anna di Stazzema massacres, was sentenced to death by a British court but pardoned in 1954.

[19] Heinrich Andergassen, alongside two others, was sentenced to death by a US military tribunal and executed in 1946 in Pisa, Italy for his role in murders of OSS agent Roderick Stephen Hall and six other Allied POWs.

[19] Karl Friedrich Titho, SS-Untersturmführer and commandant of the Fossoli di Carpi and Bolzano Transit Camps, was convicted after the war in the Netherlands for his role in executions there.

In 1999 he was sentenced in absentia in Turin to life imprisonment for his involvement in the execution of 15 hostages in Milan, on Piazzale Loreto, in August 1944 but never extradited to Italy.

[58] In 2011, a military court in Italy tried four of the suspected perpetrators of the Padule di Fucecchio massacre and found three of them guilty while the fourth one died during the trial.

Ernst Pistor (Captain), Fritz Jauss (Warrant officer), and Johan Robert Riss (Sergeant) were found guilty while Gerhard Deissmann died before the sentencing, aged 100.

[60] Karl Friedrich Titho, commander of the Fossoli di Carpi and Bolzano Transit Camps, shortly before his death admitted that he was, as a member of the SS, guilty of crimes committed in his area of operation and that it had affected him all his life.

[1] The Memoriale della Shoah is a memorial in Milano Centrale railway station, dedicated to the Jewish people deported from there to the extermination camps and was opened in January 2013.

[31] In 2015, the Italian Foreign Minister, Paolo Gentiloni, together with his German counterpart Frank Walter Steinmeier, who would later serve as President of Germany, opened a Documentation Centre on the Padule di Fucecchio Massacre.