Giovanni Palatucci

Giovanni Palatucci (31 May 1909 – 10 February 1945) was an Italian police official who was long believed to have saved thousands of Jews in Fiume between 1939 and 1944 (current Rijeka in Croatia) from being deported to Nazi extermination camps.

Palatucci, known as “the Italian Schindler,” has long been credited with saving thousands of Jews during the Holocaust while serving in the police department in the city of Fiume, and was designated by Yad Vashem as one of the Righteous Among the Nations.

Moreover, the report reviews in depth hundreds of police records preserved at the State Archive of Rijeka showing that one of Palatucci's main activities between 1938 and 1943 was the compilation and update of the census of the Jews.

Hagiographers also claim that he managed to destroy all documented records of some 10,000 Jewish refugees living in the town, issuing them false papers and providing them with funds.

The arrests began in October 1943 and were organized first as round-ups and then as targeted operations in which the Italian Questura provided information to both locate and identify Fiume Jews.

After the liberation of Florence, in August 1944, Roberto Tomasselli, his direct superior and protector who had left him in his place, defected the ranks of Salò and ended up in an Anglo-American POW camp.

His chief of cabinet and close collaborator in Fiume, left for Milan, where he served briefly Mussolini ailing administration and passed to the Liberation forces before the Allies entered the city.

[4] In October 2002, the Pope's vicar in Rome opened a beatification case for Palatucci,[6] but in June 2013 the Vatican announced that it had asked a historian to review the new findings.

As shown in the 2013 report, the main narrative of all rescue operations attributed to Palatucci can be found in a speech that the bishop delivered in Ramat Gan (Tel Aviv) on the occasion of a dead boy ceremony in honor of his nephew.

The historian of Early Modern Europe Anna Foa of Sapienza University of Rome wrote in a June 2013 article for the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano that the decision to re-classify Palatucci, a Catholic, as a collaborator was hasty, bur conceded that more study was needed.

[9] The New York Times reported a reply from Centro Primo Levi's director, Natalia Indrimi, stating that the documents have been available to the scholarly community since the inception of the project, and that, if testimonies are available, they should be made public.

Murray K. Watson, vice-rector and assistant professor of Sacred Scripture and Ecumenism at St. Peter's Seminary in Ontario, said in June 2013 "I think a judicious patience as regards this question is probably wise, since even the scholars familiar with this material disagree about its meaning and interpretation.