This changed in September 1943, when German forces occupied the country, installed the puppet state of the Italian Social Republic and immediately began persecuting and deporting the Jews found there.

Some were sympathetic to the regime, joined the party and occupied significant offices and positions in politics and economy (Aldo Finzi, Renzo Ravenna, Margherita Sarfatti, Ettore Ovazza, Guido Jung).

Italian authorities perceived that imprisoned Roma were used to a harsh life, and they received much lower food allowances and more basic accommodation.

[14] On 25 July 1943, with the fall of the Fascist Regime and the arrest of Benito Mussolini, the situation in the Italian concentration camps changed.

[9] Hundreds of Jewish refugees who were imprisoned in the major camps in the South (Campagna internment camp and Ferramonti di Tarsia) were liberated by the Allies before the arrival of the Germans, but 43,000 Jews (35,000 Italians and 8,000 refugees from other countries) were trapped in the territories now under control of the Italian Social Republic.

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

[17] 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.

[20][21] Martin Sandberger was appointed as the head of the Gestapo in Verona and played a vital role in the arrest and deportation of the Italian Jews.

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

[28] Altogether, by the end of the war, almost 8,600 Jews from Italy and Italian-controlled areas in France and Greece were deported to Auschwitz; all but 1,000 were murdered.

Among them were a few hundred Jews from Libya, an Italian colony before the war, who had been deported to mainland Italy in 1942, and were sent to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

[30] In the nineteen months of German occupation, from September 1943 to May 1945, twenty per cent of Italy's pre-war Jewish population was murdered by the Nazis.

In 1926 it ordered that all "foreign Gypsies" should be expelled from the country and, from September 1940, Romani people of Italian nationality were held in designated camps.

[32] The number of Romani people who were killed from hunger and exposure during the Fascist Italian period is also unknown but is estimated to be in the thousands.

[44] Among the most priceless artefacts lost this way are the contents of the Biblioteca della Comunità Israelitica and the Collegio Rabbinico Italiano, the two Jewish libraries in Rome.

[46] Weeks before the Raid on the Roman Ghetto, Herbert Kappler forced Rome's Jewish community to hand over 50 kilograms (110 lb) of gold in exchange for safety.

He was arrested in West Germany in 1968 and eventually sentenced to life in prison for his involvement in the deportation of 3,300 Jews from Italy to Auschwitz.

[52] In 1964, six members of the Leibstandarte division were charged with the Lago Maggiore massacre, carried out near Meina, as the statute of limitation laws in Germany at the time, twenty years for murder, meant the perpetrators could soon no longer be prosecuted.

The sentences were appealed and Germany's highest court, the Bundesgerichtshof, while not overturning the guilty verdict, ruled that the perpetrators had to be freed on a technicality.

[53][30] This verdict caused much frustration for a younger generation of German state prosecutors who were interested in prosecuting Nazi crimes and their perpetrators.

[54] The role of Italians as collaborators of the Germans in the Holocaust in Italy has rarely been reflected upon in the country after World War II.

This only began to change in the 1990s after the publication of Il Libro Della Memoria by Jewish-Italian historian Liliana Picciotto, and the Italian Racial Laws in book form in the early 2000s.

[43][28] No trace remains of the former Borgo San Dalmazzo concentration camp, but two monuments were erected to mark the events that took place there.

[35] As of 2018, 694 Italians have been recognised as Righteous Among the Nations, an honorific used by the State of Israel to describe non-Jews who risked their lives during the Holocaust to save Jews from extermination by the Nazis.

[57] Arguably the most famous of these is cyclist Gino Bartali, winner of the 1938 and 1948 Tour de France, who was honoured posthumously in 2014 for his role in saving Italian Jews during the Holocaust, never having spoken about it during his lifetime.

[58] Primo Levi, an Italian Jewish Auschwitz survivor, published his experience of the Holocaust in Italy in his books If This Is a Man and The Periodic Table.

The novel The Garden of the Finzi-Continis by Giorgio Bassani deals with the fate of the Jews of Ferrara during the Holocaust and was made into a movie of the same name.

While Levi published his first works on the Shoah in the 1970s (L'osteria di Brema and Ad ora incerta), the first implicit account of the Italian Holocaust can be found in the allusions made by Eugenio Montale in his A Liuba che parte and later in Piccolo testamento and Il sogno del prigioniero, published in the section Conclusioni provvisorie of La bufera e altro.

The subject matter was more explicitly developed by Salvatore Quasimodo and "in the prose poems collected by Umberto Saba in Scorciatoie e raccontini"[59] (1946).

[60] The Oscar-winners The Garden of the Finzi-Continis by Vittorio De Sica (1970) and Life Is Beautiful by Roberto Benigni (1997) are the two most famous movies on the Holocaust in Italy.