2. Italian anti-Semitism was not born of the Fascist Party
Adolf Hitler did not create anti-Semitism in Germany, he exploited the hatred directed towards Jews in the center of Europe for centuries. Anti-Semitism was also prevalent in France, the Soviet Union, England, and other European countries. Italy was not known for being anti-Semitic, nor was it a part of the Fascist program during Mussolini’s rise to power and early years as the Italian dictator. In the 1920s Mussolini wrote, “Italy knows no antisemitism and we believe that we will never know it”. Nevertheless, Mussolini’s writings were fraught with anti-Semitic analyses of the Russian Revolution and the ensuing Civil War prior to his rise to power. Though he personally held views which were in some cases in line with Hitler’s, the Italian dictator did not have the latent anti-Jewish views among his people as the German dictator had.
During the Fascist March on Rome in 1922, which had been instrumental in launching Mussolini to power, well over 200 Italian Jews marched with the Fascists. By the late 1930s, under pressure from both Spain’s Franco (who associated Jews with communism) and Hitler, Mussolini began to allow the spread of anti-Jewish propaganda, though the situation of the Jews in Italy never reached the depths which it had in Germany and German-occupied territories. After Italy entered the Second World War and lasting until the armistice in 1943, Italian Jews were shielded from deportation to the German concentration camps, and Italy built camps of its own to house those considered enemies of Fascism and thus of the Italian state. Anti-Semitism was unpopular in Italy and among the Italian people and even among the Fascists, who considered it a vice of the German people, and a political mistake by Adolf Hitler.