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He has been called the Italian Schindler, credited with helping to save 5,000 Jews during the Holocaust. Giovanni Palatucci, a wartime police official, has been honored in Israel, in New York and in Italy, where squares and promenades have been named in his honor, and in the Vatican, where Pope John Paul II declared him a martyr, a step toward potential sainthood.

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But at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, the tale of his heroic exploits is being removed from an exhibition after officials there learned of new evidence suggesting that, far from being a hero, he was an enthusiastic Nazi collaborator involved in the deporting of Jews to Auschwitz. A letter sent this month to the museum’s director by the Centro Primo Levi at the Center for Jewish Studies in New York stated that a research panel of more than a dozen scholars who reviewed nearly 700 documents concluded that for six years, Palatucci was “a willing executor of the racial legislation and — after taking the oath to Mussolini’s Social Republic, collaborated with the Nazis.” The letter said that Italian and German records provided no evidence that he had helped Jews during the war and that the first mention only surfaced years later, in 1952. Researchers also found documents that showed Palatucci had helped the Germans identify Jews to round up. There is no established explanation for how the account of Palatucci’s heroics took hold, but some experts say its persistence owed much to the flattering light it shed on Italy after the war. Scholars said the new evidence surfaced in recent years as they gained access to documents. The goal of their research, they said, was to understand the role of Fiume, the city where Palatucci worked, as a breeding ground for fascism; the documents that undermined the account of Palatucci’s selfless heroism were a byproduct of that investigation. Palatucci has been credited with saving thousands of Jews between 1940 and 1944 while he was police chief in Fiume, an Adriatic port city that was considered the first symbol of Italy’s new Fascist Empire. (It is now called Rijeka and is part of Croatia.) When the Nazis occupied the city in 1943, for example, Palatucci was said to have destroyed records to prevent the Germans from sending Fiume’s Jews to concentration camps. His own death at age 35 in a camp at Dachau seemed to corroborate his valor. But Natalia Indrimi, the executive director of the Centro Primo Levi, said historians have been able to review these supposedly destroyed records in the Rijeka State Archives. What they show, said Dr. Indrimi, who coordinated the research, is that Fiume had only 500 Jews by 1943, and that most of them — 412, or about 80 percent — ended up at Auschwitz, a higher percentage than in any other Italian city. The research on Palatucci found that rather than being police chief, he was the adjunct deputy commissary responsible for enforcing Fascist Italy’s racial laws. What’s more, his deportation to Dachau in 1944 was not related to saving Jews but to German accusations of embezzlement and treason for passing plans for the postwar independence of Fiume to the British.

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An estimated 9,000 Jews were deported from Italy during World War II. But experts have noted that, although the 45,000 Jews in Italy were persecuted, most survived the war. Still, many scholars portray the belated claims of some Italians that they went out of their way to save Jews as part of an attempt to recast Italy’s Fascist past. “The default statement of every Fascist leader after the war was that ‘I helped the Jews,’ ” Dr. Indrimi said. Alexander Stille, a professor at the Columbia University journalism school who has reviewed some of the documents, said the Palatucci case is a result of three powerful institutions, all with a vested interest in publicizing what appeared to be a heroic tale: “The Italian government was anxious to rehabilitate itself and show that they were better and more humane than their Nazi allies. The Catholic Church was eager to tell a positive story about the church’s role during the war, and the State of Israel was eager to promote the idea of righteous gentiles and tell stories of right-minded ordinary people who helped to save ordinary Jews.” Mr. Stille, whose recent family memoir, “The Force of Things,” includes a tale about his Jewish grandfather in Fiume, said, “Palatucci was the beneficiary of that.”

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Originally posted by Ushgarak
On a somewhat tangential subject, I wish people would stop labelling others as the X Schindler for saving Jews. There's this guy who was working for British intelligence who saved a huge bunch and got labelled in the press as 'The British Schindler' and it was noted that he 'saved more Jews than Schindler'.

This kind of talk is annoying on two levels. First, the fascination of the Schindler story is that he was PART of the system, and not on any level of trying to infiltrate it from the inside. He was a Nazi Party member (though mostly for convenience) who went to Poland to make a shedload of money (and did) and used forced Jewish labour because it was cheap; he got the initial investment by effectively intimidating it out of rich Jewish locals by saying "Give me all your money because what good is it to you now?'. Because he was a hard-headed businessman (and bon viveur) above all else, he valued his workers and tried to keep them safe. He was uninterested in anti-semitism but hardly a resistance man. So the story is how this man who had only had everything to lose by playing against the system but everything to gain by staying with it- indeed, he had more money than he could ever have spent- deliberately threw it all away in favour of people he had no such association with. He utterly destroyed his life and his future to get 'his' people out, but what he lost in practicality he gained in a spiritual fashion. It's a fantastically powerful piece of natural drama. It's actually relatively easy to find straight heroes (or possibly fake heroes in this case) who did heroic, life saving deeds and they should be greatly honoured, of course, but none of them can truly be compared to Schindler, by the very basic nature of what Schindler represents.

The other issue is much simpler; people should stop banging on about scale. One of the entire points of the Schindler mythology is that scale doesn't matter; the scene in the film where he finally breaks down because of a matter of how many handfuls of extra Jews he might have been able to get out is particularly poignant because of this. 'He who saves one life saves the world entire' is the saying they inscribed into Schindler's ring they gave him at the end, and that really is the point.

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Originally posted by Oliver North
I find the concept behind the thread a bit confusing, we are surprised a Nazi was actually a Nazi even though they weren't always 100% cartoonish super-villains?

cool story OV, not trying to be critical of you, it just reminds me of the human inability to see people and events as morally grey.

actually, the stories of German nuclear physicists are very interesting for these reasons.

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Originally posted by Ushgarak
I think there might be some interest in how the myth, if myth it was, was established. The angle that it was pro-Italian propaganda in the post-Nazi period says something about that time.

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Originally posted by Omega Vision
What interested me in the article is how people who need a hero will create one out of someone who may be an ordinary guy, or even amoral or morally reprehensible.

These sorts of myths can be incredibly destructive. The best example of that is the North Korean ruling family. Kim Il-Sung was by all (non-North Korean) accounts not a very important or successful resistance fighter against the Japanese, and had the Soviets never invaded Korea he'd probably have died by a Japanese firing squad, or disappeared into obscurity. Yet the Soviets saw in him a malleable puppet leader, and created a Stalinist (Stalin's revolutionary exploits, it should be noted, were similarly exaggerated when he came to power, though he probably had more cred than Kim) cult of personality around him, and look where the country (and the region) is now.

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Originally posted by soopercavell
They were holding out for a hero. He had to be strong, he had to be tough, he had to be larger thaN life.

-Mitch

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Originally posted by Omega Vision
The whole point was that he wasn't a hero, and that he didn't become "larger than life" by his own merit.

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Originally posted by Omega Vision
The whole point was that he wasn't a hero, and that he didn't become "larger than life" by his own merit.

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Originally posted by Bardock42
He's quoting a Bonnie Tyler song.