Italy / Milan (Milano)

Memoriale della Shoah di Milano

Since 2013 the Memoriale della Shoah at Milan's main station commemorates the Jews deported from here between 1943 and 1945.

History

The commercial and industrial centre Milan is the second largest city in Italy after Rome. Jews already lived in Milan at the time of the Roman Empire but they were expelled again and again in medieval times. Since about the middle of the 19th century, a bourgeois Jewish community developed which continued to grow. In the Kingdom of Italy, founded in 1861, Jews enjoyed full civil rights. Around 1910 there were already about 4,500 Jews living in Milan, in the 1930s their numbers rose to 10,000. From 1939 to 1941 several thousand Milanese Jews emigrated.
After Italy's capitulation Milan was occupied by German troops on September 10, 1943. At that time there were still about 4,500 Jews living in the city. About 1,500 of them managed to flee to Switzerland. Coordinated by the Reich Main Security Office (RSHA), persecution of the Jews in the occupied Italian territory began immediately after the German invasion. In Milan's San Vittore prison, the occupying forces set up a collection camp for Jews. Between September 6, 1943 and January 15, 1945 a total of 15 deportation trains left Milan from the main station. The first two transports with a total of almost 900 Jewish children, women and men, went directly to the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp, another transport to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. The remaining 12 transports were bound for the two police transit camps in Bolzano and Fossoli, from where most Jews were deported after a few days to Auschwitz together with other prisoners.

Milan, 1930s, The central railway station, opened in 1931, public domain

Milan, 2014, Entrance to the memorial, Memoriale della Shoah, Andrea Martiradonna

Victims

Between September 1943 and January 1945, the German occupation authorities deported several thousand Jews from Milan Central Station. The exact number of deportees is unclear.

In 1922 the Kingdom of Italy became a dictatorship under the »Duce« (leader) Benito Mussolini (1883–1945) and his fascist party. Until the mid-1930s there was barely any evidence of public anti-semitism in Italy; discriminatory measures were not introduced until 1938. At the time, around 46,000 Jews were living in Italy. During this period, the Italian state also included the Istrian peninsula and a number of islands that are now part of Greece, such as Rhodes, which had a Jewish community rich in tradition. The Italian government was a close ally of the German Reich but was not involved in the mass deportations of Jews to German extermination camps until autumn 1943. It was only following the occupation of the north of the country by the German Wehrmacht (the south had already been liberated by American and British troops) that the German SS and police began to implement plans to systematically deport the Italian Jews. The Jews were initially held in detention camps and then transported halfway across Europe to Auschwitz, where many were killed in the gas chambers on arrival. Between 7,000 and 8,500 Jews from Italy (excluding Italian-occupied territory) were murdered or died as a result of brutality. Tens of thousands of Italian Jews and Jewish refugees were able to survive by emigrating or going into hiding with the help of non-Jews. The Allied liberation of southern Italy spared over 2,000 Jews from deportation by the German regime. The period 1943 to 1945 saw violent conflicts between the German occupation forces and Italian partisans from the communist-dominated resistance movement »Resistenza«. German troops responded with horrific reprisal measures and massacres, for example in Marzabotto and in the Ardeatine Caves near Rome. More than 400,000 Italians – soldiers, civilians and partisans – died during the Second World War. Once the war was over, the partisan campaign became a key feature of Italian national identity and the Italian culture of memory cultivated the myth that the country had liberated itself from fascism. There was barely any confrontation with the widespread Italian support for Mussolini. The best-known sites of memory such as the former concentration camp at Risiera di San Sabba near Trieste or the memorials at Marzabotto and the Ardeatine Caves are dedicated to the resistance, as are many museums. However, there are few memorial sites at former detention camps for Jews and where these do exist they tend to commemorate the liberators rather than the victims. One example is Villa Emma in Nonatola, where Jewish children were able to survive in hiding. One feature linking many of these sites is their focus on human rights education for the present and future. In recent years, the memory of the deported and murdered Jews has become more prominent. In 2013, the Memoriale de la Shoah di Milano opened in Milan’s central railway station, and in 2023, the decision has been made to create a central holocaust memorial in Rome.

Remembrance

For a long time Italy – and Milan too – struggled with coming to terms with the memory of the deported and murdered Jews. The participation of Italians in the discrimination and subsequent deportation of Italian Jews was not discussed for a long time, they were regarded as purely German crimes. Only since the 1990s there have been public debates about a shared responsibility of Italians' for the Holocaust.
For decades the Jewish community of Milan fought for a place of remembrance for the Jews deported from Milan but there was hardly any movement until a Catholic group began demanding the realization of the plans. In 2007, the then President of the Republic and former resistance fighter Giorgio Neapolitano declared himself in favour of such a memorial in Milan.
The memorial was erected on the so-called Platform 21 of the Milan railway station, famous for its monumental architecture. The track is located in a subterranean depot, which used to be used as a major distribution point for mail and is not visible from the outside. From this depot, the deportees, who had previously had to walk several kilometres from the San Vittore prison, were driven into the trains and transported to the German camps. The memorial, inaugurated in 2013, consists of several parts. There is a wall with names of deportees on it. On the track are freight cars of the same type used for the deportations. Another central element is a wall with the large Italian slogan »Indifferenza« (»indifference«), which is intended to remind of the lack of solidarity on the part of the Italian population during the Holocaust. The memorial also has a cinema theatre and a well-equipped library.

Milan, 2014, Wall with the inscription »Indifference«, Memoriale della Shoah, Andrea Martiradonna

Milan, 2017, Exit of platform 21, Éva Kovács

Possibilities

Permanent exhibition, library, educational programmes, cinema theatre

Open

Monday 9.30 a.m. to 7.30 p.m.
Tuesday to Thursday 9.30 a.m. to 2.30 p.m.

Contact

http://www.memorialeshoah.it

coordinamento.memoriale@memorialeshoah.it

+39 (0) 02 282 0975

1, Piazza Edmond J. Safra
20125 Milano

Milan, 2017, Freight train on platform 21, Éva Kovács

Milan, September 1943, Occupation by Leibstandarte SS »Adolf Hitler«, Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-J15480 / Rottensteiner / CC-BY-SA 3.0

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