'One of the first actions that the Italian government took against Italian Jews began in 1938 with the enactment of the Racial Laws of segregation by the fascist regime of Benito Mussolini. These laws stripped away many basic human rights of the Italian Jewish citizens, with Jewish children not being allowed to go to school and Jews forbidden from marrying outside their cultural heritage. Before the Italian surrender in 1943, however, Italy and the Italian occupation zones in Greece, France and Yugoslavia had comparatively been places of relative safety for local Jews and European Jewish refugees. 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. Of the population of 38,994 Italian Jews, 7,172 were arrested and became victims of the Holocaust. By the war's end, 31,822 Jews remained in the country, having managed to evade deportation while remaining in Italy. The Italian police and Fascist militia played an integral role as the Germans' accessories.
While most Italian concentration camps were police and transit camps, one camp, the Risiera di San Sabba in Trieste, was also an extermination camp. It is estimated that up to 5,000 political prisoners were murdered there. More than 10,000 political prisoners and 40,000–50,000 captured Italian soldiers were interned and killed overall.'
Another forgotten part of Fascist war crimes is the "pacification" of Libya and the invasion of Ethiopia. Just a sample...
'In 1911, Italy went to war with the Ottoman Empire and invaded Ottoman Tripolitania. One of the most notorious incidents during this conflict was the October Tripoli massacre, wherein an estimated 4,000 inhabitants of the Mechiya oasis were killed as retribution for the execution and mutilation of Italian captives taken in an ambush at nearby Sciara Sciat. Over the course of three days, Libyan and Turkish men, women, and children were indiscriminately murdered in the streets, in their houses, farms, and gardens. Libyan and Turkish women were also reportedly raped and sexually assaulted by Italian troops, prompting ferocious and violent retaliation against captured Italian troops by Ottoman soldiers.[1] In another incident during the war reported by a British officer serving with the Turkish forces, Italian soldiers burned several hundred civilians in a mosque, wherein women and children had taken refuge. In 1912, 10,000 Turkish and Arab troops were imprisoned in concentration camps in Libya, and all Turkish troops were executed.'
