Sources for the History of the Holocaust Extant in the State Archives of Venice. Inventory Projects and Digitization
10.6092/issn.2532-8816/9038
In questo paper vengono illustrate le fasi di inventariazione e digitalizzazione messe in atto dall'Archivio di Stato di Venezia per la valorizzazione del suo patrimonio documentale sulla persecuzione degli ebrei fra il 1938 e il 1945.
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Andrea Pelizza
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Sources for the History of the Holocaust Extant in the State Archives of Venice. Inventory Projects and Digitization
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https://umanisticadigitale.unibo.it/
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2019-02-04
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2019-12-18
Um. Dig.
Andrea Pelizza
2019/03/01
10.6092/issn.2532-8816/9038
Archivio di Stato di Venezia, Venezia, Italy
2532-8816
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Jews
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Sources for the History of the Holocaust Extant in the State Archives of Venice. Inventory Projects and Digitization
https://umanisticadigitale.unibo.it/article/view/9038/8937
     Umanistica Digitale - ISSN:2532-8816 - n.4, 2019
A. Pelizza – Sources for the History of the Holocaust Extant in the State Archives of Venice.
Inventory Projects and Digitization
DOI: http://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2532-8816/9038


 Sources for the History of the Holocaust Extant in the
    State Archives of Venice. Inventory Projects and
                      Digitization

                                           Andrea Pelizza

                                     Archivio di Stato di Venezia
                              andrea.pelizza@beniculturali.it




       Abstract. In this paper are illustrated the arrangement and the digitization processes at
       the State Archives of Venice. The aim is to valorize the heritage here preserved on Jews
       persecution happened between 1938 and 1945.
       In questo paper vengono illustrate le fasi di inventariazione e digitalizzazione messe in
       atto dall'Archivio di Stato di Venezia per la valorizzazione del suo patrimonio
       documentale sulla persecuzione degli ebrei fra il 1938 e il 1945.




       Introduction

For some years now, the State Archives of Venice (Archivio di Stato di Venezia) has attempted
to highlight the importance of modern and contemporary as well as medieval and Renaissance
documentation, with the purpose of promoting Venice’s vast patrimony. Such a decision may
be un- expected. In the collective imagination, in fact, but also in the more profound reflection
of scholars, the Archives at the Frari seem “consecrated”, so to speak, to the historical memory
of the Serenissima. Therefore, they are considered most useful for medieval and early modern
studies. While this is certainly true, the institution also conserves many important sources
regarding the history of Venice in the twentieth century: among them, records pertaining to the
twenty years of the Fascist regime, a time of racial and, more specifically, anti-Jewish
persecution. Such persecution took place in Italy between 1938 and 1945 and especially during
WWII, after the Italian armistice of September 8, 1943, the surrender of the Kingdom of Italy
to the Allies, and the organization of the neofascist Social Italian Republic supported by
Germany. Documentation from the centuries preceding the end of the Republic of Venice in
1797 cover the broad spectrum of policy choices, diplomatic relations, and social life of what
was one of the largest Italian and, indeed, European political and cultural entities. It is



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consequently evident that they address matters well beyond the limits of a local history,
extending to trans-regional concerns. The framework is completely different for the period after
1797. Venice was no longer a capital, but only a provincial city like the others in Italy. For the
period following 1866 (the year of the union of the Veneto with the Kingdom of Italy), only
the archives of the offices of the so-called “peripheral” administration of the Italian State
operating in Venice are conserved in the State Archives of Venice. For those interested in
twentieth-century history, the archival material is undoubtedly more limited in scope. This,
however, does not represent a significant impediment, if scholars consider the holdings of other
libraries, archives and institutions, in the country and elsewhere, which when taken together
permit more comprehensive investigations. The historical con- text that is the background to
the present contribution is extremely complex and of fundamental importance to the
development of the Italian state in the twentieth century. It was in fact one of the darkest
periods ever known in Italy: an era of systematic anti-Jewish policies. It is un- necessary to
emphasize how such a subject might lend itself to a profound analysis. This article, however,
will be lim- ited to a description of the relevant sources housed in the State Archives of Venice,
and a brief discussion of the nation- wide projects that the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage
has undertaken to ensure their conservation and to promote their widest possible usage.




       Analyzing the Sources

Even today many hold that the fascist racial laws adopted in Italy in 1938 were merely a facade
without substance, and that an organized and well managed persecution of the Jews never took
place in Italy. Moreover, according to several studies, in spite of the defamatory press campaign
orchestrated by the regime, Italian Jews themselves kept alive the hope that Mussolini only
intended to show a gesture of friendship and goodwill to Hitler, in order to promote and
maintain the alignment of Italy with Germany, and that “The Duce” would not have actually
pursued severe measures against the Jews. This was true, it has been suggested, at least during
the year of 1938. At that time, and for some time to come, in Italy and elsewhere some
credence was in fact given to the theory originating with sympathizers of the Fascist party that
the Italian government was proposing to “discriminate lightly”, but not to “persecute” the
Jews.1
The documents stored in the Venetian State Archive help however, with many others, to testify
precisely to the opposite. The documentation produced by the most representative bodies of
the Italian public administration from the fall of 1938 is irrefutable, comprising tangible proof
of the uninterrupted and intense application of severe anti-Jewish racial legislation in pre-war
Italy. In fact, the papers produced by the Venice Prefecture and the Police Headquarters
document the continuous activities required to apply in the daily lives of Jews what the racial
laws had defined in a general and abstract way. Quite often, Rome had sent detailed written
instructions, as the result of the close interaction existing between the inner circle of Under-

1   See 3., 175-186; 175-176.


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    A. Pelizza – Sources for the History of the Holocaust Extant in the State Archives of Venice.
                                                            Inventory Projects and Digitization

Secretary of State of the Interior, Guido Buffarini Guidi, and the Directorate General for
Demography and Race, which was part of that same Ministry. The directives from the central
bodies and their application by the local offices represent concrete evidence of what was so
effectively defined as “the legality of evil”, in the context of the “darkest and most infamous
page by far in the whole legal history of the Italian state. The perfect functioning of persecutory
legislation was ensured by an impressive amount of work: a true demonstration of antisemitism
by the ministerial bureaucracy”.2




        Archival Documents' Series

The archival records deposited and permanently transferred in the past years to the State
Archives of Venice by the originating offices can be divided into four areas:
 - 15 folders produced by the Questura (the Police headquarters) in Venice, which contain 991
personal dossiers relating to men and women belonging to the Jewish community of Venice.
The practices are organized in sub-series and are mainly related to the following issues:
investigations about the “racial status” of each person; requests from the Jews to obtain
permission to employ “Aryan” domestic servants; requests for permission to spend holiday
periods in areas outside the city of Venice; in time of war, even seizure and requisition of
Jewish-owned home radio equipment. After the armistice between Italy and the Allies and the
consequent German occupation of Italy, the neofascist Italian Social Republic decided to send
“all the Jews [...] to special concentration camps” and then to deliver them to the Germans. The
“immediate seizure” of “all their properties” 3 was also authorized. The documents reflect the
new political context. An increasing number of files then concern the search and seizure of all
properties, both movable and immovable, owned by Jews, and the assignment to non-Jews of
the confiscated dwellings. The records tell us of raids, arrests, deportations, and the
institutionalization of violence that only finished at the end of the war, with the victory of the
Allies and the anti-fascist Italian forces.4
 - 4 folders created by the Prefecture of Venice, which contain 398 personal dossiers with

2   4., 2; 9.
3   For the full text of the Police Ordinance n. 5 of November 30, 1943, signed by G. Buffarini Guidi,
    Minister of the Inte- rior of the Social Republic, see Michele Sarfatti, “1938. Le leggi contro gli
    ebrei”, in La Rassegna mensile di Israel, LIV, n. 1-2 (1988):198. Scholars said that in doing so the
    fascist Republic passed from eroding the civil rights of the Jews to taking their lives. As has been
    remarked, “The Italian Shoah is not only the result of the alliance of Mussolini and his Social
    Republic with Hitler’s Germany, but is also the consequence of the direct action of many Italians
    adhering to the fascist regime” 2., 57.
4   2.. On the same page the data reported by Liliana Picciotto are quoted: “Between September 7, 1943
    and April 25, 1945, 7,013 Jews were arrested in Italy [...]. In more than 30 percent of the cases we
    know the author of the arrest, members of the Republic of Salò are involved.” For the situation in
    Venice, see also 5..


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requests for exemption (the so-called “requests of discrimination”), produced by individuals
and families belonging to the Jewish community of Venice, to obtain the benefits that the racial
laws accorded to those Jews who had demonstrated their titles of service and merit to the
nation or the fascist party.5 In each dossier, one can find the petitioner’s request with many
attachments and the investigation developed by the Prefecture, which acquired documents
from other offices and institutions. The local judgments regarding these petitions were then
transmitted to the Ministry of the Interior where finals decisions were made.
- 11 other folders generated by the Cabinet of the Prefecture of Venice (Office for General and
Jewish Affairs), which contain additional documents relating to anti-Jewish actions in the
territory of the province: the lists of Italian and foreigner Jews resident in Venice, drawn up in
1938 and updated until 1945; provisions and decrees with instructions for the application of
the racial laws; many “thematic” dossiers (e.g. concerning “mixed” marriages, school
institutions for Jews, inspections and investigations of Jewish property and businesses in
Venice, racially-motivated dismissals from public offices and other professions, requisitions of
movable and immovable goods, and transport of the Jews to concentration camps).
- A folder of the Venetian Chamber of Commerce, containing documents about anti-Jewish
measures to be adopted in the economic sector.




         Local and National Projects

At least some of the documents stored at the Frari Archive are publicly known and have already
been the object of analysis by historians specializing in the Holocaust. Indeed, in the past few
years, some important exhibitions have been mounted in Venice: one, at the Fondazione
Querini Stampalia, was very effective in delineating the inexorable ad- vance of racial
discrimination through the “extraordinary zeal of the whole Structure of the Public
Administration”.6 Another was organized by the Ministry of Interior and the Prefecture of
Venice, in co-operation with the Marciana National Library, the State Archives of Venice, the
Jewish Community of Venice, and the Superintendent for the Archives of the Veneto, in
conjunction with the “International Holocaust Memorial Day” in 2011. Through the
documents presented, the aim was to highlight “the gradual and ever more dramatically
increasing persecution of the Jews, leading from their marginalization to outright persecution
of all Italian and foreign Jews living in the territories of the Kingdom of Italy, starting from the
racial laws of 1938 until the end of WWII in the spring of 1945”. 7 In many cases over the years

5   “Esse consentivano ai liberi professionisti di mantenere la loro clientela privata; agli imprenditori di
    proseguire nelle loro attività purché fossero di ridotte proporzioni e non rientrassero fra quelle
    essenziali alla difesa nazionale; e of- frivano qualche attenuazione ai vincoli sulla proprietà,” in 6..
6   The 1995 exhibition partially reproduced an exhibition in 1988, see Segre, Gli ebrei a Venezia.
7   1938-1945. La persecuzione degli ebrei in Italia. Documenti per una storia:
    http://marciana.venezia.sbn.it/mostre/ 1938-1945-la-persecuzione-degli-ebrei-italia. The archival
    research was carried out by P. Bortolozzo, C. Salmini and A. Schiavon for the State Archives of Venice


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    A. Pelizza – Sources for the History of the Holocaust Extant in the State Archives of Venice.
                                                            Inventory Projects and Digitization

the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage, and the State Archives Administration, directly or
indirectly participated in different projects dedicated to the Holocaust and the anti-fascist
Resistance. One good example is the Guide to the Archives of the Resistance, realized more
than thirty years ago by a Commission chaired by C. Pavone. 8 More recent examples are
offered by the so-called “thematic portals”, which have been incorporated into the SAN -
National Archives System: in particular the “Archives of the Twentieth Century”; and the
“Voices from the Shoah”, collected by the General Directorate for the Archives beginning in
2002, in collaboration with the cultural institution created by S. Spielberg to preserve the
audiovisual testimonies of the last survivors of the Shoah. These few examples will have to
suffice, as a complete list is too long to include here. To close, we should recall the fundamental
research, conservation, and service activities that a galaxy of other public and private Italian
institutions carries out with regularity. Organizations devoted to the history of the Resistance
and the conservation of the memory of the Jewish communities as well as research groups
within Italian Universities are all developing programming on an increasingly systematic and
progressively wider scale.9




        Inventory Activity, Scanning, and Digitizing

In June 2014, the General Directorate for the Archives of the Italian Ministry of Cultural
Heritage renewed for another ten years a prior agreement to collaborate with the US Holocaust
Memorial Council and its Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. The intention behind this
joint project was to identify and reproduce archival material still conserved in the Italian State
Archives relating to the “history of the persecution of the six million Jews and millions of other
victims of Nazi tyranny”. The new project represents the continuation of an ambitious plan
that has allowed the US institution over the years to acquire copies of every document giving
evidence of “this unprecedented tragedy, and perpetuating its memory”, with Italian State
Archives then obtaining a full set of digital reproductions for consultation by scholars. Thus,
representatives for Europe of the US Holocaust Memorial contacted the State Archives in
Venice, to obtain permission for the full digital reproduction of the papers on twentieth-
century racial persecution housed in the city on the lagoon. The archival series described above
fit perfectly in this context. In order to organize this reproduction as efficiently as possible and
in accordance with the high standards commonly applied in the State Archives of Venice, the
latter determined to complete the sorting, analytical filing, and complete numbering of pages
of the documents before starting the process of reproduction with digital photography. By
decision of the Director of the Venetian Archive, Dr. R. Santoro, a team, coordinated by the

    (co-ordinated by director R. Santoro), and by R. Segre for the Jewish Community of Venice.
8   1..
9   Significant in the Venetian context was the conference of October 10, 2015, titled “Archives of the
    Resistance: A Widespread Heritage to Know, Defend and Promote.” http:
    //www.save.archivi.beniculturali.it/sites/default/ files/locandina_archivi_resistenti_10-2015_2.pdf


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     Umanistica Digitale - ISSN:2532-8816 - n.4, 2019

author here, was then organized. The works began in September 2014; the collaborator
appointed by the Holocaust Memo- rial was then provided with the parameters for correct
digital reproduction and for the “pyramidalization” of the images, as is required for their
subsequent long-term preservation and insertion in the context of image- and text-databases
stored in the State Archives of Venice. The work undertaken in Venice concerning the archival
series in question, which are extremely sensitive in terms of their contents and also fragile in
terms of their old-paper support, consisted of restoring the original sorting when necessary,
identifying and numbering each document, and drawing-up an analytical inventory.
Additionally, an index of names was prepared. The archival description was mainly based on
the international accepted standards, in accordance with the standardization and normalization
procedures that are habitually used in the State Archives in Venice. Due to the constraints of
time imposed by matters of scheduling, the team included young volunteers working alongside
the Archive’s staff. The first part of the work ended in February 2015; the photographic shoots
were carried out in the month of March. A total of 34,668 image files are now available, of
which 20,138 are related to the Questura, 12,505 to the Prefecture, 937 to the Chamber of
Commerce and 1,088 to the Prefecture of Rovigo (which has located its files on racial
persecution in the Venice Archives). The files are ordered in a manner that reflects their archival
organization, and are thus immediately identifiable through the inventory. They can be
consulted daily in the study hall of the Venice State Archives, at dedicated workstations. From
2015 to 2017 the activities continued on the whole complex of documentation produced by
the Office for General and Jewish Affairs of the Cabinet of the Prefecture of Venice. 10 It
consists of 11 folders, for a total of about 1,000 registers and dossiers. The papers are not
entirely related to racial persecution, but also offer interest- ing insights into Venetian history in
the years before WWII and during the conflict. Among them, of great interest is
documentation concerning the confiscation of houses, villas, hotels and other properties
(owned by Jews and non-Jews), located especially at the Lido, for the use of German troops and
Fascist officials.


        Conclusion

We have attempted here to briefly describe the main recent inventory and digitization projects
concerning twentieth-century records stored in the Venetian State Archives pertaining to the
persecution of Jews in the Fascist period in Italy. Our operations were carried out in conformity
with prevailing archival protocols, which require the application of the so-called “historical
method” in the sorting of papers, and as far as possible the reproduction of complete
documentary series rather than isolated examples. It is now up to historians and scholars to
conduct research on the digitized documents, to product increasingly detailed evaluations and
analysis.11

10 These archival records have been described and indexed by T. Carretto, with the collaboration of I.
   Sarcinelli, D. Sanna, P. Bortolozzo for the index of names.
11 I am very grateful to Karen-edis Barzman for her kind help in revising the English translation of my
   text.


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A. Pelizza – Sources for the History of the Holocaust Extant in the State Archives of Venice.
                                                        Inventory Projects and Digitization


     References

1.    Commissione archivi-biblioteca dell’Istituto nazionale per la storia del movimento di
      liberazione in Italia (ed.). 1983. Guida agli archivi della Resistenza. Roma: Ministero
      Beni Culturali.
2.    Finzi, Roberto. 2003. L’Università italiana e le leggi antiebraiche. Roma: Editori
      Riuniti, p. 57.
3.    Gebbia, Alessandra. 2010. “La ricezione delle leggi razziali in Inghilterra.” In Leggi del
      1938 e cultura del razzismo. Storia, memoria, rimozione. Beer, Marina, Anna Foa, and
      Isabella Iannuzzi (eds.). Roma:Viella, pp. 175-186; 175-176.
4.    Gentile, Saverio. 2013. La legalità del male. L’offensiva mussoliniana contro gli ebrei
      nella prospettiva storico-giuridica (1938- 1945). Torino: G. Giappichelli Editore, pp. 2-
      9.
5.    Levis Sullam, Simon. 2015. I carnefici italiani. Scene dal genocidio degli ebrei, 1943-
      1945. Milano: Feltrinelli.
6.    Segre, Renata (ed.). 1995. Gli ebrei a Venezia 1938-1945. Una comunità tra
      persecuzione e rinascita. Venezia: Il cardo editore, p. 50.




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