Rab concentration camp
Encyclopedia
The Rab concentration camp was an Italian
concentration and internment camp
on the Adriatic
island of Rab
, now part of the Republic of Croatia, during World War II
. The camp was located at 44°46′48.00"N 14°43′08.40"E. It was one of a considerable number of such camps built on Italian-governed territory during the war to hold civilians, mostly Slovenes from the Italian-occupied Slovenia
and Croats
from Gorski Kotar
suspected of partisan
activities, as well as number of interned Jews
.
With total number of inmates estimated around 15000, 20 percent of which did not survive, it was the largest World War II concentration camp in Europe located on an island.
The camp was established in July 1942 but soon became known for its appalling conditions, which caused the deaths of numerous inmates. It was closed down after the armistice with Italy in September 1943. Although most of its inmates were safely evacuated, some of its remaining Jews in the camp were deported by German forces to the extermination camp at Auschwitz.
(more specifically coastal Dalmatia
and south-western Slovenia
) were facing an ongoing campaign by local resistance groups, the Yugoslav Partisans. The Italian leadership decided that a new, severe policy of reprisals against the civilian population was required to suppress the insurgency. As General Mario Roatta
told a conference of Italian officers in Kočevje
in August 1942, internment was to be used to punish Slovenian villagers, including men, women and children, who were suspected of harbouring partisans. Roatta told his staff:
Italian troops throughout Yugoslavia thereafter undertook a campaign of village-burning, summary shootings and the wholesale internment of civilians. The decisions on whom to intern were often quite arbitrary; Uroš Roessmann, one of those interned, later recalled:
The camp at Rab, built near the village of Kampor, was one of a number of such camps established along the Adriatic coast to accommodate Slovenian and Croatian prisoners. Opened in July 1942, it was officially termed "Camp for the concentration and internment of war civilians - Rab" (Campo di concentramento per internati civili di Guerra – Arbe).
The camp held up to 15,000 prisoners at its peak, mostly Slovenes and Croatians who were housed in more than a thousand open-air tents arrayed across a valley and surrounded by razor wire and guard towers. Many of the camp's inmates were civilians from Italian-ruled Dalmatia
who had been rounded up in anti-Partisan sweeps or reprisals.
Conditions at the camp were described as appalling: "filthy, muddy, overcrowded and swarming with insects". The Slovenian writer Metod Milač, an inmate at the camp, described in his memoirs how prisoners were quartered six to a tent and slowly starved to death on a daily diet of thin soup, a few grains of rice and small pieces of bread. Prisoners fought with each other for access to the camp's meager water supply, a single barrel, while many became infested with lice and wracked with dysentry caused by the unhygenic conditions. Part of the encampment was washed away by flash flooding. Some of the Italian authorities eventually acknowledged that the treatment of the inmates was counterproductive; in January 1943, the commanding officer of the 14th Battalion of Carabinieri complained:
Although the conditions at Rab were particularly atrocious, it was far from unique. According to James Walston, the annual mortality rate in the Italian camps was at least 18 percent and "[t]ens of thousands of internees died of disease and malnutrition." The number of deaths in the Rab camp has been put at some 1,400 people, with a further 800 prisoners dying later when they were relocated to other Italian concentration camps such as Gonars
and Chiesanuova
near Padua
. According to the Ljubljana Institute of Contemporary History, 1,147 people were killed at Rab.
The difference in treatment was the consequence of a conscious policy by the Italian military authorities. In July 1943, the Civil Affairs Office at the 2nd Army HQ issued a memorandum on "The Treatment of Jews in the Rab Camp", which was enthusiastically approved by chief of the office and the 2nd Army's chief of staff. The memorandum's author, a Major Prolo, urged that the infrastructure of the camp must be:
He concluded with a clear reference to Italian awareness of the massacres of Jews that were ongoing elsewhere in German-occupied Europe:
The difference in treatment is explained by Jonathan Steinberg
as arising from the differing Italian views towards Slovenes/Croatians and Jews. Italy's Slovenian and Croatian subjects posed an active political and military threat to the regime, as they rejected Italian rule and took up arms to resist. Jews, by contrast, were not seen as a threat. Some members of the Italian military also saw humane treatment of the Jews as a way of preserving Italy's military and political honour in the face of German encroachments on Italian sovereignty; Steinberg describes this as "a kind of national conspiracy [among the Italian military] to frustrate the much greater and more systematic brutality of the Nazi state."
Apparently there was some positive interaction between the Slavic camp and the Jewish one, since according to the Slovenian Rab survivor, Anton Vratuša
, who later became Yugoslavia
's ambassador to the United Nations
: "We were prisoners; they were protected people. We used their assistance."
The island remained in Italian hands until after the Armistice with Italy
was signed on 8 September 1943, when the Germans seized control. About 245 of the Jewish inmates of the camp joined the Rab Brigade
of the 24th Division of the People's Liberation Army and Partisan Detachments of Yugoslavia, forming the Rab battalion
, though they were eventually dispersed among other Partisan units. Most of the Jews from the camp were evacuated to Partisan-held territory, but 204 (7.5%) elderly or sick people were left behind. They were immediately sent by the Germans to Auschwitz for extermination. For his actions in saving Jews evacuated from Rab in September 1943, Ivan Vranetić was honored as one of the Croatian Righteous Among the Nations
.
by the prisoners of the Goli Otok
labor camp, to a design by Edvard Ravnikar
. The site has also been given explanatory memorial notices in Croatian, Slovene, English and Italian to inform visitors of the camp's history.
It has been said that "By the murderous standards of the second world war, Rab was only a footnote of evil" and due to Italian "amnesia" and their role on the Allied side in the last years of the World War II
, not much is known about this camp outside the borders of the former Yugoslavia. In 2003 the Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi
told the Italian newspaper La Voce di Rimini that the fascist government of Benito Mussolini
"never killed anyone" and "Mussolini used to send people on vacation in internal exile".
Survivors of the camp include Anton Vratuša
, who went on to be Yugoslavia
's ambassador at the United Nations
(1967–69) and was Prime Minister of Slovenia
(1978–80), and Elvira Kohn, a Jewish Croatian photo-journalist who described her experiences at the camp in some detail.
Italy
Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...
concentration and internment camp
Internment
Internment is the imprisonment or confinement of people, commonly in large groups, without trial. The Oxford English Dictionary gives the meaning as: "The action of 'interning'; confinement within the limits of a country or place." Most modern usage is about individuals, and there is a distinction...
on the Adriatic
Adriatic Sea
The Adriatic Sea is a body of water separating the Italian Peninsula from the Balkan peninsula, and the system of the Apennine Mountains from that of the Dinaric Alps and adjacent ranges...
island of Rab
Rab
Rab is an island in Croatia and a town of the same name located just off the northern Croatian coast in the Adriatic Sea.The island is long, has an area of and 9,480 inhabitants . The highest peak is Kamenjak at 408 meters...
, now part of the Republic of Croatia, during World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
. The camp was located at 44°46′48.00"N 14°43′08.40"E. It was one of a considerable number of such camps built on Italian-governed territory during the war to hold civilians, mostly Slovenes from the Italian-occupied Slovenia
Province of Ljubljana
The Province of Ljubljana was a province of the Kingdom of Italy and of the Nazi German Adriatic Littoral during World War II. It was created on May 3, 1941 from territory occupied and annexed to Italy after the Axis invasion and dissolution of Yugoslavia, and it was abolished on May 9, 1945, when...
and Croats
Croats
Croats are a South Slavic ethnic group mostly living in Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and nearby countries. There are around 4 million Croats living inside Croatia and up to 4.5 million throughout the rest of the world. Responding to political, social and economic pressure, many Croats have...
from Gorski Kotar
Gorski kotar
Gorski kotar is the mountainous region in Croatia between Karlovac and Rijeka. Together with Lika and the Ogulin-Plaški valley it forms Mountainous Croatia. Because 63% of its surface is forested it is popularly called the green lungs of Croatia or Croatian Switzerland...
suspected of partisan
Partisan (military)
A partisan is a member of an irregular military force formed to oppose control of an area by a foreign power or by an army of occupation by some kind of insurgent activity...
activities, as well as number of interned Jews
Jews
The Jews , also known as the Jewish people, are a nation and ethnoreligious group originating in the Israelites or Hebrews of the Ancient Near East. The Jewish ethnicity, nationality, and religion are strongly interrelated, as Judaism is the traditional faith of the Jewish nation...
.
With total number of inmates estimated around 15000, 20 percent of which did not survive, it was the largest World War II concentration camp in Europe located on an island.
The camp was established in July 1942 but soon became known for its appalling conditions, which caused the deaths of numerous inmates. It was closed down after the armistice with Italy in September 1943. Although most of its inmates were safely evacuated, some of its remaining Jews in the camp were deported by German forces to the extermination camp at Auschwitz.
Establishment of the camp
By the summer of 1942, Italian forces in occupied YugoslaviaKingdom of Yugoslavia
The Kingdom of Yugoslavia was a state stretching from the Western Balkans to Central Europe which existed during the often-tumultuous interwar era of 1918–1941...
(more specifically coastal Dalmatia
Dalmatia
Dalmatia is a historical region on the eastern coast of the Adriatic Sea. It stretches from the island of Rab in the northwest to the Bay of Kotor in the southeast. The hinterland, the Dalmatian Zagora, ranges from fifty kilometers in width in the north to just a few kilometers in the south....
and south-western Slovenia
Slovenia
Slovenia , officially the Republic of Slovenia , is a country in Central and Southeastern Europe touching the Alps and bordering the Mediterranean. Slovenia borders Italy to the west, Croatia to the south and east, Hungary to the northeast, and Austria to the north, and also has a small portion of...
) were facing an ongoing campaign by local resistance groups, the Yugoslav Partisans. The Italian leadership decided that a new, severe policy of reprisals against the civilian population was required to suppress the insurgency. As General Mario Roatta
Mario Roatta
Mario Roatta was an Italian general, Mussolini's Chief-of-Staff, and head of the military secret service.-SIM:From 1934 to 1936, Roatta headed up the Italian Military Intelligence Service .-Spain:...
told a conference of Italian officers in Kočevje
Kocevje
Kočevje is a city and a municipality in southern Slovenia. In terms of area it is the largest municipality in Slovenia. It is located between the rivers Krka and Kolpa and is part of the traditional region of Lower Carniola. It is now included in the Jugovzhodna Slovenija statistical region...
in August 1942, internment was to be used to punish Slovenian villagers, including men, women and children, who were suspected of harbouring partisans. Roatta told his staff:
Italian troops throughout Yugoslavia thereafter undertook a campaign of village-burning, summary shootings and the wholesale internment of civilians. The decisions on whom to intern were often quite arbitrary; Uroš Roessmann, one of those interned, later recalled:
The camp at Rab, built near the village of Kampor, was one of a number of such camps established along the Adriatic coast to accommodate Slovenian and Croatian prisoners. Opened in July 1942, it was officially termed "Camp for the concentration and internment of war civilians - Rab" (Campo di concentramento per internati civili di Guerra – Arbe).
Prisoners and camp conditions
| Period | Men | Women | Children | Total | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 27–31 July 1942 | 1061 | 111 | 53 | 1225 | ||
| 1–15 August 1942 | 3992 | 0 | 1029 | 5021 | ||
| 16–31 August 1942 | 5333 | 1076 | 1209 | 7618 | ||
| 1–15 September 1942 | 6787 | 1563 | 1296 | 9646 | ||
| 16–30 September 1942 | 7327 | 1804 | 1392 | 10 523 | ||
| 1–15 October 1942 | 7387 | 1854 | 1392 | 10 633 | ||
| 16–31 October 1942 | 7206 | 1991 | 1422 | 10 619 | ||
| 1–15 November 1942 | 7207 | 2062 | 1463 | 10 732 | ||
| 16–27 November 1942 | 6647 | 1560 | 926 | 9133 | ||
| Estimates of the number of Croatian and Slovenian prisoners: Davide Rodogno Il nuovo ordine mediterraneo (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2003) |
||||||
The camp held up to 15,000 prisoners at its peak, mostly Slovenes and Croatians who were housed in more than a thousand open-air tents arrayed across a valley and surrounded by razor wire and guard towers. Many of the camp's inmates were civilians from Italian-ruled Dalmatia
Dalmatia
Dalmatia is a historical region on the eastern coast of the Adriatic Sea. It stretches from the island of Rab in the northwest to the Bay of Kotor in the southeast. The hinterland, the Dalmatian Zagora, ranges from fifty kilometers in width in the north to just a few kilometers in the south....
who had been rounded up in anti-Partisan sweeps or reprisals.
Conditions at the camp were described as appalling: "filthy, muddy, overcrowded and swarming with insects". The Slovenian writer Metod Milač, an inmate at the camp, described in his memoirs how prisoners were quartered six to a tent and slowly starved to death on a daily diet of thin soup, a few grains of rice and small pieces of bread. Prisoners fought with each other for access to the camp's meager water supply, a single barrel, while many became infested with lice and wracked with dysentry caused by the unhygenic conditions. Part of the encampment was washed away by flash flooding. Some of the Italian authorities eventually acknowledged that the treatment of the inmates was counterproductive; in January 1943, the commanding officer of the 14th Battalion of Carabinieri complained:
Although the conditions at Rab were particularly atrocious, it was far from unique. According to James Walston, the annual mortality rate in the Italian camps was at least 18 percent and "[t]ens of thousands of internees died of disease and malnutrition." The number of deaths in the Rab camp has been put at some 1,400 people, with a further 800 prisoners dying later when they were relocated to other Italian concentration camps such as Gonars
Gonars concentration camp
On February 23, 1942 the Italian fascist regime established a concentration camp in Gonars, a town with approx. 4,600 inhabitants near Palmanova in the Province of Udine in northeastern Italy.Most of the prisoners were from present day Slovenia and Croatia...
and Chiesanuova
Italian concentration camps
Fascist Italy under Benito Mussolini operated 23 concentration camps.Name of the campDate of establishmentDate of liberationEstimated number of prisonersEstimated number of deathsBaranello near Campobasso ...
near Padua
Padua
Padua is a city and comune in the Veneto, northern Italy. It is the capital of the province of Padua and the economic and communications hub of the area. Padua's population is 212,500 . The city is sometimes included, with Venice and Treviso, in the Padua-Treviso-Venice Metropolitan Area, having...
. According to the Ljubljana Institute of Contemporary History, 1,147 people were killed at Rab.
Jewish internees at Rab
By 1 July 1943, 2,118 Yugoslav Jews were recorded having been interned by the Italian army. Starting in June 1943, they were moved into a newly constructed section of the Rab concentration camp, alongside the Slovenian and Croatian section. Unlike the other prisoners, the Jews were provided with proper accommodation, sanitation and services; they were provided with wooden and brick barracks and houses in contrast to the overcrowded tents sheltering the Slavic prisoners. The historian Franc Potočnik, also an inmate in the Slavic section of the camp, described the much better conditions in the Jewish section:The difference in treatment was the consequence of a conscious policy by the Italian military authorities. In July 1943, the Civil Affairs Office at the 2nd Army HQ issued a memorandum on "The Treatment of Jews in the Rab Camp", which was enthusiastically approved by chief of the office and the 2nd Army's chief of staff. The memorandum's author, a Major Prolo, urged that the infrastructure of the camp must be:
He concluded with a clear reference to Italian awareness of the massacres of Jews that were ongoing elsewhere in German-occupied Europe:
The difference in treatment is explained by Jonathan Steinberg
Jonathan Steinberg
Jonathan Steinberg is the Walter H. Annenberg Professor of Modern European History and former Chair of the Department of History at the University of Pennsylvania. He received his A. B. from Harvard University and his Ph.D...
as arising from the differing Italian views towards Slovenes/Croatians and Jews. Italy's Slovenian and Croatian subjects posed an active political and military threat to the regime, as they rejected Italian rule and took up arms to resist. Jews, by contrast, were not seen as a threat. Some members of the Italian military also saw humane treatment of the Jews as a way of preserving Italy's military and political honour in the face of German encroachments on Italian sovereignty; Steinberg describes this as "a kind of national conspiracy [among the Italian military] to frustrate the much greater and more systematic brutality of the Nazi state."
Apparently there was some positive interaction between the Slavic camp and the Jewish one, since according to the Slovenian Rab survivor, Anton Vratuša
Anton Vratuša
Anton Vratuša is a former politician and diplomat, who was Prime Minister of Slovenia and Yugoslavia's ambassador to the United Nations....
, who later became Yugoslavia
Yugoslavia
Yugoslavia refers to three political entities that existed successively on the western part of the Balkans during most of the 20th century....
's ambassador to the United Nations
United Nations
The United Nations is an international organization whose stated aims are facilitating cooperation in international law, international security, economic development, social progress, human rights, and achievement of world peace...
: "We were prisoners; they were protected people. We used their assistance."
Closure of the camp
By mid-1943 the camp's population stood at about 7,400 people, of whom some 2,700 were Jews. The fall of Mussolini in late July 1943 increased the likelihood that the Jews on Rab would fall into German hands, prompting the Italian Foreign Ministry to repeatedly instruct the General Staff that the Jews should not be released unless they themselves requested it. The ministry also began to put in place a mass transfer of the Jews to the Italian mainland. However, on 16 August 1943 the Italian military authorities ordered that the Jews were to be released from the camp, although those that wished could stay.The island remained in Italian hands until after the Armistice with Italy
Armistice with Italy
The Armistice with Italy was an armistice signed on September 3 and publicly declared on September 8, 1943, during World War II, between Italy and the Allied armed forces, who were then occupying the southern end of the country, entailing the capitulation of Italy...
was signed on 8 September 1943, when the Germans seized control. About 245 of the Jewish inmates of the camp joined the Rab Brigade
of the 24th Division of the People's Liberation Army and Partisan Detachments of Yugoslavia, forming the Rab battalion
Rab battalion
The Rab Battalion was a unit of the Yugoslav partisans during the Second World War. It was formed by and from Jewish survivors of Rab concentration camp upon their liberation in September 1943....
, though they were eventually dispersed among other Partisan units. Most of the Jews from the camp were evacuated to Partisan-held territory, but 204 (7.5%) elderly or sick people were left behind. They were immediately sent by the Germans to Auschwitz for extermination. For his actions in saving Jews evacuated from Rab in September 1943, Ivan Vranetić was honored as one of the Croatian Righteous Among the Nations
Croatian Righteous Among the Nations
This is the list of Croatian Righteous among the Nations. 102 Croatians were honored with this title by the state of Israel for saving Jews during World War II.* Antunac, Ivan* Bartulović, Olga and Dragica * Bauer, Čedomir and Branko...
.
After the war
In 1955, a memorial and cemetery were built on the site of the campby the prisoners of the Goli Otok
Goli otok
Goli otok is an island off the northern Adriatic coast, located between Rab's northeastern shore and the mainland, in what is today Croatia's Primorje-Gorski Kotar county. The island is barren and uninhabited...
labor camp, to a design by Edvard Ravnikar
Edvard Ravnikar
Edvard Ravnikar was a Slovenian architect.He was a professor at the Ljubljana School of Architecture, who made the most decisive contribution to the promotion of Scandinavian architectural style in Slovenia, particularly Finnish achievements in architecture accomplished by those such as Alvar...
. The site has also been given explanatory memorial notices in Croatian, Slovene, English and Italian to inform visitors of the camp's history.
It has been said that "By the murderous standards of the second world war, Rab was only a footnote of evil" and due to Italian "amnesia" and their role on the Allied side in the last years of the World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
, not much is known about this camp outside the borders of the former Yugoslavia. In 2003 the Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi
Silvio Berlusconi
Silvio Berlusconi , also known as Il Cavaliere – from knighthood to the Order of Merit for Labour which he received in 1977 – is an Italian politician and businessman who served three terms as Prime Minister of Italy, from 1994 to 1995, 2001 to 2006, and 2008 to 2011. Berlusconi is also the...
told the Italian newspaper La Voce di Rimini that the fascist government of Benito Mussolini
Benito Mussolini
Benito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini was an Italian politician who led the National Fascist Party and is credited with being one of the key figures in the creation of Fascism....
"never killed anyone" and "Mussolini used to send people on vacation in internal exile".
Survivors of the camp include Anton Vratuša
Anton Vratuša
Anton Vratuša is a former politician and diplomat, who was Prime Minister of Slovenia and Yugoslavia's ambassador to the United Nations....
, who went on to be Yugoslavia
Yugoslavia
Yugoslavia refers to three political entities that existed successively on the western part of the Balkans during most of the 20th century....
's ambassador at the United Nations
United Nations
The United Nations is an international organization whose stated aims are facilitating cooperation in international law, international security, economic development, social progress, human rights, and achievement of world peace...
(1967–69) and was Prime Minister of Slovenia
Prime Minister of Slovenia
There have been six Prime Ministers of Slovenia since that country gained its independence in the breakup of Yugoslavia. Unlike the President of Slovenia, who is directly elected, the Prime Minister is appointed by the National Assembly, and must control a majority there in order to...
(1978–80), and Elvira Kohn, a Jewish Croatian photo-journalist who described her experiences at the camp in some detail.
Further reading
- Campi Italiani d Internamento e di Deportazione (in Italian)
- Survivors of war camp lament Italy's amnesia
- Survivors mark passage from prisoners to fighters
- Concentration camp memorial complex
- Report on the Jews who escaped the holocaust via the Adriatic coast
- Slovenian Children in the Italian Concentration Camps (1942-1943) (in Italian; abstract in English)
- Metod Milač, Resistance, Imprisonment and Forced Labor : A Slovene Student in World War II. ISBN 0-8204-5781-7
- Božidar Jezernik, Struggle for Survival : Italian Concentration Camps for Slovenes during the Second World War (Ljubljana : Društvo za preučevanje zgodovine, literature in antropologije, 1999)
External links
- Official Rab concentration camp memorial museum site
- Oris, magazine for the architecture and culture A memorial plaque for the victims of fascism in Kampor on the island of Rab
- Kampor - concentration camp sur Flickr: partage de photos
- International Herald Tribune: Survivors of war camp lament Italy's amnesia