Giacomo Matteotti was an Italian socialist politician. On 30 May 1924, he openly spoke in the Italian Parliament alleging the Fascists committed fraud in the recently held elections, and denounced the violence they used to gain votes. Eleven days later he was kidnapped and killed by Fascists. The presumed fraud in the 1924 elections was not the only cause of his murder. In fact, according to Renzo De Felice's essay Breve Storia del Fascismo, Matteotti also publicly condemned the alliance of the socialist trade unions and the fascist counterpart. Yet, the most important aspect, and probably the main reason for his murder, was that he found out the evidence of bribes from Sinclair Oil in favour to Mussolini, in order to get permission for the petroleum reservoir exploitation in North Africa.
Hildegard Neumann was a chief overseer at several Nazi concentration, transition and detention camps during the last year of World War II. She was born in Deutsch Gabel, Czechoslovakia.
Avanti! is an Italian daily newspaper, born as the official voice of the Italian Socialist Party, published since 25 December 1896. It took its name from its German counterpart Vorwärts, the party-newspaper of the Social Democratic Party of Germany.
Giustizia e Libertà was an Italian anti-fascist resistance movement, active from 1929 to 1945. The movement was cofounded by Carlo Rosselli, Ferruccio Parri, who later became Prime Minister of Italy, and Sandro Pertini, who became President of Italy, were among the movement's leaders.
Ardengo Soffici was an Italian writer, painter, poet, sculptor and intellectual.
Giangiacomo Feltrinelli was an influential Italian publisher and businessman active following the Second World War. He founded a vast library of documents mainly in the history of international labor and socialist movements. He became a left-wing activist preceding Italy's Years of Lead.
Michael Seifert was an SS guard in Italy during World War II.
Risiera di San Sabba is a five-storey brick-built compound located in Trieste, northern Italy, that functioned during World War II as a Nazi concentration camp for the detention and killing of political prisoners, and a transit camp for Jews, most of whom were then deported to Auschwitz. SS members Odilo Globočnik and Karl Frenzel, and Ivan Marchenko are all said to have participated in the killings at this camp. The cremation facilities, the only ones built inside a concentration camp in Italy, were installed by Erwin Lambert, and were destroyed before the camp was liberated. Today, the former concentration camp operates as a civic museum.
Bolzano was a transit camp operated by Nazi Germany in Bolzano from 1944 to 3 May 1945 during World War II. It was one of the largest Nazi Lager on Italian soil, along with those of Fossoli, Borgo San Dalmazzo and Trieste.
Giuseppe Rensi was an Italian philosopher.
The Fossoli camp was an internment camp in Italy, established during World War II and located in the village Fossoli, Carpi, Emilia-Romagna. It began as a prisoner of war camp in 1942, later being a Jewish concentration camp, then a police and transit camp, a labour collection centre for Germany and, finally, a refugee camp, before closing in 1970.
The Holocaust in Italy was the persecution, deportation, and murder of Jews between 1943 and 1945 in the Italian Social Republic, the part of the Kingdom of Italy occupied by Nazi Germany after the Italian surrender on September 8, 1943, during World War II.
Teresio Olivelli was an Italian Roman Catholic soldier during World War II and part of the Italian Resistance movement to Fascism and the Nazi regime. Olivelli graduated in law in Pavia in 1938 and went on to comment in papers on the legal and social issues of the time before he became a volunteer fighter in the Spanish Civil War and in World War II with a notable campaign fought in Russia. The war soured his views towards the Italian fascist regime of Benito Mussolini and his time in the resistance was marked with articles in a newspaper he founded dedicated to promoting the Christian message and attempting to improve upon aspects of fascism with a more Christian message.
Liliana Segre is an Italian Holocaust survivor, named Senator for life by President Sergio Mattarella in 2018 for outstanding patriotic merits in the social field.
Two of the three Axis powers of World War II—Nazi Germany and their Fascist Italian allies—committed war crimes in the Kingdom of Italy.
The Memoriale della Shoah is a Holocaust memorial at the Milano Centrale railway station commemorating the Jewish prisoners deported from there during the Holocaust in Italy. Jewish prisoners from the San Vittore Prison, Milan, were taken from there to a secret underground platform, Platform 21, to be loaded on freight cars and taken on Holocaust trains to extermination camps, either directly or via other transit camps. Twenty trains and up to 1,200 Jewish prisoners left Milan in this fashion to be murdered, predominantly at Auschwitz.
Karl Brunner was a German lawyer, SS-Brigadeführer and Generalmajor of the police and the SS and police leader in Salzburg and Bolzano. Brunner served as head of the Einsatzkommando 4/I during the invasion of Poland and the early stages of the German occupation in 1939, tasked with the killing of Polish civilians. During his time in Northern Italy he was also responsible for the arrest, and ultimately, the deportation of the Jews in his area of jurisdiction, as well as reprisals against Italian civilians.
Renata Viganò (1900–1976) was an Italian writer best known for her neo-realist novel L'Agnese va a morire, published in 1949. Viganò was an active participant in the Italian Resistance movement during World War II and featured fictionalized accounts of her experiences as a partisan in her written work.
Laura Conti was an Italian anti-fascist partisan, doctor, environmentalist, socialist politician, feminist, and novelist, considered one of the avant-garde figures of Italian environmentalism.
