Office of War Information Reports New Anti-jewish Measures in Occupied Italy

The Office of War Information today reported a decree published in the Gazetta Officiale in Rome stating that henceforth Jewish property in Italy will be treated like the property of enemy aliens. A special office will administer the confiscated property. The office is authorized to delegate its power to credit institutions.

The decree, according to the Swiss newspaper Gazette de Lausanne, said that Italian Jews cannot “be completely or partly proprietors or managers in any capacity in firms of any kind and cannot assume any administrative post whatsoever,” that Italian Jewish citizens cannot “possess landed property, immovable property, or participate in any firm which possesses movable property;” and that within thirty days the creditors of Jews must announce the value of all property in their possession which belongs to Jews, whether they are Italian citizens or not and whether they are living in Italy or not. Persons who fail to report Jewish property deposited with them, or who give false information, or who help Jews evade the regulations will be subject to heavy fines and imprisonment.

The Office of War Information also quoted a report in a Geneva newspaper, La Suisse, declaring that by German figures altogether 60,000 Jews have been arrested and had their property confiscated, among them 10,000 in Rome, 12,000 in Milan, 8,000 in Trieste, 9,000 in Turin, 11,000 in Genoa, and 4,000 in Bologna. By the Fascist statistics there were only 39,444 Jews in the whole of Italy.

VATICAN PAPER DEPLORES ANTI-JEWISH ACTION IN ITALY

The Observatore Romano, official organ of the Vatican, has published an article, reported to the Office of War Information, strongly protesting the persecution of Jews in German-occupied Italy. The article reads:

“The newspapers published a Stefani communique according to which the heads of Provinces have been ordered to put into force without delay a certain police ordinance. This lays down that all Jews, resident in Italy, even though they be ‘discriminati’ (hitherto exempt from racial laws) and of whatever nation they may be, shall be sent to special concentration camps, and that all their property, movable and real, shall be sequestrated with a view to eventual confiscation for the benefit of victims of enemy air-raids, and that the issue of mixed marriages who have already been recognized as of Aryan race, shall be subjected to special police supervision. The ordinance is unaccompanied by any statement of the motives which have caused so severe a modification of the regulations hitherto in force.

“All the more, then, do reasons of humanity require it to be pointed out that, whatever these motives may be — and conditions such as the abstention from all public life have already been imposed on the persons in question — it remains a fact that the enormous majority of them are devoid of all responsibility, and innocent of all blame whatsoever, children, women, old people and invalids; those most exposed to the privations which a regulation of this sort necessarily involves, especially in view of the inclemency of the season, the scarcity of food and clothing, and of the want with which all are threatened.”

The article concludes by pointing out that “the times through which we are passing are full of anguish, and great must be our desire not to see our anxieties increased by new trials and preoccupations–trials and preoccupations which will not be limited to those who are directly affected by them, but will be extended through ties of relationship, sympathy and friendship to vast numbers of people.”