Fear of Vatican Prevents Mussolini from Introducing Yellow Badges for Jews

Jews in Italy have been saved from wearing the yellow Mogen Davids now worn by most of their co-religionists throughout Axis-dominated Europe as a result of Mussolini’s fear that an order to this effect would precipitate a serious rift with the Vatican, it was disclosed today by David Colin, JTA Rome correspondent, who returned home on the S.S. Drottningholm yesterday after being interned in Italy since the United States entered the war.

Colin revealed that when Mussolini returned to Rome after his last conference with Hitler on May 1, he summoned his chief of police, Senise, and the head of his Bureau on Racial Policies and requested them to order all Jews in the country to wear yellow badges. The chief of police informed II Duce that such an order would be extremely inadvisable as it would arouse the opposition of the Vatican. Mussolini, therefore, abandoned the idea.

At this conference, however, it was decided that Italian Jews must be utilized for the war effort. The following week an order was issued mobilizing all Jews in Italy between the ages of 18 and 55 for forced labor. Four hundred Jewish doctors and 300 Jewish engineers who were exempted from this order will also soon be called to service on the home front, Colin stated.

JEWISH COMMUNITIES IN ITALY OPERATING UNDER DIFFICULTIES

In spite of the generally repressive policies of the Italian government as regards the Jews, Jewish communities are still operating in Italy, although greatly handicapped, Colin asserted. Their chief task at present, he stated, was earring for the thousands of refugees who have sought comparative shelter in Italy from the intolerable conditions in the Nazi state of Croatia, which was carved out of Yugoslavia. An estimated 2,800 Jews are reported to have crossed the frontier into Dalmatia and northern Italy in the last year. Nearly all slipped through the Italian lines at great risk, Colin said, while many others were caught and turned back.

Those Jews who did in succeed in getting through brought tales of incredible persecution by the Ustacia, the Croatian storm-troops of the country’s dictator, Ante Pavelitch. Jews were murdered, their homes pillaged, and women and girls were violated by marauding Ustacia bands.

JEWS NEEDED FOR WAR EFFORT TRANSFORMED INTO “HONORARY ARYANS”

Italy has adopted the Nasi technique of transforming Jews whose services are sorely needed in the war effort into “honorary Aryans,” Colin disclosed. After the British raid on Taranta, which left a good part of the Italian fleet crippled, Mussolini called upon the Jewish Admiral Umberto Pugliesi, to attempt to salvage the battleships Julius Caesar and Conte Cavour. Pugliesi, who designed practically every vessel in the Italian fleet, has already succeeded in reflecting the Caesar and is now working on the Cavour.

Another “honorary Aryan” is Angelo Sacerdoti, designer of the pride of the Italian merchant fleet, Conte di Savaoi, and other merchant ships. He is now in charge of merchant ship construction with an office in the ministry of marines.

Speaking of the general situation in Italy, Colin declared that 85 per cent of the people are pro-American and bitterly anti-German. “You can see it in the hospitality the people have for Americans,” he reported. “They hate the Germans, who, they think, are trying to master them.”