Emanuele Filiberto de Savoie, the great-grandson of King Victor Emmanuel III, wrote a letter to the country’s Jewish community in which he said that the role of his family in the rubber stamp of dictator Benito Mussolini caused “a wound still open for everyone in Italy.”
He said that he and his relatives “firmly dissociate us” from the king, who approved of Mussolini’s rise to power and gave royal consent to the laws, and asked for forgiveness for the actions of his ancestors.
But the gesture, made before the Holocaust Memorial Day on Wednesday, was dismissed by historians as “a little too late”, and drew the ire of Jewish groups who condemned the family’s long reluctance to confront its role in laying the groundwork for the Holocaust in Europe.
Mussolini’s racial laws destroyed the civil rights of Italian Jews between 1938 and 1943, during which time the dictator allied with Hitler to form the Axis powers.
“What happened to racial laws, at the height of a long collaboration with a dictatorship, is an offense against Italians, Jews and non-Jews, which cannot be erased and forgotten,” said the Jewish Community of Rome in response to the report by Emanuele Filiberto letter.
“The silence about these facts of the descendants of that house, which lasted more than 80 years, is another aggravating factor,” they added. “The descendants of the victims have no authority to forgive and it is not for the Jewish institutions to rehabilitate people and events whose historical judgment is recorded in the history of our country.”
Emanuele Filiberto, 48, is the grandson of Italy’s last king, Umberto II, and a supposed heir to the throne if the royal family had not been dissolved in 1946 in a referendum. The descendants of the old Italian monarchy still use royal titles, although they are not recognized by law.
Historian Amedeo Osti Guerrazzi, a researcher at the Shoa Roma Foundation, told CNN that his letter was “a little too late, adding,” I think it was an attempt at publicity.
“The king played a very serious role” in passing Mussolini’s laws, he added. “Some statements say that he was against (the laws) personally, (but) he didn’t want to go against fascism. He didn’t want to risk a conflict … It was an episode of great cowardice.”
Andrea Ungari, historian and professor at the Luiss Guido Carli University in Rome, added that “it is not clear” what Emanuele Filiberto’s motivations were when writing the letter. “Of course, it is neither his nor his father’s responsibility, so if anyone had to apologize, it was King Umberto II,” he said, referring to the monarch who reigned for a few months in 1946 while the royal family struggled in vain for their survival at the polls.
Mussolini’s racial laws, enacted along with his infamous “Manifesto of Race”, forbade Jews from going to university or holding public office, restricted their travel and goods, and imposed various other controls on their public lives.
Emanuele Filiberto’s letter was published before January 27, a memorial day that marks the anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland.
“I am writing to you with an open heart that is certainly not an easy letter, a letter that may surprise you and that perhaps you did not expect,” he wrote to the Italian Jewish community.
“I want to ask for official and solemn forgiveness on behalf of my entire family. I decided to take this step, which is a duty for me, so that the memory of what happened remains alive, so that the memory is always present, “he added.
More than 6 million Jews died at the hands of the Nazi regime during the Holocaust, both in society and in hundreds of concentration camps established in Central and Eastern Europe.
CNN’s Antonia Mortensen contributed to this report.