Emanuele Filiberto of Savoy, the great-grandson of King Victor Emmanuel III, wrote a letter to the country’s Jewish community saying that his family’s role in dictator Benito Mussolini’s anti-Semitic laws “ caused a wound that is still open to it. whole country. from Italy. “
He said he and his relatives ‘distance us firmly’ from the king, who approved Mussolini’s rise to power and gave the laws royal assent and asked for forgiveness for his ancestor’s actions.
But the gesture, made ahead of the Holocaust Memorial Day on Wednesday, has been dismissed by historians as ‘too little too late’ and has angered Jewish groups who condemned the family’s long-standing reluctance to play its part in laying the groundwork. for the Holocaust in Europe.
Mussolini’s racial laws tore away the civil rights of Jewish Italians between 1938 and 1943, during which time the dictator allied Hitler to form the Axis powers.
“What happened to the racial laws, at the height of a long association with a dictatorship, is an insult to Italians, Jews and non-Jews, which cannot be erased and forgotten,” Rome’s Jewish community said in response. the answer of Emanuele Filiberto. letter.
“The silence on these facts of the descendants of that house, which lasted over 80 years, is a further aggravating circumstance,” she added. “The descendants of the victims have no authority to forgive and it is not up to Jewish institutions to rehabilitate people and facts whose historical judgment is inscribed in the history of our country.”
Emanuele Filiberto, 48, is the grandson of the last king of Italy, Umberto II, and a future heir to the throne had the royal family not been dissolved in a 1946 referendum. Descendants of the former Italian monarchy still use royal titles, although these are not legally recognized.
Historian Amedeo Osti Guerrazzi, a researcher at the Shoa Foundation Rome, told CNN his letter was “too little late, adding,” I think it was an attempt at some publicity. “
“The king played a very serious role” in approving Mussolini’s laws, he added. “Some testimonials say he was personally against (the laws), (but) he didn’t want to go against fascism. He didn’t want to risk conflict … It was an episode of great cowardice.”
Andrea Ungari, a historian and professor at Luiss Guido Carli University in Rome, added that it is “not clear” what Emanuele Filiberto’s motivations were in writing the letter. “Of course none of the responsibility rests with him or his father, so if anyone had to apologize, it was King Umberto II,” he said, referring to the monarch who ruled for a few months in 1946 when the royal family fought. in vain for its survival at the polls.
Mussolini’s racial laws, enacted alongside his infamous “Manifesto of Race,” prohibited Jewish people from attending university or holding public office, restricted their travel and property, and imposed numerous other controls on their public life.
Emanuele Filiberto’s letter was published before January 27, a commemoration day marking the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland.
“I am writing you with an open heart a letter that is certainly not easy, a letter that may surprise you and that you may not have expected,” he wrote to the Italian Jewish community.
“I wish officially and solemnly to ask for forgiveness in the name of all my 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 set up in Central and Eastern Europe.
CNN’s Antonia Mortensen contributed to this report.