The Holocaust in Italy
The Holocaust saw the persecution, deportation, and murder of Jews between 1943 and 1945 in the Italian Social Republic, a puppet state of Nazi Germany after the Italian surrender on 8 September 1943, during World War II. One of the first actions that the Italian government took against Italian Jews began in 1938 with the enactment of the Racial Laws of segregation by the fascist regime of Benito Mussolini. These laws stripped away many basic human rights of the Italian Jewish citizens, with Jewish children not being allowed to go to school and Jews forbidden from marrying outside their cultural heritage.