Rab concentration camp

The Rab concentration camp (Campo di concentramento per internati civili di Guerra – Arbe; Koncentracijski logor Rab; Koncentracijsko taborišče Rab) was one of several Italian concentration camps. It was established during World War II, in July 1942, on the Italian-occupied island of Rab (now in Croatia). According to historians James Walston and Carlo Spartaco Capogeco, at 18%, the annual mortality rate in the camp was higher than the average mortality rate in the Nazi concentration camp of Buchenwald (15%). According to a report by Monsignor Jože Srebrnič, Bishop of Krk on 5 August 1943 to Pope Pius XII: "witnesses, who took part in the burials, state unequivocally that the number of the dead totals at least 3,500". According to Yugoslav estimates of the Commission for Determining the Crimes of the Occupiers, 4,641 detainees died at the camp, including 800 inmates who died while being transported from Rab to the Gonars and Padua concentration camps in Italy. However, other sources place the figure at around 2,000. In July 1943, after the fall of the Fascist regime in Italy, the camp was closed, but some of the remaining Jewish prisoners were deported by German forces to the extermination camp at Auschwitz. Yugoslavia, Greece and Ethiopia requested the extradition of some 1,200 Italian war criminals, who, however, were never brought before an appropriate tribunal because the British government, at the beginning of the Cold War, saw in Pietro Badoglio a guarantor of an anti-communist post-war Italy. In the autumn of 1943, Yugoslav partisans, led by the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, rescued approximately 2,500 Jews from the island. Under Italian army commander Mario Roatta's watch, the ethnic cleansing and violence committed against the Slovene civilian population easily matched that of the Germans with summary executions, hostage-taking and hostage killing, reprisals, internments (both in Rab and at the Gonars concentration camp), and the burning of houses and villages.