Giovanni Palatucci

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Giovanni Palatucci.

Giovanni Palatucci (May 31, 1909 —February 10, 1945) was an Italian police official who saved thousands of Jews from being deported to Nazi extermination camps.

Palatucci was born in Montella, province of Avellino. He graduated in Law from the University of Turin in 1932. In 1936 he entered police service in Genoa and the following year he was assigned to Fiume.

After the promulgation of racial laws against Jews in 1938 and at the beginning of war in 1940 he was chief of the Foreigners' Office, where he forged documents and visas to Jews threatened by deportation. He managed to destroy all documented records of the some 5,000 Jewish refugees living in the town, issuing them false papers and providing them with funds. Palatucci then sent the refugees to a large internment camp in southern Italy protected by his uncle, Giuseppe Maria Palatucci, the Catholic Bishop of Campagna.

Following the 1943 capitulation of Italy, Fiume was occupied by Nazis. Palatucci remained as head of the police administration without real powers. He continued to clandestinely help Jews and maintain contact with the Resistance, until his activities were discovered by the Gestapo. The Swiss Consul to Trieste, a close friend of his, offered him a safe pass to Switzerland, but Giovanni Palatucci sent his young Jewish fiancée instead.

Palatucci was arrested on September 13, 1944. He was condemned to death, but the sentence was later commuted to deportation to Dachau, where he died. He was officially honored by the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in 1990 as one of the Righteous Among the Nations. As of March 2005 a beatification case is in progress.