The Rab concentration camp (Croatian: Koncentracijski logor Rab; Italian: Campo di concentramento per internati civili di Guerra – Arbe) was an Italian concentration and internment camp on the Adriatic island of Rab, now part of the Republic of Croatia, during World War II. The camp was located at . It was one of a considerable number of such camps built on Italian-governed territory during the war to hold civilians, mostly Slovenes from the Italian-occupied Slovenia and Croats from Gorski Kotar suspected of partisan activities, as well as number of interned Jews. With total number of inmates estimated around 15000, 20 percent of which did not survive, it was the largest World War II concentration camp in Europe located on an island.
The camp was established in July 1942 but soon became known for its appalling conditions, which caused the deaths of numerous inmates. It was closed down after the armistice with Italy in September 1943. Although most of its inmates were safely evacuated, some of its remaining Jews in the camp were deported by German forces to the extermination camp at Auschwitz.
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By the summer of 1942, Italian forces in occupied Yugoslavia (more specifically coastal Dalmatia and south-western Slovenia) were facing an ongoing campaign by local resistance groups, the Yugoslav Partisans. The Italian leadership decided that a new, severe policy of reprisals against the civilian population was required to suppress the insurgency. As General Mario Roatta told a conference of Italian officers in Kočevje in August 1942, internment was to be used to punish Slovenian villagers, including men, women and children, who were suspected of harbouring partisans. Roatta told his staff:
Don't worry if those expelled include innocent people. Operations must be brief and effective: if necessary don't shy away from using cruelty. It must be a complete cleansing. We need to intern all the inhabitants and put Italian families in their place, families of dead or wounded soldiers.[1]
Italian troops throughout Yugoslavia thereafter undertook a campaign of village-burning, summary shootings and the wholesale internment of civilians. The decisions on whom to intern were often quite arbitrary; Uroš Roessmann, one of those interned, later recalled:
The camp at Rab, built near the village of Kampor, was one of a number of such camps established along the Adriatic coast to accommodate Slovenian and Croatian prisoners. Opened in July 1942, it was officially termed "Camp for the concentration and internment of war civilians - Rab" (Campo di concentramento per internati civili di Guerra – Arbe).[3]
| Period | Men | Women | Children | Total | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 27–31 July 1942 | 1061 | 111 | 53 | 1225 | ||
| 1–15 August 1942 | 3992 | 0 | 1029 | 5021 | ||
| 16–31 August 1942 | 5333 | 1076 | 1209 | 7618 | ||
| 1–15 September 1942 | 6787 | 1563 | 1296 | 9646 | ||
| 16–30 September 1942 | 7327 | 1804 | 1392 | 10 523 | ||
| 1–15 October 1942 | 7387 | 1854 | 1392 | 10 633 | ||
| 16–31 October 1942 | 7206 | 1991 | 1422 | 10 619 | ||
| 1–15 November 1942 | 7207 | 2062 | 1463 | 10 732 | ||
| 16–27 November 1942 | 6647 | 1560 | 926 | 9133 | ||
| Estimates of the number of Croatian and Slovenian prisoners: Davide Rodogno Il nuovo ordine mediterraneo (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2003) |
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The camp held up to 15,000 prisoners at its peak, mostly Slovenes and Croatians who were housed in more than a thousand open-air tents arrayed across a valley and surrounded by razor wire and guard towers.[4][5] Many of the camp's inmates were civilians from Italian-ruled Dalmatia who had been rounded up in anti-Partisan sweeps or reprisals.[6]
Conditions at the camp were described as appalling: "filthy, muddy, overcrowded and swarming with insects". The Slovenian writer Metod Milač, an inmate at the camp, described in his memoirs how prisoners were quartered six to a tent and slowly starved to death on a daily diet of thin soup, a few grains of rice and small pieces of bread. Prisoners fought with each other for access to the camp's meager water supply, a single barrel, while many became infested with lice and wracked with dysentry caused by the unhygenic conditions. Part of the encampment was washed away by flash flooding.[2] Some of the Italian authorities eventually acknowledged that the treatment of the inmates was counterproductive; in January 1943, the commanding officer of the 14th Battalion of Carabinieri complained:
| “ | In the last few days some internees have returned from the concentration camp in such a state of physical emaciation, a few in an absolutely pitiful condition, that a terrible impression has been created in the general population. Treating the Slovene population like this palpably undermines our dignity and is contrary to the principles of justice and humanity to which we make constant reference in our propaganda.[1] | ” |
Although the conditions at Rab were particularly atrocious, it was far from unique. According to James Walston, the annual mortality rate in the Italian camps was at least 18 percent and "[t]ens of thousands of internees died of disease and malnutrition."[7] The number of deaths in the Rab camp has been put at some 1,400 people, with a further 800 prisoners dying later when they were relocated to other Italian concentration camps such as Gonars and Chiesanuova near Padua.[5] According to the Ljubljana Institute of Contemporary History, 1,147 people were killed at Rab.[8]
By 1 July 1943, 2,118 Yugoslav Jews were recorded having been interned by the Italian army. Starting in June 1943, they were moved into a newly constructed section of the Rab concentration camp, alongside the Slovenian and Croatian section. Unlike the other prisoners, the Jews were provided with proper accommodation, sanitation and services; they were provided with wooden and brick barracks and houses in contrast to the overcrowded tents sheltering the Slavic prisoners. The historian Franc Potočnik, also an inmate in the Slavic section of the camp, described the much better conditions in the Jewish section:
| “ | The [Slavic] internees in Camp I could watch through the double barriers of barbed wire what took place in the Jewish camp. The Jewish internees were living under conditions of true internment for their 'protection', whereas the Slovenes and Croatians were in a regime of 'repression'. . . . They brought a lot of baggage with them. Italian soldiers carried their luggage into little houses of brick destined for them. Almost every family had its own little house.... They were reasonably well dressed; in comparison, of course, to other internees.[1] | ” |
The difference in treatment was the consequence of a conscious policy by the Italian military authorities. In July 1943, the Civil Affairs Office at the 2nd Army HQ issued a memorandum on "The Treatment of Jews in the Rab Camp", which was enthusiastically approved by chief of the office and the 2nd Army's chief of staff. The memorandum's author, a Major Prolo, urged that the infrastructure of the camp must be:
| “ | ...comfortable for all internees without risk to the maintenance of order and discipline.... Inactivity and boredom are terrible evils which work silently on the individual and collectivity. It is prudent that in the great camp of Rab those concessions made to the Jews of Porto Re [Kraljevica] to make their lives comfortable should not be neglected. | ” |
He concluded with a clear reference to Italian awareness of the massacres of Jews that were ongoing elsewhere in German-occupied Europe:
| “ | The Jews.... have the duties of all civilians interned for protective reasons, and a right to equivalent treatment, but for particular, exceptional political and contingent reasons [emphasis added], it seems opportune to concede, while maintaining discipline unimpaired, a treatment consciously felt to be 'Italian' which they are used to from our military authorities, and with a courtesy which is complete and never half-hearted.[1] | ” |
The difference in treatment is explained by Jonathan Steinberg as arising from the differing Italian views towards Slovenes/Croatians and Jews. Italy's Slovenian and Croatian subjects posed an active political and military threat to the regime, as they rejected Italian rule and took up arms to resist. Jews, by contrast, were not seen as a threat. Some members of the Italian military also saw humane treatment of the Jews as a way of preserving Italy's military and political honour in the face of German encroachments on Italian sovereignty; Steinberg describes this as "a kind of national conspiracy [among the Italian military] to frustrate the much greater and more systematic brutality of the Nazi state."[1]
Apparently there was some positive interaction between the Slavic camp and the Jewish one, since according to the Slovenian Rab survivor, Anton Vratuša, who later became Yugoslavia's ambassador to the United Nations: "We were prisoners; they were protected people. We used their assistance."[4]
By mid-1943 the camp's population stood at about 7,400 people, of whom some 2,700 were Jews. The fall of Mussolini in late July 1943 increased the likelihood that the Jews on Rab would fall into German hands, prompting the Italian Foreign Ministry to repeatedly instruct the General Staff that the Jews should not be released unless they themselves requested it. The ministry also began to put in place a mass transfer of the Jews to the Italian mainland. However, on 16 August 1943 the Italian military authorities ordered that the Jews were to be released from the camp, although those that wished could stay.[9]
The island remained in Italian hands until after the Armistice with Italy was signed on 8 September 1943, when the Germans seized control. About 245 of the Jewish inmates of the camp joined the Rab Brigade of the 24th Division of the People's Liberation Army and Partisan Detachments of Yugoslavia, forming the Rab battalion, though they were eventually dispersed among other Partisan units. Most of the Jews from the camp were evacuated to Partisan-held territory,[10] but 204 (7.5%) elderly or sick people were left behind. They were immediately sent by the Germans to Auschwitz for extermination.[11] For his actions in saving Jews evacuated from Rab in September 1943, Ivan Vranetić was honored as one of the Croatian Righteous Among the Nations.[12]
In 1955, a memorial and cemetery were built on the site of the camp by the prisoners of the Goli Otok labor camp, to a design by Edvard Ravnikar.[13] The site has also been given explanatory memorial notices in Croatian, Slovene, English and Italian to inform visitors of the camp's history.
It has been said that "By the murderous standards of the second world war, Rab was only a footnote of evil"[4] and due to Italian "amnesia"[4] and their role on the Allied side in the last years of the World War II, not much is known about this camp outside the borders of the former Yugoslavia. In 2003 the Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi told the Italian newspaper La Voce di Rimini that the fascist government of Benito Mussolini "never killed anyone" and "Mussolini used to send people on vacation in internal exile".[4]
Survivors of the camp include Anton Vratuša, who went on to be Yugoslavia's ambassador at the United Nations (1967–69) and was Prime Minister of Slovenia (1978–80), and Elvira Kohn, a Jewish Croatian photo-journalist who described her experiences at the camp in some detail.[14]