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The role of the Fossoli camp in the Italian holocaustThis paper examines the function of the Fossoli di Carpi Jewish concentration camp, which played a central role in the Italian Holocaust. The camp, which was created on December 3, 1943 by the government of the Italian Social Republic, was the direct consequence of an order issued the preceding November 30th that commanded the arrest and roundup of all of the Jews, as well as the confiscation of all of their belongings. This order impacted Jews who had already been persecuted and terrorized starting in October 16th of the same year in the German roundups carried out in the big cities and in the immediate deportation of those arrested. Once Fossoli became operational, the persecution mechanism changed. Henceforth, the arrests were carried out not by the German police, but by the Italian police, who, from that point on, conducted a very thorough search for Jews who had become “outlaws.” In mid-February 1944, the Germans ordered that an Italian garrison be replaced by a German garrison. They then began to organize, with the utmost calm, the staged deportation of Jews from the camp to the Auschwitz extermination camp and, in certain cases, the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Beginning in March 1944, a separate section of Fossoli also served as a detention and deportation camp for political opponents. The camp was closed at the beginning of August 1944 after the last deportations of Jews took place and prisoners had been transferred to the Bolzano-Gries camp farther north in Italy.