At the site of a Nazi massacre, the Jews are forgotten

Former Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte’s speech at Sant’Anna di Stazzema shows how the Palestinian cause is becoming a political and moral rallying point for parts of the European left.

Conte is an especially interesting case in the antisemitic tsunami now engulfing much of the world. The former prime minister and current leader of the left-wing populist Five Star Movement is a key ally of Democratic Party leader Elly Schlein and a potential candidate to lead Italy again. Italian media are already portraying his political moves with an eye toward a future contest for leadership of the left-wing coalition.

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Increasingly, Conte appears to be using the Palestinian cause as a moral glue for the electorate he hopes to assemble, much as New York politician Zohran Mamdani has done in the United States.

That is what made his appearance this week at Sant’Anna di Stazzema so significant.

Sant’Anna is not simply another Italian village with a tragic wartime history. It is one of the most powerful symbols of Nazi-Fascist barbarism in Italy.

On Aug. 12, 1944, soldiers of the 16th SS Panzergrenadier Division “Reichsführer-SS,” aided by Italian Fascist collaborators, descended on the Tuscan village and surrounding hamlets and massacred hundreds of civilians. The official commemoration on Wednesday marked the 82nd anniversary of the slaughter, in which 560 people were killed, including more than 100 children.

Women, old people and children were slaughtered. The youngest victim, Anna Pardini, was just 20 days old. What was ostensibly an operation against partisans became a bloodbath of defenseless civilians.

Italian writer Adriano Sofri has compared the massacre to Srebrenica. The comparison is understandable.

But there is another massacre, far closer to us in time, that should have been impossible to ignore at Sant’Anna: Oct. 7, 2023.

On that day, Hamas terrorists invaded southern Israel and carried out a mass slaughter of Jews in kibbutzim, towns and at a music festival, murdering some 1,200 people and abducting 251 to the Gaza Strip.

Why should Oct. 7 have been remembered at Sant’Anna?

Because the defining ideological crime of Nazism was the persecution and extermination of the Jewish people. The SS did not merely terrorize Europe. It was a central instrument in the machinery that murdered 6 million Jews.

On Oct. 7, an ancient ideological hatred appeared once again in its most bloodthirsty form: the mass murder of innocent Jews, accompanied by an explicit determination to destroy their state.

Yet Conte, who delivered the official commemorative address at Sant’Anna on Wednesday, did not make that connection.

Instead, he spoke of the need to fight Nazi-Fascist ideology as the enemy of democracy, constitutional government and equality. That is, of course, legitimate. Sant’Anna is rightly regarded in Italy as a symbol of the values on which the postwar republic and its Constitution were built.

But something essential was missing.

Conte forgot—or chose not to remember—that antisemitism and the extermination of the Jews stood at the heart of the Nazi project.

And when Jews did enter his speech, they appeared not as the quintessential victims of Nazi ideology, but in the form of Israeli soldiers accused of perpetrating atrocities.

Speaking at the site of the Nazi-Fascist massacre, Conte declared that opposing fascism today requires condemning what he called the “horror” in Gaza, where, he claimed, “over 20,000 defenseless children have been massacred by the Israeli army.”

Conte has repeatedly used Gaza and accusations against Israel in parliament and on the campaign trail. His rhetoric has turned increasingly sweeping and accusatory, presenting Israel not simply as a country whose government or military policies may be criticized, but as an engine of war, horror and extermination.

And now this propaganda has been brought to Sant’Anna di Stazzema.

That is what gives this very Italian story a much broader meaning.

Across the West, the Palestinian cause has increasingly become a political identity marker, particularly on the left. Politicians have discovered that attacking Israel can serve as a shorthand for moral virtue and as a means of mobilizing a particular political constituency.

But at Sant’Anna, the contradiction is especially grotesque.

Here was a politician standing at a place soaked in the blood of victims of an army belonging to a regime whose defining racial obsession was the destruction of the Jews—and using the occasion not to recall the latest mass murder of Jews, but to portray the Jewish state as the perpetrator of contemporary horror.

Memory is not merely about remembering that a crime occurred. It is about understanding what produced it.

If we commemorate Nazi-Fascist massacres while removing antisemitism and the attempted annihilation of the Jews from the center of the Nazi worldview, then we are not preserving history. We are reshaping it for present political purposes.

Was this really how its victims should have been commemorated—as another opportunity to hunt for pro-Palestinian votes, whatever the cost?

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