All or Nothing: The Axis and the Holocaust

Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy were united in a 'brutal friendship'. Both had savage racial laws: both Hitler and Mussolini viciously denounced the 'Jewish menace'. Yet each nation treated the Jews quite differently. Whilst Jews who fell into the arms of the German army were consigned, almost without exception to concentration camps, not one Jew taken by the Italians suffered the same fate. Italian officers protected not just Italian Jews, but Jewish refugees of every nationality. Jonathan Steinberg uses this remarkable and poignant story to unravel the motives and forces underpinning both Nazism and Fascism in an attempt to resolve the underlying question: Why?