Also the Catholic church is based in ITALY, and Italy was never involved with any anti-Jewish Nazism. They did change sides didnt they?
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M*W: I located the below-notated work of Joshua D. Zimmermann,
Jews in Italy under Fascist and Nazi rule, 1922-1945, University of Cambridge Press, 2005. ISBN: 0521841011 9780521841016
A brief introduction is as follows:
"The Jews represent the only population which has never assimilated in Italy because it is made up of racial elements which are not European, differing absolutely from the elements that make up the Italians.
Until recently, the subject of Italian Jewry under Fascist rule received little attention in English-language Holocaust historiography. A combination of factors, including the size of the community and the relatively small number of victims--about 8 out of every 10 Italian Jews survived the war--partly accounted for this neglect in historical literature. With the third highest survival rate after Denmark and Bulgaria, a consensus emerged that Italian Fascist persecution of Jews was not only mild but that Mussolini, the Italian armed forces, Italian civilians, and many church officials consistently protected Jews throughout the war years. Many scholars do not dispute the fact that while Nazi Germany began its genocidal assault on European Jewry in June 1941, Fascist Italy, as long as it remained a sovereign state, became a haven of safety and security not only for Italian Jews but for thousands of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi persecution in both the peninsula as well as the Italian-occupied zones of France, Greece, and Croatia.
Yet when the Germans occupied Italy in September 1943 and placed Mussolini at the head of a puppet Fascist state known as the Republic of Salò, tragedy struck Italian Jewry. In collaboration with Mussolini’s republic, the Nazis implemented their Final Solution on Italian soil. Over the next 20 months, Italian and German authorities hunted down Jewish men, women, and children in German-occupied northern Italy, which led to the arrest of 8,529 Jews of whom an estimated 6,806 were deported to concentration and death camps.
Historians have not until recently drawn attention to the degree of Italian complicity in the implementation of Nazi Jewish policy on Italian soil. Rather, they highlighted the degree to which many officials of the Salò Republic, while outwardly and officially complying with Nazi demands, strove as much as possible to obstruct German roundup and deportation actions by warning Jewish communities in advance of impeding mass arrests. Thus, when comparing Italy with other European countries, historians of the Holocaust often characterized both the Italian government and the Italian people as shining examples of heroic resistance to Nazi barbarism.
The decidedly positive evaluation of Italy during the Holocaust was articulated at a 1986 conference in Boston dedicated to Italian rescue efforts during the Holocaust. One historian maintained, the Holocaust is to a considerable extent a study in the potentialities of human evil and inhumanity. However, within all the horror, there were still sparks of good and hope....Italy was one of these sparks which illuminated human good, compassion, and tolerance....While the evil [of the Holocaust] cannot be forgotten, its darkness all the more serves to contrast with the light of the Italian response."
