An anomaly in the terrible chronicle of the Holocaust was the role of Italy’s army and Fascist police in saving Jews. The setting was Italian-occupied France—a strip along the Alps and the Mediterranean Sea whose commanders refused to hand over Jews to the Vichy French (who were determined to please Hitler) and eagerly frustrated the Nazis by foot-dragging. In Mussolini’s Army in the French Riviera, Emanuele Sica from Canada’s Royal Military College examines Italy’s World War II adventure in France and finds an army whose men were eager to fraternize with the natives out of boredom, curiosity and self-interest and whose generals didn’t feel up to squelching a resistance movement. As for saving Jews, Sica finds motivation in the relatively tepid anti-Semitism of Italian society coupled with a desire to block Vichy and eventually seize more French territory.
