THE FAKE DISEA ITALIAN JEWS F
The highly-infectious Syndrome K made the Gestapo flee a Rome hospital in terror. But it was a clever ruse dreamt up by two young doctors to foil Nazi death squads
WHEN the Nazis arrived at the entrance of the Rome hospital, they knew exactly who they were looking for – Jews. It was October 1943 and, with the Holocaust already unfolding across occupied Europe with horrifying consequences, SS and Gestapo teams had finally begun operations to track down Italy’s Jewish population.
The Fatebenefratelli Hospital had sat in the centre of the city – on an island in the middle of the River Tiber – since 1585. Suspecting that doctors there were concealing fleeing Jews, the Germans demanded to search the building. Who were the patients in the hospital? Were Jewish families among them? Who was being hidden in the wards?
Two young Italian doctors came forward, and insisted that there were no Jews in the building; the Catholic hospital’s closed wards simply contained patients who had to be isolated because they were suffering from a mysterious and highly-infectious illness. Symptoms of the “contagious” new respiratory disease included fever, breathing difficulties and dementia.
Signs bearing the words – “Morbo di K” or “Syndrome K” – had been hung on some of the doors of the wards. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the German search parties went no further, and abruptly left the hospital.
In fact, the terrifying new disease which sent the Nazis scurrying away, was just a clever ruse to save lives.
The two doctors who had come up with “Syndrome K” were Vittorio Sacerdoti, 28, who was Jewish himself, and his Catholic colleague Adriano Ossicini. The latter had narrowly avoided prison in the 1920s for his antifascist views, while Sacerdoti had lost his first job in 1938 when Mussolini’s government introduced anti-Semitic racial laws.
Dr Sacerdoti told the BBC in 2004: “The Nazis thought it was cancer or tuberculosis, and they fled like rabbits.”
THE “K”, the men would later explain, came both from the surname of the German Supreme Commander in Italy, Albert Kesselring, and Rome’s feared Gestapo chief, Herbert Kappler. It also referred to Koch’s bacillus, which causes tuberculosis.
When the round-up of Rome’s Jews began in October 1943, both Sacerdoti and Ossicini brought groups of them to the hospital. Patients were advised to cough violently should German soldiers appear.
Dr Giovanni Borromeo, the hospital’s director, registered them as carriers of “Syndrome K”. Inside the hospital, according to Ossicini, staff knew a Syndrome K registration meant the patient was not sick at all, but Jewish.
He recalled: “We created those papers for Jewish people as if they were ordinary patients, and at the moment when we had to say what disease they were suffering from? It was Syndrome K, meaning ‘I am admitting a Jew,’ as if he or she were ill, but they were all healthy. The idea to call it Syndrome K, like Kesselring or Kappler, was mine.”
Dr Borromeo had also installed an illegal radio transmitter and receiver in the hospital basement, which was used to communicate with local partisans.
The invention of the fake disease was just one of many courageous, daring and ingenious ways in which Italy’s Jews were hidden and saved from arrest, and deportation to almost-certain death in the concentration camp systems at Auschwitz and Mauthausen.
Under the fascist regime of Benito Mussolini in 1938, Italy’s Jewish population had multiple laws passed against them restricting their rights. However, it wasn’t until late 1943,
after the fascist regime had collapsed and Nazi German forces had occupied the country, that Italian Jews faced deportation to the concentration camps.
By September, the Germans and the now puppet regime of the Italian Social Republic, headed once again by Mussolini, began arresting and systematically deporting Italian Jews to the concentration camps of central and Eastern Europe.
Across German-occupied Europe, including Poland, the Baltics and parts of the Soviet Union, more than three-and-a-half million Jews had already been murdered. Yet despite the efforts of the Nazis and Mussolini, Italy was to prove an exception: of the estimated 44,500 Jews in Italy when the Germans invaded, an astonishing 80 per cent were to
escape arrest and deportation – the second highest survival rate of any country’s national Jewish population after Denmark.
On October 16, 1943, the SS spearheaded a savage dawn round-up operation to capture Rome’s estimated 10,000 Jews, but even after the city’s Jewish ghetto was surrounded by 300 troops, thousands managed to escape.
Across the country, thousands more would avoid capture thanks to the bravery and determination of a huge variety of Italians, Allied soldiers and intelligence agents, and even some Germans.
Five hundred yards across the Tiber from the Fatebenefratelli Hospital, in the 16th-century splendour of the Piazza Farnese, the convent of Santa Brigida was home to a Swedish order of nuns. One of them, Sister Mary Richard Hambrough, was English.
Born in Brighton in 1887, she became part of the community in Rome in 1924.As the SS rampaged across Rome, Sister Hambrough and her Mother Superior came up with a
‘The Nazis thought Syndrome K was cancer or tuberculosis... they fled like rabbits’
secret plan: the convent would be used to hide fleeing Jews. A teenage boy called Piero Piperno and his Italian Jewish family were concealed there until the Allies liberated Rome in June 1944. For nearly a year, he and the other men from three families hid in rooms next to a secret entrance to the convent, behind its chapel.
The Vatican allowed Jews to take refuge in the thousands of Catholic churches, convents and properties across Italy – as Vatican property, many of these were declared “extra-territorial”, supposedly preventing the Germans from searching them – but the SS, a law unto themselves, often brutally flouted this ruling.
Inside the Holy City, an Irish priest, Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty, became known as The Scarlet Pimpernel of the Vatican. He was 45, originally from County Kerry, and had travelled as a Vatican diplomat in Egypt, Haiti, Santa Domingo and Czechoslovakia in the 1920s and 30s.
Before Mussolini’s fall from power in sum
mer 1943, O’Flaherty had been touring Italian POW camps collecting the names of Allied prisoners, which he would then broadcast on Vatican Radio, so that their units knew they were safe.
AFTER the Armistice, an estimated 70,000 Allied POWs were released from prison camps by their Italian guards: these men now tried desperately to reach the safety of Allied lines. Meanwhile, the British diplomatic envoy to the Vatican, Sir D’Arcy Osborne, was assembling an eclectic team of men and women, the kind that only exists in wartime. They would assist escaped Allied POWs and Jews to hide from the German occupation, via an ad hoc organisation they dubbed “The Rome Escape Line”.
It was co-run by Major Sam Ironmonger Derry, a Royal Artillery officer captured near El Alamein, who had then escaped three times from German and Italian custody. After he walked south to Rome, Osborne had him smuggled into theVatican hidden under a load of cabbages in a farmer’s cart. On another occasion, Derry once entered the Vatican in disguise, dressed in a Monsignor’s clerical vestments.
Along with the Irish Ambassador Thomas J. Kiernan, his singer wife Delia Murphy, Osborne’s butler, and two young New Zealand priests, a Maltese widow called Chetta Chevalier was also part of the Escape Line. Her husband had worked in Rome for Thomas Cook Travel Agents, and her flat in Rome’s Tiburtina district was used as a logistics base.
It was one of a number of safe houses where Jews and British POWs could rest and eat for 36 hours, before being passed to another hiding place. Chevalier and three Maltese priests, all of whom held British passports, estimated that 4,000 separate individuals passed through the apartment. German codebreakers were intercepting some of the information from D’Arcy Osborne’s coded messages, but the SS could not arrest any of the men inside the Vatican as it was neutral territory.
Gestapo chief Herbert Kappler was incensed by this, so he allegedly told his soldiers to paint a white line across the cobblestones, under the Roman colonnades, at the precise point where theVatican territory officially ended and Italian territory began. The SS would shoot O’Flaherty, said the German Ambassador, if he stepped over this.
But some German diplomats and army officers, horrified at the atrocities taking place, also helped save some of Italy’s Jews. Gerhard Wolf was German Consul in Florence, and had been forced to join the Nazi Party or face losing his job. He and another German diplomat, Rudolf Rahn, fought to save Jews from being deported. Among those Italians helping was the Italian cycling champion Gino Bartali who, before the war, had stunned his countrymen by winning both the Tour de France and the Italian national Giro d’Italia. By 1943, he would go on long training rides between Florence and Assisi.
Hidden inside his bicycle frame were messages, cash and documents for fleeing Jews.
The hugely popular bicyclist also had another secret – hidden in his Florentine cellar was a family of Croatian Jews called the Goldenbergs. The mother, father and two children spent nearly nine months in Bartali’s house, until Florence was liberated by the Allies in August 1944.
Giorgio Goldenberg, nine at the time, later said: “One thing I know for certain is that Bartali saved our lives.”
In May 1944, the Nazis finally raided The Fatebenefratelli Hospital, but only five Polish Jews were caught hiding on a balcony. Rome was liberated by the Allies a month later and they all survived the war.
In total, 36,780 Italian Jews would eventually survive the Holocaust. Among them were an estimated 100 people saved by the doctors at the Fatebenefratelli Hospital, with their ingenious mythical disease.
After the war the Italian government bestowed many honours upon Professor Borromeo. In 1961, at the age of 62, he passed away in his own hospital.
‘One man was smuggled into the Vatican hidden under a load of cabbages in a farmer’s cart’
●●Syndrome K: How Italy Resisted The Final Solution by Christian Jennings (History Press, £20) is out now. For free UK P&P, call Express Bookshop on 020 3176 3832 or visit expressbookshop.com