Italian anti-migrant party organises Nazi army camp re-enactment

ITALY’S anti-immigration party The League has sparked a furore in the town of Cologne Monzese, near Milan, after its councillors sponsored a reenactment of the Nazi occupation with locals dressed up as SS officers.

The bizarre event, in which families have been invited to visit a replica camp, was condemned by Italy’s centrist Democratic Party, which says it offends the memory of locals who were deported to Nazi death camps in the Second World War.

ANPI, an influential group of former Resistance partisans, was outraged to learn the re-enactment was due to take place just a few days before Italy’s annual Liberation Day holiday, to be held this year on April 25. The re-enactment is organised by a group called the 36 Fuesilier Kompanie, a reference to the notorious 36th Grenadier Division of the Waffen SS, responsible for some of the worst Nazi atrocities.

The “kompanie” describes the event as aiming to “re-evoke and get to know the life of an infantry unit camp in the weeks before the Liberation of Italy”.

Former partisans from ANPI’S Milan branch in Cologno Monzese said they “consider very grave the decision by the Cologno Monzese council to organise, in the days leading up to the 73rd anniversary of the Liberation, a German military camp by the Villa Casati”.

Pietro Bussolati, Democratic Party local secretary, called the event “intolerable and shameful”. The event “is an outrage to the memory of those who suffered from Nazi horror and violence”, he added. Emanuele Fiano, a Democratic Party MP who drafted legislation to make it a crime in Italy to support Fascism online, said the fact that The League chose to commemorate the occupiers and not the liberation was “beyond all limits”.

But Angelo Rocchi, The League mayor of the town, rejected the criticism. “We have provided a cultural and informative project for students and families.” he said. “The controversy is manipulative.”