Italian king’s heir apologises for monarchy’s Holocaust role

ROME: A descendant of Italy’s wartime King Victor Emmanuel III has apologised to the country’s Jewish community for his ancestor’s role in dictator Mussolini’s racial laws and the Holocaust.

"I condemn the 1938 racial laws, all of whose weight I still feel on my shoulders to this day, and with me the whole royal house," 48-year-old Emmanuel-Philibert of Savoy said of his great-grandfather. Victor Emmanuel III had put his signature to an "unacceptable document", he added in a letter posted to Facebook, "officially apologising" in the name of his family. Almost 8,000 Italian Jews were deported from the country and murdered in Nazi extermination camps, most of them in Auschwitz.

Giving a TV interview alongside the letter, Emmanuel-Philibert also vaunted his family’s positive role in Italian unification and granting of equal rights to Jews from 1848. Several Italian royals were themselves deported to Nazi concentration camps, he recalled. After the war, Victor Emmanuel III abdicated in May 1946 and died the following year in Egypt.