The End of the Rhodes’s Jewish Community and the Italian Rule. From control to deportation

This paper describes the total annihilation of the Jewish Community of Rhodes by the Nazis with the Italian’s complicity in the last years of World War II. During the military occupation of the Italian Dodecanese islands by the German Army, lasted from September 1943 until the end of the war, almost all the Jewish inhabitants of the islands of Rhodes and Cos were expelled and deported to Auschwitz Death Camp in Poland were more than 90% died. Until 2013, the story of the deportation of the Jews of Rhodes was studied mostly through memories or indirect sources. The secret archives of the Carabineers (1932−1945) brought to light by a team of researchers and archivists of the Dodecanese State Archive allowed to shed light upon the key moments of the deportation. The records kept in the Carabineer’s Archive in Rhodes makes possible as well to clarify how many people were deported from Rhodes and Cos in 1944 and to reconstruct the biographies of the victims.