King in court: Italy ?tries? wartime monarch over race laws
 

ROME: Eighty years after Mussolini began persecuting Jews, Italy is putting the dead king who backed his racial laws on trial.
The setting may be a theatre, but the prosecutor, witnesses and three judges meeting in Rome are real, their scrutiny of the controversial monarch part of events organised to mark Holocaust Remembrance Day.
?The Trial? comes a few weeks after the remains of Victor Emmanuel III were discreetly returned to Italy. The king, who ruled from 1900 to 1946, fled in disgrace and died in exile in Egypt in 1948. Three high-ranking judges sit at a table under the motto hanging in courts across Italy: ?The law is equal for all?. The charge? Betraying the spirit of the monarchy´s statute, which tasks it with guaranteeing all its subjects are equal.
Witnesses describe the horror of laws the fascist regime introduced from 1938 to ban Jews from public life. At the time, there were 46,000 living in Italy. Thousands of pupils and hundreds of teachers were kicked out of schools, 400 civil servants and 24 generals were fired. The noose tightened further until deportations began under German occupation in 1943, resulting in the slaughter of some 8,000 Italian Jews.One woman reads out a letter from her grandfather describing not only the humiliation he suffered, but also the kindness of those in the monasteries that hid him and his relatives. Experts go through the list of renowned academics in exile, including three future Nobel Prize for medicine winners. By signing the racial laws, Victor Emmanuel III made an ?immoral, illegal and anti-historical use? of his powers, says Rome military prosecutor Marco De Paolis.

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