ROME, April 27 (UPI) -- The former home of Italy's Benito Mussolini will be turned into a memorial of the Holocaust endured by Rome's Jews, the Independent reported Tuesday.
The Shoah Foundation, established 10 years ago by U.S. film director Steven Spielberg, will contribute funds to the museum, to be built on the Villa Torlonia, where the dictator lived.
Beneath the villa is an enormous network of Jewish catacombs. Some six miles in length, it dates to the third and fourth centuries and contains some of the best-preserved paintings and inscriptions of the Jewish community.
After the start of the war, Mussolini used some of them to construct an air-raid shelter for himself and his family.
It was Mussolini who, under Nazi pressure, enacted the race laws that mandated discrimination against Jews in education, jobs and other areas, but no Italian Jews were deported to concentration camps until the Nazi takeover in 1943.
Of all countries touched by the Nazis' extermination program, Italy's record is the least shameful. About 85 percent of the country's 45,000 Jews survived, many thousands protected by Catholics around the country.
