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Silvio Berlusconi
Well then, just when you think disgraced former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi couldn’t go any lower, he manages to surprise you. No, he didn’t have another orgy with a 17 year old. This time he’s defending Benito Mussolini’s alliance with Hitler… on International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Yep.
In 1938, before the outbreak of World War II, Mussolini’s regime passed the so-called “racial laws,” barring Jews from Italy’s universities and many professions, among other bans. When Germany’s Nazi regime occupied Italy during the war, thousands from the tiny Italian Jewish community were deported to death camps.
“It is difficult now to put oneself in the shoes of who was making decisions back then,” Berlusconi said of Mussolini’s support for Hitler. “Certainly the (Italian) government then, fearing that German power would turn into a general victory, preferred to be allied with Hitler’s Germany rather than oppose it.”
Berlusconi added that “within this alliance came the imposition of the fight against, and extermination of, the Jews. Thus, the racial laws are the worst fault of Mussolini, who, in so many other aspects, did good.”