Syndrome K: The Fake Disease That Saved Jews in Nazi-Occupied Italy

In September 1943, the last surviving Jews of Italy groaned under the Nazi boot. Special Nazi units operated with ruthless efficiency to track down and annihilate every Jew who remained alive. Italy’s leader, Benito Mussolini, fully collaborated with the Nazis.

At a hospital in Rome, a Jewish doctor named Dr. Vittorio Emanuele Sacerdoti was employed. He was considered an essential worker, since every day wounded soldiers arrived from the battlefront and every doctor was needed. Still, the ultimate goal of both the Nazis and the Italians was the complete extermination of the Jews — including those deemed “essential.”

Amid the chaos of war and the pressure of Nazi occupation, Sacerdoti devised a daring idea: he would invent a disease.

With the help of an Italian colleague, he began producing medical reports, preserving samples, and documenting hospitalizations — all centered around a fabricated illness he called “Syndrome K.”

The supposed disease was described as highly contagious and, strangely enough, it seemed to strike Jews in particular. Anyone “diagnosed” with Syndrome K had to be placed in special isolation wards within the hospital. They could not be deported on trains, imprisoned, or sent anywhere else — only quarantined.

In this way, approximately sixty Jews were hidden in plain sight for nearly a year inside the hospital in Rome, classified as patients of a deadly, terrifying disease that did not exist at all.

It was nothing more than the brilliant invention of a Jewish doctor — together with a measure of divine providence, that allowed these people, whose fate otherwise would have been sealed, to live through even the darkest years of the Holocaust.