The dark fascist secret hidden beneath one of Europe’s largest railway stations

Milano Centrale opened in 1931, and was swiftly appropriated by the fascist regime as a symbol of power. (Touring Club Italiano/Universal Images Group/Getty Images via CNN Newsource)

MILAN, Italy — With its monumental façade, ornated with Roman-style columns, pedestals, and huge statues — naked men, winged horses, lions’ heads and gargoyles, for starters — Milan’s main train station is a tourist sight in its own right. This is a city that doesn’t do things by halves — the city’s iconic Duomo is Italy’s largest cathedral. But the station goes one further — it’s one of the largest in Europe.

Breathtaking from the outside, it’s no less spectacular inside. Travellers walk in through monumental entrances on three sides to an interior where vast staircases sweep upstairs to the departures hall with its mosaic flooring and sculpted walls. Trains depart from the 21 platforms that make up the main area of this magnificent station, which opened in 1931.

It’s bombastic and stylish — and was the perfect introduction to the 2026 Milano-Cortina Winter Olympics earlier this year. “L’emozione di essere italiani” declared posters all over the station — “the thrill of being Italian.” The phrase was even projected in green, red and white lights — the colours of the Italian flag — on the façade.

Yet the building also represents another, less spectacular part of Italy — its fascist history.

Not only is the station one of the most famous buildings in the country to be completed during fascism — while designed in a previous period, it was “tweaked” to add symbols of Benito Mussolini’s dictatorship, which are still visible — but beneath the main passenger facilities lies a concealed platform that was used for horrifying purposes during the Second World War.

Hidden for generations, Binario 21 — Platform 21 — is the underground area from which the Nazi occupiers and fascist sympathizers dispatched Jews and political opponents to the Second World War death camps.

Originally built as a space to transport goods, the area’s horrifying wartime use was hushed up for decades. It was only in 1994 that researchers realized what it was.

Even today, the more than 320,000 passengers who pass through the Stazione Centrale each day have little idea of its shocking history.

Today, the space has been turned into the Memoriale della Shoah di Milano, the city’s Holocaust memorial. Visitors can walk along the secret platforms, go inside the freight carriages that the fascists repurposed for human transportation, and see vivid testimony from Holocaust survivors. All while the screech of brakes and rumble of trains on the tracks pass overhead this dark underground space.

A symbol of the regime

When Milano Centrale opened in 1931, it was during a powerful period for Mussolini. Italy’s fascist dictator had swept to power in 1922, and was increasingly popular. “By 1931 the regime was very consolidated,” says Vanda Wilcox, an adjunct professor of modern European history at John Cabot University.

The station’s construction had began in 1912, when architect Ulisse Stacchini won a competition with his design. He planned a monolithic entrance whose vast spaces and soaring ceilings were said to be inspired by ancient Roman and Egyptian architecture, then added elements of Art Deco, Liberty style (Italy’s answer to Art Nouveau), and frescoes of the cities of the relatively new Italian state.

As the regime took over the build, fascist touches were added such as sculpting fasces — bundles of rods that had symbolized authority in ancient Rome, and the root of the word fascism — on the façade. The symbol of transport, travel and freedom, had been given a fascist tone.

A secret underground space

While Stacchini’s stylistic vision was perfected in the public areas and the platforms upstairs, down below he built an area for the transport of the mail. Milan’s main post office was on a side street, and goods leaving Milan were taken across the road to a side entrance of the station, where two platforms awaited.

Stacchini had cleverly designed the station as a multilevel building with passenger platforms on the top floor — even today, stairs and escalators take you to the trains — and the mail area underneath, unseen by the general public.

Here, in a walled space as dark as a basement but in fact at ground level, a thoroughly modern system was built: two platforms, connected by a turning circle at one end and a futuristic elevator at the other. The carriages were filled on one platform, rotated onto the other, then rolled one by one onto a huge elevator, which slowly raised them to regular platform level, where they were hitched together and attached to an engine.

It was a smooth system for the transportation of the mail — one that got the job done without impinging on passenger trains at this increasingly busy station. But during the war this efficient system was used for horrifying purposes.

A brutal takeover

Italy entered the Second World War on the side of Nazi Germany on June 10, 1940. Mussolini was overthrown in July 1943, and the country signed an armistice with the Allies in September. In response, the Nazis invaded their former allies, occupying northern and central Italy as the Allied forces advanced up the country from the south. The occupying Germans installed Mussolini as head of a puppet state, the Repubblica Sociale Italiana (RSI), based at Lake Garda and nominally ruling much of northern Italy.

Italian fascism had long been steeped in antisemitism — Mussolini’s 1938 Racial Laws had stripped Italy’s Jewish population of their civil rights. But while Jews and political opponents were imprisoned, exiled and subjected to forced labor during the early years of the war, they had not yet been deported to Germany’s death camps.

All that changed under Nazi occupation. The Germans — aided by the RSI — carried out mass roundups and deportations, aiming to wipe out Italy’s Jewish population and dispatch opponents of fascism to camps where they would be worked to death. Of the 44,500 Jews living in Italy, 7,680 were murdered, according to the Yad Vashem World Holocaust Memorial.

Bands of Italian fascists roamed the region of Lombardy, torturing partisans and capturing Jews, says Colacicco. They would bring them to the SS, which was based in Milan. From there, the prisoners would be deported. It is believed that civilians already working in the basement of the station stayed on to help with the deportations. “Otherwise it wouldn’t have worked,” says Colacicco.

Dispatched to their deaths

Thousands are thought to have been sent to their deaths through Binario 21 of Milano Centrale. With the arrival of the Nazis, the nearly two-acre site was quickly switched from a place to process mail and objects to one to process people.

The process was kept largely undercover, with deportations taking place overnight. “Trucks would drive into the atrium,” says Milena Santerini, an Italian politician and vice president of the Fondazione Memoriale della Shoah di Milano.

It wasn’t only Jews who were sent to their deaths. Captured partisans, political opponents and anyone who opposed the Nazis were processed through Milano Centrale. Many were factory workers who refused to produce munitions for the Nazi occupiers, says Colacicco. They were deported en masse to Mauthausen, a slave-labor camp in Austria, where many were worked to death.

Few records survive from the period, and nobody involved in the deportations has ever come forward to bear witness to what happened beneath the station, so it’s difficult to know the total number of those deported, says Colacicco.

Only two passenger lists survive — those of the first two convoys, which left Milan for Auschwitz in December 1943 and January 1944. They list 774 names, of whom only 27 survived. In total, says Colacicco, more than 20 convoys departed from the station — and new research suggests that those first two lists were not complete.

“It’s very difficult,” he says of the search for numbers and names. Researchers believe that thousands of Jews, and an equal number of political prisoners, were despatched between December 6, 1943, and January 15, 1945, shortly before partisans wrested control of the city from the Nazis as the Allied forces approached Milan.

The deportees were packed into wooden railway carriages that had previously been used for goods, and sometimes livestock. Between 60 and 80 people were forced into each, packed so tightly that they were unable to sit. (When the carriages were used to transport horses, the limit was six animals per carriage.)

“There were no windows, no toilets, no food and water,” says Santerini. “It was a 1,250-kilometre, seven-day journey to Auschwitz, and took seven days. It’s difficult to imagine what they must have experienced.”

Visitors to the memorial now can walk inside similar carriages from the same era. Stepping inside is claustrophobic enough when the doors are open.

The destination depended on who was in the carriages, says Colacicco. Convoys of Jewish people were sent straight to Auschwitz; political prisoners were sent to Mauthausen. “It was different treatment,” says Colacicco. “Political prisoners were sent to work like slaves, but the Jews were sent to death camps to be destroyed. It seems like a useless distinction but it’s an important one. National Socialism organized the destinations and the journeys with great precision.”

Some convoys even headed southeast, to Fossoli, a holding camp for Jewish deportees in the Emilia Romagna region, before returning north to Auschwitz. “Sometimes it was to pick up more people, or for technical reasons, or because Auschwitz was too full,” says Colacicco. “This was an industrial system, so technical problems happened.”

A hidden history

The arrival of the Allies in Milan and the liberation of Italy in April 1945 put an end to the convoys. Anyone who’d taken part in the deportations kept silent; most victims had been murdered. Survivors spoke of being forced into what seemed to be a “cavern” and loaded into carriages. They spoke, too, of a strange motion — a feeling of being lifted upward, before the train left.

Some of the most crucial testimony came from Liliana Segre, who was deported to Auschwitz on January 30, 1944, with her father. Aged 13 at the time, she was the only one of her immediate family to survive the holocaust.Now aged 95, she was inducted into the Italian Senate as a “senator for life” in 2018.

In 1994, survivors’ testimony was combed through by researchers from CDEC, the Fondazione Centro Di Documentazione Ebraica Contemporanea, which documents modern Jewish history. They realized that the deportees must have been dispatched from a space underneath Milano Centrale, and went looking for it. Entering the former mail area, they saw the elevator and realized what they were dealing with.

The area was opened to the public in 2013. It is the only place of Nazi deportation that has remained intact.

Today, visitors enter the same way the convoys did. Where the deportees would have been forced out of trucks, visitors are met with the “Wall of Indifference,” an artwork highlighting the “indifferenza” that Segre says led to the persecution of Italy’s Jewish population.

The two original underground platforms remain. On one sit vintage carriages; the other lies empty. On the wall behind are projected the names of the 774 people on the passenger manifests of the first two convoys.“It shows there were real people behind the numbers,” says Santerini.

Booths play wartime witness testimony, and visitors can take guided tours or walk around the space themselves. They can enter the carriages, or walk to the turning circle where the carriages were rotated to begin their journey. A spot overlooks the elevator which raised the deportees to their fate. All the while, those 320,000 daily travellers are passing overhead. Quiet moments of reflection are interrupted by trains screeching over the rails directly above.

Upstairs, amid the passenger platforms and beside the modern binario 21, is an invitation for people to visit what lies beneath.

Colacicco calls this an important place for Italians. “It represents the chance to think of our own past — that of the Italian people — that we have, after 80 years, partly forgotten and partly erased what happened,” he says.

“Italians haven’t taken full responsibility. But the fact that this happened in the economic capital of our country is significant. This was done by Italians and the responsibility is ours.

“It’s important to know that in the belly of the station you use every day to go to work or go on vacation, this space exists.”

By Julia Buckley, CNN