The Memoriale della Shoah is a Holocaust memorial at the Milano Centrale railway station commemorating the Jewish prisoners deported from there during the Holocaust in Italy. Jewish prisoners from the San Vittore Prison, Milan, were taken from there to a secret underground platform, Platform 21 (), to be loaded on freight cars and taken on Holocaust trains to extermination camps, either directly or via other transit camps. Twenty trains and up to 1,200 Jewish prisoners left Milan in this fashion to be murdered, predominantly at Auschwitz. Milan during the German occupation Background After the Italian surrender on 8 September 1943 and the occupation of northern Italy by German forces, Milan became a centre for processing, interrogating and torturing captured resistance fighters and Jews, which was carried out by both the German police and the Italian Muti police unit. Prisoners were held at San Vittore Prison, but were also taken for interrogation and torture at either the headquarters of the German police at Hotel Regina or at the headquarter of the Muti unit in an army base at Via Rovello. The German police in Milan was under the command of SS-Sturmbannführer Theo Saevecke. Saevecke was sentenced in absentia in 1999, but never extradited, for ordering the Piazzale Loreto massacre—the public execution on 10 August 1944 of 15 Italian partisans who had been hand-picked by Saevecke, as a reprisal for a partisan attack on a German military convoy. The executed were left on display for a number of days. The same Piazzale Loreto became the scene of the public display of Benito Mussolini's corpse on 29 April 1945. The Muti police unit, based in Milan and named after Ettore Muti, was commanded by Francesco Colombo and acquired a reputation for ruthlessness and brutality during anti-partisan operations. Members of the unit were convicted in 1947 by a court in Milan for crimes ranging from blackmail to murder and rape. Deportation Milan served as central deportation place for the Jews of northern Italy, who were brought there from other cities like Genoa and Turin as well as rural regions like the Aosta Valley. The loading of deportees onto carriages took place in the early mornings to ensure secrecy and also prevent disruption of the vital daily mail and freight services. The first holocaust train with deportees left Milan from Platform 21 on 6 December 1943, carrying 169 Jews to Auschwitz; only 5 of them