Leopoldo Faretra (Grottaminarda, 1 February 1908 – Passo Eclano, 25 May 2001) was an Italian physician. He devoted his life to those in need of care and was strongly opposed to his political ideals. From 2 November 1943 to 13 April 1945 directed the Infirmary in Italian concentration camp in Hemer, in the northwest of Germany, in which he worked a resistance unarmed, allowing them to escape the German heavy work in the hundreds of Italians. On 3 September 1944, Faretra was reported to the Gestapo for propagating anti-German propaganda and to have caused the failure of the request for voluntary cooperation by the Germans advanced to the Italian military infirmary run by him. After his death, 16 March 2010 he was awarded the Medal of Honor due to him as an Italian citizen deported to a concentration camp Nazi.

This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page. (Learn how and when to remove these template messages) The topic of this article may not meet Wikipedia's notability guideline for biographies. (January 2013) You can help expand this article with text translated from the corresponding article in Italian. (January 2013) Click [show] for important translation instructions. View a machine-translated version of the Italian article. Machine translation, like DeepL or Google Translate, is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Wikipedia. Consider adding a topic to this template: there are already 3,069 articles in the main category, and specifying|topic= will aid in categorization. Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article. You must provide copyright attribution in the edit summary accompanying your translation by providing an interlanguage link to the source of your translation. A model attribution edit summary is Content in this edit is translated from the existing Italian Wikipedia article at [[:it:Leopoldo Faretra]]; see its history for attribution. You should also add the template {{Translated|it|Leopoldo Faretra}} to the talk page. For more guidance, see Wikipedia:Translation.

Leopoldo Faretra was born in Grottaminarda. He devoted his life to poor and needy people and he fought against infant mortality.^[1]

From 2 November 1943 to 13 April 1945, he directed Italian infirmary in the concentration camp of Hemer, in the north-west of Germany. Here, he prescribed a lot of false medical certificates to deported people in order to get them away from death caused by work in heavy industry.^[2]

He worked as health officer in Rocchetta Sant'Antonio. Then he moved to Venezuela cause of his socialist ideals and because there were needed doctors. There, doctor Faretra was the only one who gave immediately help to survivors of an air accident through impassable paths risking his life.^[3]

In 1957 he specialized in gynaecology and he managed to save a lot of unborn children and women in childbed through surgical operations.^[4] On 16 May 2010 it was award him a medal of honour because he was an Italian deported in a Nazi lager.^[5]

• Melucci, Luigi (2012). Leopoldo Faretra, storia, memoria, etica e resistenza non-armata di un irpino. Versi Editori, Grottaminarda.