| الوصف: |
Like its Axis partner, the Italian state created the necessary machinery for dealing with prisoners of war and communicating with other belligerent powers. While capturing British imperial forces in Greece and North Africa, it soon lost many of its own men to captivity as its forces were driven out of east Africa and Libya. After the Tunisian campaign had ended and the Western powers had invaded Sicily, they held more than 500,000 Italian prisoners. For pragmatic reasons, the captors chose to move these prisoners to other parts of the British Empire and to the United States. Likewise, the more limited Italian contribution to the Eastern Front had left 60,000+ men in Soviet hands. However, the Italian surrender in September 1943 left the rump of the Italian army at the mercy of the invading Germans—with some tragic consequences as in the case of Kefalonia. While some units remained to fight alongside the Nazis, the majority were interned and taken to German as forced labourers. In many respects, this holds the key to an understanding of this Italian diaspora—namely the perceived usefulness of Italian prisoner labour to the war economies of the capturing belligerent powers. The internees of the Germans are very much at the forefront of Italian post-war memory, thus stressing the country’s anti-Axis stance at the end of the war. They are followed by the victims of the USSR, whose plight fitted a Cold War agenda, while the large numbers captured by the country’s future allies, Britain and the United States, were largely forgotten. |
