When Italia Pained - Italia Joe

§ Curriculum Vitae: Forced Labourer

Research attempts via Arolsen Archives end inconclusively but confirm the effect of Russian occupation in East Germany resulted in records being destroyed.
Enrico Iozzelli’s essay ‘Gli Internati militari italiani in Germania 1943 – 1945’,provides definitive testimony of how the Germans ran the work camps.
German logic for harsh treatment involved their desire to have Italian soldiers enlist to support Mussolini’s continuance of war with Germany.
Mussolini lobbies Hitler to have Italians treated more humanely, but still with strings attached.

Province of Saxony Host Region for IMIs

A historical summary of the region.

Junkers Werke Dessau

A historical summary of the inventor who put his name to his works.
Hugo Junkers Russian connections for the supply of aircraft pre-war is the beginning of a debt he accumulates with the German State which the Nazis later use to defraud him of the business he had built up.
The effects of the sanctions imposed on Germany after WWI are explored.
Opinions about Plato’s book The Republicas to Hugo Junkers’ study of economics is at odds with Socrates’s ideal citizen. My own experience is explored.

Labour Theft

My own experiences from visits to Germany led to places such as Munich and Landsberg. Hitler had been imprisoned at Landsberg prison along with Emil Maurice and Rudolf Hess.
Firsthand experience gained of what the sardonic lie ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’(Work Will Make You Free) laced ironwork sign above the entrance meant.
Factual narrative citations: Book ‘The Dachau Concentration Camp 1933 to 1945’.The chapter ‘The deployment of prisoners in the armament industry 1942 to 1945’, provides clear accounts of what the IMIs faced as guest workers.
Factual narrative citations: Michela Cimbalo’s Research Paper^[1] details the labour shortages faced by Germany; the IMI’s fate was sealed along with 1.9 million POWs from twenty-six countries.
Mussolini’s RSI’s positioning alongside Germany’s war effort made the status of Italians’ internment a contradiction; something had to give. The ruse to transition the men to civilian workers was part of the answer. RSI being allowed to recruit from amongst the ranks rounded off the deception.
Differences between the treatment of officers and soldiers are explored. Officers had it quite easy.
The absence of the International Red Cross ensures that there is no oversight of the harshness inflicted on Italians.

Stammlager XIA Sub Camps Dessau-Junkers

Establishing the geographical locales where the Italians in the environs of Dessau resided.
Understanding the German nomenclature for the camps and subcamps.
Factual narrative citations: British plans to liberate their POWs include setting up ‘The Special Allied Airborne Reconnaissance Force (SAARF)’.
Militarism conceptually explored using ‘prions’as a
Analysis made of Amedeo Usai’s internment papers to supplement understanding of the work camps and geographic locations of these and Junkers factories. Factual narrative citations: Booklet celebrating the Bauhaus School of Architecture titled “Dessau 1945 Modernity Destroyed”^[2]; Research Paper by Bernd G. Ulbrich, “On the history of the victims of National Socialism in Dessau-Roßlau (5): Slave labour.”^[3].
The research finally enabled me to determine that Michele was housed at the camp in Burgkühnauer Allee.
The sugar refinery in Dessau also produced Zyklon B, the poison used as part of the ‘Final Solution’.
Relating the past to my own experiences in Melbourne’s industrial sector and its similarities to that in Dessau.
Amedeo Usai and Giuseppe Summito descriptors of how they scavenged for food.

Daily Routine for IMI Life

IMIs send postcards sent back home.
Some Italians commit suicide because of the harshness of conditions.
Pitches made to have soldiers switch to serve in the German army. Those who lived in the North did so only to abscond as soon as they were repatriated.
Michele with a farming background is assigned to Junkers to work with machinery the same as the mechanic Ivo Cardini. Amedeo is sent to work on a sugar beet farm near Holland and later sent to Dessau for outdoor work. Michele told of the cold inside the factory, and Amedeo wrote of the excruciating conditions outside.
The conditions in German camps are correlated to those that Father Zio and I experienced in Cobram in 1957.
Light humour at Messrs Mussolini’s and Hitler’s expense recorded in a ‘barzaletta’ (joke) which Father told of the pair.
The donkey of the joke is further explored in the context of Calabrian folklore.
The joke about the smokers like Gian Carlo who could not give up the habit were otherwise also prisoners of their own making.
Amedeo jumps in with his black humour of the ‘giant’ Northerners.
Southern Italians, unlike their Northerner counterparts, did not receive mail. Michele’s family did not know whether he was still alive.

§ The War Back Home

Invasion Endurance & Liberation Pain

Italy’s support for Germany’s Operation Barbarossa’has a high cost in lives lost. These losses were on top of those already suffered in other battlefronts.
Britain makes a pre-emptive strike on Taranto.
Italy was forced to join the rolling holocaust.
Italian cities were attacked after Mussolini declared war.
Francavilla and Simonetti farms in the firing line of Allied landings at Pizzo.
King regained constitutional powers and used them to dismiss Mussolini but was powerless to stop the bloodletting by Italy’s people.
The effect of war on the Simonetti family from oral history notes. Need to maintain farm productivity.
Attisani’s continue farming and collaborate with the Simonetti family. Descriptors made of the farms and agricultural procedures.
Mine own memories of family life mixed in with known anecdotes of day-to-day living in Francavilla.
Allies target women with propaganda to have them agitate to hasten Italy’s pulling out of the war. Food shortages affected all.

Political Remix Gestates the Resistance 1943-45

A retrospective look at the Nationalism of 1910 which delivered Libya to Italy, followed by a scrabble to join WWI to share in the spoils of war.
Cracks in Italy’s economic model for waging war were evident from the onset based on an opportunity cost-benefit analysis. Factual narrative citation: Claudio Sommaruga memoirs.
Partisan resistance or was it a civil war that took hold in the North, is explored. The communists receive a ‘get out of jail free’ card after Party Secretary Palmiro Togliatti returns from Moscow. Factual narrative citation: Christopher Duggan.
Other resistance movements in Greece and Yugoslavia become prominent amidst Monarchs having to take refuge elsewhere. The allies need to sift through these to determine their real intentions.

§ The War Back East

The Hopscotch War Goes On

Russian POWs virtually exterminated by neglect leading to petechial typhus in camps.
Claudio Sommaruga and others transferred to Poland to a camp where Russian POWs were seen living in dugouts and moving about on hands and knees in temperatures of minus 15^o
The cost of IMIs saying “NO” included possibly settling the debt with one’s life. Some do succumb to German promises for the restoration of worldly comforts. Claudio Sommaruga suffers misadventures at the hands of his jailers.
The status of ‘civilian worker’is explored. Factual narrative citations: Research Papers by Michela Cimbalo^[4] and Marco Paolini.^[5]
The effect that the ‘civilian worker’classification had on the IMIs was best summed up laconically by Giuseppe Summito.
Hope surfaces that the IMIs will not spend another winter in Germany but alas it was not to be. More of the same for Amedeo Usai and Michele Simonetti but for the officers such as Gian Carlo Turchetto, they are now required to work; rosters are announced. The ‘cold’ of that time becomes the classic by-line used by Michele to joke about the cold experienced in Cobram.
Michele’s takeaway from the Germans is that his experience did not leave him bitter. He even tells of a German having the surname ‘Simonetti’ which he encountered by chance at the Junkers factory.
German housing and standard of living in stark contrast with IMI’s still in the clothes they arrived in from Greece. Michele and Amedeo relate their experiences.

Franz Vogel’s Crossfire War

Known campaigns of the Waffen SS ‘Prince Eugene Division’ form the background to Franz Vogel’s participation in the war.
Greece is out of the war; a tenuous peace is administered by resistance groups.
In Croatia there is a reorganisation of German-backed military divisions. An attempt is made to capture Tito.
Tito Partisans were taking control of townships and began rounding up Swabians, inflicting genocidal murder and rape. Factual narrative citation: Dr Valentin Oberkersch.^[6]
Swabian’s Sepp Janko^[7] and his deputy Josif Beer had duplicitously convinced many ethnic Germans to stay put in Croatia.
The end of the ‘Prince‘Eugene Division’ occurs at Celje, in Slovenia.
The Vogel family amongst those refugees fleeing Croatia, their lands being confiscated by the Tito Regime. Josef Vogel Jr dies in war.
Criminal activities by the ‘Prince‘Eugene Division’ are made reference to at the Nuremberg trials. Who is to blame is explored with references made to Queen Victoria ordering Charles Edward to assume the Duchy of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha.

Bombardment Rages On Dessau

The Allies targeted Dessau because of its importance to Germany’s armament production. Some brief stats are quoted.
Happenings to Italians in Dessau detailed by ‘our eyewitness reporter’, Amadeo Usai. are compared to actual historical documentation of events.
Survival for IMIs meant running for open fields when air sirens were sounded. A short piece extract from Amedeo’s memoirs is translated to provide a firsthand account of the air raids.
Another account is given by Dr Petr Jaroslav the Czech prisoner held in the Dessau II. He has still adequate pathos to help save children from a burning house.
Michele’s oral history is supplementary to the written accounts by Amedeo and Petr.
Refugees seen streaming in from the East, fear of the Russians spreads. Even Russian POWs did not want to be liberated by their kind.
If that were possible, food becomes even scarcer,
SS squads set up defence positions around Dessau. Italians were arbitrarily rounded up to become human shields.

IMIs Share Temporal Space with Hitler’s “Final Solution”

Silvia Pascale’s book based on Gian Carlo Turchetto’s diary makes mention of the Wannsee Conference. The Jews in Greece had been left alone by the Italians; that changed after the armistice. Factual narrative citation: Institute for the Study of Rescue and Altruism in the Holocaust (ISRAH).
Amedeo is befriended by a Jewish girl whilst on-site at a camp he worked at. Her disappearance leads to the discourse of evidence of the Nazi’s ‘Final Solution’in the environs of Dessau. Factual narrative citation: ‘Inside the Concentration Camps, Eyewitness Accounts of Life in Hitler’s Death Camps’
Italians with a hot temper ill advised to display their feelings otherwise even more brutal camps would dampen their spirits.
Understanding of the ‘Konzentrationslagers (KLs also known as KZs)’is given by a declassified report^[8] prepared for the Allied Expeditionary Forces.
Buchenwald Concentration Camp; a brief case study.
Michele’s oral history and Amedeo’s memoirs about the V1 and V2 Rockets put into historical context.
Wars, the Treaty of Westphalia and later the Geneva Convention are explored.
Palpable hatred in German military ranks led to the massacre of Italians at Treuenbrietzen.

§ Liberation from Servitude to the Third Reich

The Elbe and Mulde Rivers in the environs of Dessau were to the demarcation lines between Western Allied Forces and the Russians. Mine own thoughts of ‘destiny’. Factual narrative citation: Forrest C. Pogue.^[9]
The ‘Battle of the Bulge’is Germany’s last hurrah! This was followed by Hitler issuing the ‘Nero Decree’.
Giuseppe Summito sums up with laconic sharpness of the confronting desperation.
The Western Allies, Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) planned to avoid starvation of their POWs in Germany and set up SAARF.^[10]
Things go ‘pear shape’ for the collaborative spirit between Russians and British on-site at the POW camp at Altengrabow.
Catch up on Montgomery’s belated arrival in Germany. The difference of opinion between Churchill-Montgomery and Eisenhower ultimately delivers Berlin to the Soviets. Eisenhower’s telegram to Stalin, a noted misstep.
President Roosevelt’s death was announced amidst a ‘cat and mouse’ battle of wits between the Western Allies and Stalin.
The Nazi stash of treasure discovered new the village of Merkers.
Concentration camps are found by the advancing Western armies.
Brief overview of battles taking place en route to Dessau. Factual narrative citations: Book ‘The Last Offensive’ by Charles B MacDonald,Professor Victor Davis Hansen provides opinions of Churchill being accepting of his General’s advice, compared to Hitler’s ‘never retreat’.Stalin is forced to begrudgingly accept advice from the only Generals left after he had executed his best ones.
German Commanders attempt army regroupings to slow down the Allied advance. Last gasp counter offensive battles by Germany in the environs of Dessau.
Oral history of Michele being liberated by the Russians is put into historical perspective of documented events of the liberation of Dessau.
The spoils of war were made up of the Junker’s technical advances in aircraft design. The scientists and engineers, including, Professor Wernher von Braun were living assets that needed to be taken out of the Russian zone of occupation. Russians left with enough booty of what remained of Junkers.
American field units offer material assistance to liberated Italians. Michele’s oral history is merged with Amedeo Usai’s memoirs of Italians showing their relief in song.
Amedeo becomes aware of the social changes occurring by his seeing American women in uniform.
The German people were left to struggle without men making do with women working alongside fathers and children to repair dwellings. Dessau was doomed to be part of the German Democratic Republic’, a puppet state of the Soviets.

Repatriation Out of Dessau

The Italian sanctuary at Kochstedt just out of Dessau is the holding area where the IMIs waited for transport across Germany to make their way home.
Notes from Amedeo Usai and Gian Carlo Turchetto’s testimonial memoirs are used to map the paths for the Italians from Dessau and others from further east to the Brenner Pass, across the Alps back into Italy.
The frenzied post-war Allied activity must contend with transport shortages. German POW camps are repurposed into hostels for short-term accommodation whilst transport assets are juggled.
Adding further misery to their humdrum existence, Italians are subject to fumigation with DDT at various points of their transit.
The French can’t wait to vent their spleens on the Italians, conveniently forgetting their history of invasions and occupations.

Repatriation Blues for the Officer Class

Gian Carlo Turchetto had been initially sent to Oflag 73, Benianminow near Warsaw and later sent to Stalag XB also known as Sandbostel Camp.
His final residency is another hell hole called Wietzendorf Stalag XD.
Some of the camp histories are explored based on Gian Carlo’s testimonials.
Closure to Gian Carlo’s story comes about through circumstances reflecting the mayhem occurring at the end of the war.
Closure for Claudio Sommaruga is truly telling of his being a victim of the principles he had set himself to defy the Germans. His incarceration eventually has him at the same camp as Gain Carlo.
The hunger experienced during captivity is explored. Factual narrative citations: Tonino Guerra^[11], Odysseus (Ulysses in Roman mythology) following his raft wreck on Skheria Island.^[12]
A politico update of the goings on in Italy; Pietro Badoglio is replaced as PM by Ivanoe Bonomi.
Camp hierarchy for Italian officers is explored including their resourcefulness to gathering intelligence.
Rogue SS units are still a threat to camp residents waiting for transport out. These were able to disrupt food deliveries.
The call to move out came eventually; Claudio Sommaruga near death is propped up to make it to the rail head.
The German residents of a town were expelled to make way for incoming POWs. The homes were not bombed and it is noted that such Germans maintained a high standard of living during the war.
The priority of ordinary soldiers compared to the officer class is noted, however still well below the Allies giving much higher priority to their own.
The British show signs of being crass arbiters in their adjudication of Italian ‘civilian workers’.
Italians rally to the idea of repurposing their IMI label to ‘Iternati Martiri Innocente’and in so doing, conveniently relegating their being ‘Fascists’ credentials to the dustbin. Only history cannot be so easily discarded. Gian Carlo exhibits signs of elitism, and Claudio Sommaruga eventually does come to grips with his Fascist past.
News received that politics in Italy continue to be unstable, hunger and vendettas go hand in hand. The Vatican and the International Red Cross are the only bright spots to assist with incoming expatriates.
Gian Carlo’s diary notes enable mapping his transit out of Germany.

Patria Welcomes All With Arms Crossed

Germans returning from Italy cross paths with Italians at Innsbruck, Austria. They exchange currencies.
Entry points into Italy at Bolzano and Pescantina are set up with aid stations to provide food and clothing. Testimonials are taken in attempts to determine the deaths of comrades.
Evidence of the Allied bombings makes for a constant reminder of how Italy suffered during the war. Infrastructure destroyed, limits transport to take people to their home destinations.
Amedeo Usai’s memoirs fill in the gaps in Michele’s repatriation. Amedeo is making the same way south to take a ferry to Sardinia.
Even through the destruction of Michele and Amedeo see the wonderful standard of living in the Northern cities.

§ The Reds Collect on Debts Owed

Franz Vogel’s Gulag Misery

The Vogel family becomes fragmented by the edict for ethnic Germans in Croatia-Yugoslavia to be relocated to Austria and Germany.
The Desanka Çarević family is ethnic Serbian and their fate was controlled by other political factors, including the transformation of Tito’s Communist Partisans into the Yugoslav Army.
The Communists target retribution on the Swabian population, Croats, Serb monarchists and Hungarians; pogroms responsible for 100,000 being executed.
The Red Army arrives on the scene to take its revenge on what is left.
The anecdote retold by Michael Kovacs of an event passed down by his parents shows the brutality that the Russians were capable of.
Franz Vogel caught up in the dragnet to have POWs work in Russia. Factual narrative citation: Fletcher School, Tufts University.
How Franz Vogel survived is based on the slimmest of opportunities in a nation that had very few commodities for maintaining life, to share.
Codifying suffering if it were possible!
Coming out of the Gulags alive had a chronic cost, Franz’s daughter will in the future ask “Why does dad drink so much that he has to go to bed?”
Vogel family lands and properties became part of assets to set up the Communist utopia which was never realised.

Vogel’s Austrian Hiatus

Vogel archive photos tell a story of the family becoming refugees in Austria.
Vogel – Çarević family politics revisited to explain the stratification that occurred once Desanka left for Austria. Her father Pavao was killed by the Ustaša.
Desanka’s talents in dressmaking give her an advantage in the booming economic conditions prevalent in Croatia before the war. Her skills will differentiate her post the family’s arrival in Australia.
A causal comparison of the economics of Croatia and those prevailing in Calabria at about the same time indicate differences in living standards.
Michele and Franz become POWs for different reasons; the effect on the Vogels family having been active participants in the war is compared in brief to the Simonetti -Attisani family’s lot in Francavilla.
The International Red Cross (IRC) assists with Russian POWs released; Franz returns to his family in Austria to begin the rebuilding of finances.
Family politics surface with Steve Vogel marrying Magdalena Bonigut.
Strife among, sisters-in-law leads to Magdalena becoming involved in a bicycle–automobile accident, her unborn child suffers lifelong injuries.
Vogel oral history of their life in Salzberg and later in Wels. Sisters Anna, Erica and Rosalia and their cousins Monika and Maree were born in Pernau. Narratives made of the dates in documents in the family archives fit in with oral history.
Cousins Franz Jr and Josef Jr, attend school and play around the farms in Pernau.
Applications made to immigrate to the US and Australia; Australia came through first.
Franz and John Vogel families immigrate to Australia. Steve and his family stay behind with Veronica and Josef. Steve and Magdelena build a DIY modest house. Magdelena, partly of her own making, must contend with the lingering bad blood with her in-laws. Ill will continue to plague family unity even once grandparents reunite in Australia.

§ Pull up a Chair, We need to Talk

Theory of Relativities

Italy looking, for a ‘free lunch’, is led into the abyss by adventurous politicians and a gullible populace. Italy’s arrival at the ‘trough’ was well after other European States had taken their fill through colonisation.
Attention is focused on the period when Germany took over the reins in Italy after the armistice was signed. Germany remains committed for the long haul. Italy did not have the capabilities to prevent the short-term outcome.
Claudio Sommaruga’s testimonial is scathing of the attitude displayed by the military leaders tasked with the safety of their soldiers.
Who controlled what became a mad scramble for political influence, the church included? There is no apparent interest in analysing why Italy had erred so badly.
References made to similarities to an earlier time when the Sanfedistas backed by the church dismantled the makings of a Republic. Garibaldi had fought in South America against the very colonisations that some decades later the united Italy tried to implement in North Africa.
Giuseppe Mazzini was the messenger, to have Italy heed the calls for social change. The Monarchs in the North and South, aided by the Papacy weren’t having any of that.
The appeal of Fascism to a populace left wanting by revolving foreign rule has some merit for Italians to hope for sympathy from the rest of Europe; Churchill said as much. Italians, however, going into denial about their indiscretions, committed to fulfilling their greed, at the expense of others, is also reprehensible. Michele knew something was not quite right.
The North-South divide gets a makeover by the lyrics ‘O Italiella, o Itali�in which the South still grieves that the Unification of Italy was the cause of the ‘today’ ills faced by the South. The relativities of European expansion are explored.
Britain’s slave trade sets the tone for such relativities. Factual narrative citations: John Locke, English doctor and philosopher, and historian Robert Lacey.
Gian Carlo Turchetto indulges in nostalgia for his Patria; Enrico Iozzelli writes about the pathetic response to the IMI’s return. Michele’s discharge papers analysed and Amedeo reflects on the destruction which had occurred in Naples and his native Sardinia.
The allure of joining in the ‘feel-good’ times is explored using crass decisions to join the ‘get rich’ stock market phenomenon of 1987. There was a price to pay. Character building from the ashes is compared to Prime Minister Robert Menzies.
Soul search of what was the Italian state of mind post WWII. Factual narrative citations: Francesco Lamendola.^[13] dispels any idea that the resistance movement was the ‘secondo Risorgimento’.
Italy is not out of the woods; the return of the IMIs is overshadowed by the anguish at the Border States between Italy and Yugoslavia. Factual narrative citation: historian Roberto Spazzali uses the irredentism movement to prove his point about saying ‘yes’ to The Second Risorgimentocoming into effect; acrimony continues to this day.
The Italian Partisan Resistance operating in the North of Italy is put under the microscope. Factual narrative citation: historian Christopher Duggan

Theorem Test

No possibility of heroes; some altruism exhibited by individuals towards their kind comes to the fore.
Political affiliations are being crafted in the officer camps.
Claudio Sommaruga accepts that his fate was to ‘be a good Fascist’; he agonises over ending his allegiance to the cause. Gian Carlo Turchetto can quickly reconcile to the new paradigm, and Emanuele Caffiero is very reflective of his commitment to the Fascist cause.
Fascism is compared to other events which enriched Britain, Spain, France and other states.
From a soldier’s perspective, Amedeo Usai volunteered, as did Australian Charlie Gilbert to get off the treadmill of poverty. Charlie’s story continues in which he barely survived during the defence of New Guinea.
The treatment of Allied POWs by the Japanese is as bad as that meted out by the Germans. Japan’s forced labourers are a result of a dragnet cast over occupied S-E Asian territories.
The non-volunteer Italian draftees had no choice. All the Simonetti men were called up for active duty. Had they been casualties of war the Simonetti family would have been devastated.
Claudio Sommaruga draws attention to the poor treatment of the returning IMIs. The reason was the need to keep Germany out of the communist clutches through the formation of NATO. NATO acted in the interests of the member states. Italy wanted to avoid being implicated in the Holocaust.
The feeble attempts to reconcile IMI’s needs for recognition become the collective aftermath blotch, many years later.
Closure for Claudio Sommaruga and Gian Carlo Turchetto is representative of their officer class. Giuseppe Summito sums up that the common Italian soldiers were handled as a ‘job lot’, they had little choice. Historian Christopher Duggan concludes that the Italian Resistance was a ruse by the Communists to gain influence out of the turmoil of the invading Allies.
Those who did join the Repubblica Sociale Italiana – RSI under Field Marshal, Rodolfo Graziani. Some were classmates of Claudio Sommaruga; these had no qualms about taunting him for his stance; it added up to nothing. He writes that he is even persecuted by his government, ‘stab in the back’, as payback for the loyalty he had shown.

Reds Under the Bed

The death toll of WWII is overshadowed by Communist expansionism.
Allies take stock of the duplicity being posed by resistance movements which had to be supported. Democracy must be bastioned against the tides eroding its foundations.
Italian politics prove to be particularly difficult to gauge and to harness. The disparate wartime coalition entities vie for influence. Churchill regrets having put effort into improving Sforza’s political capital.

Let’s Wrap This Up

Attempts for all to bathe in ‘Liberation Glory’ need to be tempered by the factual realities of the previous two decades. Why the IMI phenomenon even existed is just cause, to be sceptical of anyone’s need, to claim glory.
Value adding to Italy’s declaration of war onto a base of sand adds up to naught. The IMI “NO” stance must contend with the other “NO” or “ochi – Όχι”, the Greek response to Italian demands to relinquish territory.
Germany was the beneficiary of the Italian “NO”, manpower was badly needed for armament production.
The Volksdeutche’of Eastern Europe was to provide the cannon fodder for Germany desperately remaining in the war. Germany sucked manpower like an insatiable vortex. The Italian “NO” was inconsequential to the existential ‘big picture’ that Germany faced.
Italy lost talented scientists such as Enrico Fermi because Italy became aligned with Germany’s racial laws.
Amedeo Usai makes note of Germany possessing a ‘secret weapon’.
Germany lacking a long-range bomber limited its effectiveness in the Russian campaign. The development of the jet engine is explored.
IMI incarceration was not unique, it had parallels throughout Europe, China and the Pacific theatre of war. The killing fields continued to be propagated by the Ustaša, the Chetniks, Tito’s Partisans and the Russians.
Michele’s oral history of the war and written memoirs by Amedeo Usai and Claudio Sommaruga point to the neglect by Italian politicians to acknowledge the failures of the military to safeguard its soldiers. It would be therapeutic to have some form of public acknowledgment of IMI suffering; men, through no fault of their own, were cut off from the International Red Cross and family.
The ‘Marshall Plan’and how money was allocated is explored. Factual narrative citation: Professor Michela Giorelli (UCLA) and Nicola Bianchi (Kellogg School of Management) present a paper ‘The Role of the Marshall Plan in the Italian Post-WWII Recovery’.
Quick revisit of the occupations of the peninsular by foreign powers seeking to replace their versions of the Roman Empire, often the Church of Rome being complicit.
Summing up Italy’s misadventures, one bright spot is Giuseppe Attisani retaining some wealth from his expeditions to North Africa. Italy’s cash burn resulted in the impoverishment of the Italian people.
The Bolshevik Revolution affected Italy’s politico; Communism could find a niche alongside the Pope and the Mafia.
Italy should have been amongst the loser states and been occupied just like Germany. Factual narrative citation: Edward C Banfield.^[14]

[1] Gli internati militari italiani nei Lager del Terzo Reich

[2] Editor: Philipp Oswalt et al for the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation

[3] Zur Geschichte der Opfer des Nationalsozialismus in Dessau-Roßlau (5):Zwangsarbeiter

[4] Gli internati militari italiani nei Lager del Terzo Reich

[5] I.M.I. Internati Militari Italiani nati nel Comune di Pistoia. Deportati Nei Lager Nazisti 1943 – 1945

[6] Book: Die Deutschen in Syrmien, Slavonien, Kroatien und Bosnien” Translated by Henry A. Fischer

[7] Dr. Sepp Janko, the leader of the Kulturbund and the ‘Führer’ of the Danube Swabians as recognised by Heinrich Himmler, attained an asylum visa out of Yugoslavia from the Red Cross and, under the pseudonym Jose Petri, fled to Nazi-sympathetic Argentina.

[8] Document Reference K-86936, Supreme Headquarters Allied Evaluation and Dissemination Section, German Concentration Camps

[9] Book: COMMAND DECISIONS, Chapter 22, The Decision To Halt at the Elbe

[10] Acronym for: ‘Special Allied Airborne Reconnaissance Force’

[11] Antonio “Tonino” Guerra (16 March 1920 – 21 March 2012) was an Italian poet, writer and screenwriter who collaborated with some of the most prominent film directors in the world.

[12] Homer: The Odyssey, translated by Robert Fitzgerald, Everyman’s Library Page117

[13] ‘The Courier of the Regions’ (23/11/2015).

[14] The Moral Basis of a Backward Society Page 23

Leave a Reply