The I.M.I.

The Italian Military Internees in the Camps of the Nazis

Military internees were called the Italian soldiers,who were arrested in September 1943 in the home or on the war fronts abroad, after the proclamation of the armistice. 

The Nazis didn't want them call "prisoners of war" in order to withdraw them the control and support of the international institutions, under the Geneva Conventions of 1929.

The victims of Hitler was promised "exemplary punishment" because they were guilty of the failed coalition. This was indeed a relation of submission.

That was the most serious political and military defeat, which suffered our country in modern times.

Six hundred thousand men and perhaps even more: officers, sergeants, soldiers, doctors, pastors, trapped in train cars and transported in the camps in Poland and Germany to suffer in hunger or work as a slave in mines or war factories.

More than fourty thousand died to hunger or tuberculosis or by torture and executions or during the bombings. After the war fell to the terrible tragedy an unexplained silence.

It seemed as if a kind of repression in the national awareness of what happened, even though there were other different political and social motivations, what they determined.

Only the National Association of ex internees took the systematic work of investigation and collection the documents which are now in a large volume objectify, scientific available.

The obvious fact, which characterized the history of the Italian military internees in the camps was their massive refusal to the Nazis or fascists to fight or cooperate. The NO, which she held in Germany and which many paid with their lives, was a voluntary and conscious decision.