264 pp. - b/w ill. - softbound - printed 2015
Italian text
FORGOTTEN HEROES
ITALIAN MILITARY INTERNEES
IN THE GERMAN FIELDS 1943-1945
By this book the author intends to cast full light on the troubled events of the 770,000 Italian soldiers captured and kept in captivity by the German soldiers after 8 September 1943.
The Italian military internees were, even more than the prisoners of war, at the mercy of the German Commands, since, because of their anomalous "status", not foreseen by the international treaties, they were not safeguarded by the Geneva Convention of 1929, remaining outside its field of application.
This subject is dealt exhaustively in the first part of the book, also thanks to the numerous documents present in it.
The second part examines the Feldpost numbers of the Prison Camps and of the prisoner formations, with the insertion of the abbreviation table to facilitate their reading. Almost 60 pages are devoted to the censor marks used in the different camps.
For safety reasons, no internee could state the place where any German formation worked and where he was kept in. Nevertheless many cases can be found of correspondence whose text mentions the formation position, or bears a mark in the frontispiece with the place stamped in it.
Serious attention is paid to the verification of real situations, to have a picture as precise as possible of the extent of the Italian military internees, of their relocation - identifying the Camps and the formations where they were kept in - of the treatment they underwent, of the work organization, of their relationships, even towards the outside, by means of the correspondence, in spite of the censorship that primly limited every communication.