Stalin S Italian Prisoners Of War

This book reconstructs the fate of Italian prisoners of war captured by the Red Army between August 1941 and the winter of 1942-43. On 230.000 Italians left on the Eastern front almost 100.000 did not come back home. Testimonies and memoirs from surviving veterans complement the author's intensive work in Russian and Italian archives. The study examines Italian war crimes against the Soviet civilian population and describes the particularly grim fate of the thousands of Italian military internees who after the 8 September 1943 Armistice had been sent to Germany and were subsequently captured by the Soviet army to be deported to the USSR. The book presents everyday life and death in the Soviet prisoner camps and explains the particularly high mortality among Italian prisoners. Giusti explores how well the system of prisoner labor, personally supervised by Stalin, was planned, starting in 1943. A special focus of the study is antifascist propaganda among prisoners and the infiltration of the Soviet security agencies in the camps. Stalin was keen to create a new cohort of supporters through the mass political reeducation of war prisoners, especially middle-class intellectuals and military élite. The book ends with the laborious diplomatic talks in 1946 and 1947 between USSR, Italy, and the Holy See for the repatriation of the surviving prisoners.

During the Second World War, British and Imperial forces captured more than half a million Italian soldiers, sailors and airmen. Although a symbol of military success, these prisoners created a multitude of problems for the authorities throughout the war. This book looks at how the British addressed these problems and turned liabilities into assets by using the Italians as a labour force, a source of military intelligence and as a political warfare tool before their final repatriation in 1946-47.

Millions of servicemen of the belligerent powers were taken prisoner during the Second World War. This collection brings together new scholarship, largely based on sources from previously unavailable Eastern European or Japanese archives, detailing how these POWs were treated.

The authors employ previously classified documents in Russian and Italian archives, including reports to Stalin on the virtually daily meetings of Palmiro Togliatti, head of the Italian Communist Party, with Soviet diplomats. This recent, post-revisionist scholarship underscores the role of Stalin's ambitions and their incompatibility with liberal-democratic systems in the development of the Cold War. Stalin and Togliatti come across as shrewd politicians, implacable enemies of the capitalist West, yet acutely aware of the limits of their power.

The only study to date on Italian POWs in the United States, this book records the history of the 50,000 Italian prisoners of war who were captured in North Africa during fighting in the desert and shipped to the United States as POWs. After Italy surrendered to the Allies and declared war on Germany, 35,000 POWs worked with the U.S. Army as cooperators in Italian Service Units serving on Army posts throughout the United States. The 15,000 non-cooperators remained in stockades until their release in 1945 and 1946. The text itself is more than 50 percent oral history and is based largely on interviews with nearly 50 former POWs, their friends and families, and the U.S. civilian and military personnel who worked with them. Many of the POWs returned to the United States after the war (some as male war brides). Every individual interviewed has a colorful, vivid, emotional story to tell of his experience with bullets and bombs, with the dead and the dying, and about the trauma of captivity. The interviews and archival data indicate that the United States treated its POWs very well for the most part, with a couple of dreadful exceptions, and that the POWs' participation helped us to win the war. Italian-Americans interested in their heritage and students of World War II will find these unique stories compelling and informative.

Wars may be examined on many levels. On the grandest scale one can see them as the movements of masses of troops across a map with arrows and denotations of decisive battles. With a finer lens one can attempt to comprehend wars from the statements of national leaders or the strategic feints, thrusts, and parries of generals who order individual units across the battlefield. As valuable as these frames are in seeking to understand the reality of war, it is only by adding the perspectives of the individual soldiers that one can try to complete a thorough portrait of human conflict. That most critical and fine of lenses is the focus of this book. This is the story of World War II from the individual soldier's view as told by the men who fought for Italy on the Axis side and finished the conflict as prisoners of war (POWs). Through their accounts readers see the war as they experienced it.

The Second World War between the European Axis powers and the Allies saw more than twenty million soldiers taken as prisoners of war. While this total is inflated by the unconditional surrender of all German forces in Europe on 8 May 1945, it nonetheless highlights the fact that captivity was one of the most common experiences for all those in uniform - even more common than frontline service. Despite this, and the huge literature on so many aspects of the war, prisoner of war histories have remained a separate and sometimes isolated element in the wider national chronicles of the conflict constructed in the post war era. Prisoners of every nationality had their own narratives of military service and captivity. While it is impossible to encompass their collective histories, let alone the individual experiences of all twenty million prisoners in a single volume, Bob Moore uses a series of case studies to highlight the key elements involved and to introduce, analyse, and refine some of the major debates that have arisen in the existing historiography. The study is divided into three broad sections: captivity in Eastern and Western Europe during the war itself, comparative studies of specific categories of prisoners, and the repatriation and reintegration of prisoners after the war.