1943-1954

Over 60,000 Italian POWs were caught in the sack by the Red Army between late-December 1942 and February 1943. Almost all were captured during “Operation Little Saturn” that would annihilate the Italian Army in Russia (ARMIR) in less than a month.

ARMIR was around 235,000 strong by the time of the Russian offensive. 85,000 would never come home.

Documents that surfaced with the fall of the Soviet Union have shed some light on what happened to around 55,000 of the 85,000 dispersi—the lost. They were captured and sent on the “March of the Davai” to Russian POW camps that would, many years later, become known to the world as Gulags. Camps such as Suzdal 160 (where most of the Italian POWs would be taken along with General Paulus when he surrendered at Stalingrad), Tambov, Oranki, Michurinsk, and the now notorious camps simply known as Lager 58/c and Lager 171.

Of the 55,000 Italian POWs, 45,000 would die in the camps within a couple of weeks. They died of starvation, from the cold, and from disease. They fared better than the German POWs: of 91,000 captured in Stalingrad, only 6,000 would ever find their way home.

As for the remaining 30,000 Italian soldiers, nothing is known. They are the Armata Scomparsa—the vanished army.

In the end, around 10,000 Italian POWs would be repatriated between 1945 and 1954.

For those who made it home in the spring and summer of 1943, fate would soon play another fateful and deadly hand. In September, when Italy surrendered and swapped sides, these soldiers, who’d fought with the Nazis in Eastern Europe, became the enemy overnight and were swiftly rounded up and sent to the “stalags”, the Nazi POW camps where thousands of Italian POWs were murdered by disease, starvation, and forced slave labor.

Their deaths are now slowly being revealed by mass graves in Poland where Soviet and Italian soldiers have been found buried and forgotten side by side. A strange irony of history: the same men who fought in Russia with their Nazi allies now killed by the Nazis along with the Red Army soldiers who’d been the enemy but six months earlier.

The fate of the Italian Army in Russia (ARMIR) heavily influenced the first post-war elections in 1948 with the pro-US centre-right parties accusing the Italian Communist Party—favored to deliver a win in the elections—of deliberately holding back the full scale of the tragedy on the Eastern Front and the fate of Italian POWs in the Soviet Union. So traumatized was Italy by what happened in Russia that fake propaganda was still being published in 1994 before the election tying in then-Communist Party leader Togliatti to a secret pact with the Soviets to kill Italian POWs.

It would only be in the early 2000s when the true scale of the horror would be revealed and become a topic not for political debate but historical objectivity and research.

My uncle Alessandro was one of the 30,000 who vanished without a trace.