Sabrina Frontera, Sapienza University of Rome 
CAPPE Visiting Scholar  

The Memory of Italian Military Internees In Germany During WWII: Between Denial and The Myth of Unarmed Resistance 

4.30pm Tuesday 2^nd June 2015

Room 101, Pavilion Parade
University of Brighton

After the Italian armistice, more than 650,000 Italian soldiers who had refused to fight for the Axis were disarmed by Wehrmachtand deported to the Reich for forced labour. Denied “Prisoner of War” status, they were classified as “Italian military internees”. Their history remains largely untold and their deportation is even today largely overlooked in the literature. Indeed, their experience appears to have been entirely unknown to historians until the late 1980s. As such, the case constitutes evidence of a striking amnesia in Italian collective memory.
This talk analysed the reasons for this long and deep silence about the “memories” of these soldiers’ internment produced and handled by both ex-internees themselves and by the institutions both of the nascent Italian republic post-1945 and of later Italian state institutions, arguing that this case serves as an emblematic example of how memory representations of WWII are influenced by cultural and political aims.