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 elite. 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.

About the Author
Maria Teresa Giusti is Associate Professor of Contemporary History at Department of Literature, Arts and Social Sciences at the University "Gabriele d'Annunzio" of Chieti-Pescara, Italy

Reviews
"This is the first major English-language study of the fate of the roughly twenty thousand Italian soldiers held by Soviet forces during and after the Second World War. It fills an important gap in the English-language literature on Axis prisoners in Soviet captivity, and deserves praise for painting a full picture of Italian prisoners of war (POWs) in the Soviet Union from capture to repatriation. It is a valuable resource for anyone interested in Soviet forced labor and incarceration, prisoners of war, Italians on the Eastern Front, or Italian-Soviet relations." -- Susan Grunewald * The Russian Review *
"Stalin's Italian Prisoners of War has finally been made available through the fine English translation by Riccardo James Vargiu. This translation offers to a wider international audience with little Italian or Russian language knowledge an unprecedented corpus of historical materials, data, photographs, archival records, and veterans' life-writings that allows for a better understanding and positioning of the Italian military captivity experience in the USSR, within the larger existing comparative historiography on WWII military captivity in Soviet hands." https://www.proquest.com/openview/378a4ec4a55cadcfe3238e0c936d6a01/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=6698596 -- Elena Bellina * Annali d'Italianistica *



Book Information
ISBN 9789633863558
Author Maria Teresa Giusti
Format Hardback
Page Count 510
Imprint Central European University Press
Publisher Central European University Press