Although roughly 700,000 captured Italian soldiers were originally classified as war prisoners, hence protected by the Geneva Convention, the German government declared them “military internees,” meaning that in the Wehrmacht’s POW camps and during forced labor they lost all legal protection and support by the International Red Cross. They were deliberately subjected to poor nutrition by the Germans; food was measured in proportion to work output. Inadequate working strength caused by illness, injury, or any other circumstances was mercilessly punished by food withdrawal. Against international law, the Italian soldiers were often deployed for slave labor in sectors important for Germany’s war effort such as the armaments industry and coal mines. Creation of this special status amounted to a form of intensified imprisonment violating international law, meant as a punishment for purported Italian treachery, a process carried out at Hitler’s direct orders.

Directly after their capture but in the following months as well, the Italian prisoners repeatedly had the possibility to be dismissed from the POW camps and slave labor – as long as they were willing to fight on the German side. They could either directly report to the Wehrmacht or else to the newly formed troops of the Italian Social Republic (the Repubblica Sociale Italiana; RSI), the satellite state led by Mussolini in Northern Italy. The RSI saw organization of its own army as a possibility for more independence from more powerful Germany; in this context the use of Italian soldiers for forced labor led to conflicts in an unequal alliance. In hours-long roll calls, RSI recruiters tried to persuade the prisoners to join the new army’s ranks.

Most of the men turned down this option, remaining in German imprisonment until the end of the war. For this so-called resistenza senza armi,  “resistance without arms,” a term alluding to the partisan movement and post war political standing, there were various, often intertwining reasons: a basic mistrust of the Germans and their promises; the oath taken to the Italian king, who had fled to the Allies; fear of being wounded or killed after being deployed on the Eastern Front; and also disappointment with fascism and Benito Mussolini.

The Italian soldiers deported to the German Reich in autumn 1943 were urgently needed for Germany’s war economy. Increasing numbers of young German men were missing from all economic sectors due to their entry into the Wehrmacht; the arrival of hundreds of thousands of Italian men capable of work was thus greeted by the German government and industries.  

Despite their new designation by the Wehrmacht, distribution of the “military internees” was according to military status. While commissioned officers usually remained in their own camps, the so-called Oflags, and did not have to work, non-com officers and regular soldiers were initially registered in the so-called Stalags, then assigned a workplace. 

Daily life of the Italian soldiers during their slave labor consisted of a vicious circle of hard work, hunger, and illness. Prisoners who could only work less because of illness received less food and became weaker, leading to disease outbreaks that themselves easily led to death because of a lack of medical care. Thousands of these men died from the complex of hunger, work, and disease, often from feared  tuberculosis. But they were in mortal danger for another reason as well: since they often had to work in the armaments industry or in infrastructure-locations like railway stations, they were usually also quartered nearby. In this way, they worked and lived in precisely the places bombed by the Allies with special frequency, while at the same  time being forbidden access to air raid shelters. In addition, there was also the risk of being forced to clean up after attacks and dying in the explosion of dud bombs.

In the summer of 1944, many “military internees” were “released” into the status of civilian forced laborers; food was no longer furnished in proportion to degree of work, and the prisoners were no longer under the Wehrmacht’s control. The Nazi leadership hoped that this step would increase labor-expenditure. Many prisoners protested against the change: on the one hand they now feared the Gestapo, from which they had been protected as “military internees”; on the other hand they were concerned at the possibility of being suspected of voluntary collaboration with the Germans after return to Italy.

In both West and East Germany, the internment of the Italian POWs and imposition on them of slave labor was only prosecuted in connection with other acts such as shooting to death and maltreatment; the sentences passed were usually mild. Hence on 5 Feb. 1952, Franz Marmon, commander of the Security Police and SD in Kassel, was sentenced to prison for two years by a Kassel district court jury. On 31 March 1945, shortly before the arrival of the American army, Marmon had ordered the shooting to death of 78 “military internees” at the Kassel-Wilhelmshöhe train station.

Beyond this, in relevant postwar trials only those chiefly responsible for transport of the Italian prisoners to the German Reich for the sake of forced labor and what was referred to as “enslavement” were punished. Nobody was even charged in respect to the collective injustice of denying the Italian soldiers their POW status and sending them into slave labor by the hundreds of thousands.

In the postwar period, reparations for Italian “military internees,” men who had suffered deportation and forced labor, was anticipated neither by the new Italian republic nor by either West or East Germany. The London Agreement on German External Debts of 1953 deferred claims by foreign persons who had suffered forced labor to a peace treaty to be formulated later on; this served as a means to block any Italian claims. Treaties between the two countries such as the agreement of 2 June 1961 to compensate victims of Nazi persecution deliberately excluded the Italian POWs. Germany argued that despite the deliberate terminological change in Sept. 1943 and change of status in the summer of 1944, the “military internees” had been exclusively and consistently POWs.

Despite the discussions about the “military internees” that emerged in the 1980s and 1990s, in 2001 the German “Remembrance, Responsibility, and Future” foundation, together with the German administrative courts, did not assess the injustice suffered as a “crime against humanity.” In taking that stance, they implicitly adopted the defense strategy of the accused organizers of Nazi slave labor. In the Nuremberg Military Tribunals that tried important figures in Nazi German industry and the SS Main Economic and Administrative Office, for example, these persons had referred to the massive deployment of slave labor as an “unavoidable accompaniment of war.”

Outside of Italy, all efforts by the former prisoners to individually obtain justice have failed before the German Federal Constitutional Court, the Berlin Administrative Court, and the European Court of Human Rights. In this manner, still living former “military internees” have been denied compensation by both German state offices and the firms that participated in what had occurred. In addition, the pay due them but not transferred to them during the period of slave labor has continued to be withheld. 

In Italy, by contrast, courts have recently recognized claims to compensation by the former prisoners. Since 2022, as a result of such judgments they and their relatives can apply for money from a state fund. In 2025 there were first decisions of courts in favour of relatives claiming the withheld money.