After September 8th 1943

• … and they used to rinse clothes in the Ombrone
• After September 8th 1943
• Between the twenties and thirties
• Corrado Capecchi, military internee
  • A medal (at last) for Corrado
  • The joke of the military internees
• Five places of Romanesque Carmignano
• Friar Bocci, at the beginning of the twentieth century
• From archaeologists to farmers
• Gino Balena
• Gino di Fico
• Historical shops in Carmignano
• In the name of Jesus and Saint Peter, may the sty go away
• Liberation day
• Matteucci, the ‘forgotten’ bishop
• Soldier in Greece
• Stories from a school notebook
• Stories of donkeys and jockeys
• Stories of mayors and town councils in Carmignano
• Stories of our home
• Stories of war and displaced persons
• The Battistina and other scary stories
• The colours of the rioni
• The Golden Roster
• The last sharecropper in Carmignano
• The siege in memory of the Princess
• The tree of liberty in Carmignano
• Ugo Contini Bonacossi
• Vittorio’s bicycles
• When the river Arno was fordable ..
• When they were digging pietra serena between Arno and Ombrone
• The colours of Carmignano, a small guide for tourists
  • Ancient churches and abbeys. Montalbano, a crossroads for pilgrims.
    • San Giusto al Pinone
    • San Jacopo in Capezzana
    • San Leonardo in Artimino
    • San Lorenzo in Montalbiolo
    • San Martino in Campo
    • San Michele amarcord
      • San Michele, the theater takes to the streets
• Itineraries for just a few days or more
  • Walking through history and nature
  • A Sunday devoted to the discovery of Artimino
  • A few words about the hamlets of Carmignano
  • The Fontina and Castagnati Lake
• Guides to download

On September 8th 1943 the announcement of the armistice of Italy by Marshal Badoglio came as a shock to many. Uselessly in fact, due mainly to the opposition of the British and Americans, the Italian General Staff had tried to postpone the proclamation for four-days, so as to have more time to organise and to have their forces withdraw. There was a sort of “psychological” uncertainty on how to behave towards those who, until the day before, were allies. This would be enough to generate crises and confusion, but there was also a lack of precise operational orders, which came only three days later. So the first move came from the Nazis and more than 600,000 soldiers, who were not veterans of small and selected elite units but people who had suffered, fought and almost always had been defeated, became prisoners of the Germans.
More than 40,000 would no longer return home, killed by the guards with weapons, diseases, malnutrition and abuse. Those 600,000 soldiers however were also a seriously courted people and army. There were continuous calls from the Germans and the Fascists from Salò to fight alongside the Wehrmacht and join the new army of the Social Republic of Graziani, or to contribute in the war effort in German factories and take the oath as “free workers” (but only towards the end of “44).

The refusal  entailed imprisonment, hunger, filth, cold, and a multitude of humiliations. Yet, despite the unspeakable deprivations, the risk of suffering and oppression and of fatigue and injuries, only 2 percent of those who were captured said “yes” to the seductive proposals of the Nazi-Fascists. It was a real “Resistenza senz’armi” (Unarmed Resistance), along with the partisan war in Northern Italy and the liberation corps in the South, which is also the title of a book published in 1984 with a preface by Leonetto Amedei (in the Quaderni of Spadolini) dedicated to those men to whom the Germans did not want to recognise, most of the time, even the legal status of “prisoners of war”.

Here lie the paradox and injustice (but also the only open glimmer) regarding the compensation for the apparently denied “slaves of Hitler”. The Italian soldiers were in fact deprived of the checks and assistance of international bodies provided for by the Geneva Convention of 1929, nor did they receive the Red Cross parcels. Hypocritically they were called “military internees”, but in the camps were most commonly labeled as “stik”: or human “pieces”, now reduced to only a serial number, and predestined victims of that exemplary punishment that Hitler had promised Italians, guilty of having broken the covenant. Even if theirs was a resistance, the tones were much less epic than partisans’. In the conscience and memory of the nation, the military internees were almost obliterated. Only in December 1977, as a title of honour, some Members of Parliament introduced a draft law to grant those soldiers, or rather ex-soldiers, the qualification of “volunteers of liberty.” (Wf)