The ‘Other’ Axis Concentration Camps

Even if you didn’t know anything about the worst regimes of the XX century, it would take you a couple of minutes online to find out that certain countries, at certain points in their past, had a certain knack for amassing large numbers of people in the same spot. These people would then be beaten, starved and/or worked to death, if disease did not get them first. Alternatively, they would be straight out mass murdered on arrival.

The second half of the XX Century was mostly characterised by the Soviet GuLag, the Chinese Laogai, and other systems of labour and concentration camps set up by communist regimes. But before them, the Axis powers took centre stage when it came to perfecting the art of industrialised murdered.

Basically everybody has heard about the Nazi concentration camps and their criminal SS administrators. And history buffs, movie lovers and fans of this channel are surely familiar with Imperial Japan’s internment camps, as well as the infamous Unit 731.

But how about the other European Axis power?

‘Decent People’?

Post-WWII narratives popularised the idea of the Italian Armed Forces as more humane than their German and Japanese allies, a concept expressed with the often quoted phrase ‘Italiani brava gente’—or ‘Italians, decent people’.

Sure, Fascism never fully espoused a policy of radical elimination of entire populations considered ‘undesirable’. And the number and severity of documented war crimes attributed to Italian forces is limited in comparison to other Axis powers.

Nonetheless, Benito Mussolini’s regime was an aggressively nationalist and expansionist one, which conquered, occupied or ‘pacified’ vast territories in Libya, Ethiopia, Somalia, Eritrea and Albania from 1923 to 1939. Following the declaration of war on the Allies, on June 10, 1940, Italy expanded its reach also over parts of Greece and former Yugoslavia. After 1941, the Italian Army contributed to the initial success of Operation Barbarossa, successfully advancing over the front of the river Don, in the Soviet Union.

Across all these territories, Fascist forces did perpetrate several war crimes and crimes against humanity, targeting enemy combatants, partisan forces and civilian populations. And, as was the practice of the time, they did set up some pretty nasty concentration and PoW camps—to say nothing of similar facilities established within Italian borders.

To give you an idea of the misery doled out by the Fascist militia—the ‘Blackshirts’—as well as the regular armed forces, let’s talk numbers first. During its 21 years of Fascist rule, from 1922 to 1943, the Kingdom of Italy administered a total of 135 concentration camps, 85 labour camps, 651 prisons for common criminals and political prisoners alike, and 42 locations destined for the ‘internal exile’ and isolation of enemies of the regime.

Between 1940 and 1943, Italian armed forces set up further 107 camps exclusively for prisoners of war, of which 85 were located on Italian soil and 22 in occupied areas.

Following the ousting of Mussolini by King Victor Emmanuel III in July 1943, Germany reinstalled the Duce as the ruler of the Italian Social Republic, in the northern sector of the ‘boot’. Over the following two years, Nazi and Fascist authorities set up further 15 camps to sort and process resistance fighters, members of the opposition, and most of all Italian Jews, before deporting them to extermination camps in Germany and Poland.

The conditions of life, and especially, death, in most of these camps is poorly documented. But thanks to researchers such as Andrea Giuseppini and Roman Herzog, working for associations Audiodoc and ‘Topography for History’, we are able to report on some well-documented examples. We shall cover them by geographic location, starting with the earliest instance of Italian internment: the island of Nocra, Eritrea.

‘Perfect Diet’, Perfect Lies

This island holds the dubious honour of being the very first concentration camp established by the Kingdom of Italy. This happened in 1895, long before Mussolini’s rise to power, and after a recently unified Italy had initiated its colonisation of the Horn of Africa. Nocra was used as a detention centre for ordinary criminals as well as people considered to be politically dangerous—i.e. Eritreans and Somalians with a desire for independence.

The camp of Nocra became very handy following Italy’s invasion and occupation of the Ethiopian Empire in 1936. The Viceroy in charge of the newly conquered territory, Marshal Rodolfo Graziani, had led a violent pacification campaign in Libya some years earlier and was adept at using draconian methods to suppress resistance movements.

He put Nocra to good use, confining Ethiopian political prisoners, Eritrean rebels and ordinary criminals, for a total of 1,800 prisoners. They were exploited by occupation authorities, used as forced labour in a concrete factory and an oil drilling facility, suffering frequent floggings and beatings if they refused to cooperate.

As harsh as the guards were, the island itself did a perfect job of keeping the prisoners in check. The average temperature, throughout most of the year, was—and is—50 degrees Celsius, that’s 122 Fahrenheit! The heat and the extreme levels of humidity contributed to frequent deaths by sunstroke and exhaustion amongst the prisoners—especially the Ethiopian ones, who hailed from the Abyssinian plateaus, and were used to a cooler, drier climate.

To make matters worse, Nocra completely lacked a natural source of drinking water. The Italians imported bottled water from the mainland, but this was available for sale only—and at extortionate prices! Many prisoners resorted to drinking brackish or sea water, thus falling sick and dying from dysentery or kidney failure.

Nocra alone would not be enough to intern all deportees, and other facilities mushroomed throughout Italian colonies in East Africa.

The camp of Dhanaane, Somalia, was built at the end of 1935 to house Ethiopian PoWs and dissident élites. On February 19, 1937, Marshal Graziani narrowly survived an assassination attempt, an act which unleashed a brutal reprisal against Ethiopian civilians. Known as ‘Yekatit 12’ in the Amharic language, the massacre perpetrated by Italian soldiers may have caused as many as 30,000 deaths. Most of the civilians arrested during and after Yekatit 12 were interned at Dhanaane.

Then, on May 20, 1937, Italian troops massacred up to 1,000 monks at the Debre Libanos monastery. Some 360 young men, who had witnessed the atrocity, were also transferred to Dhanaane, as a means to erase the massacre from memory.

More and more prisoners were crammed into the camp in the following years, including women and children. All of them were used as slave labour, building roads or collecting lumber. Those who disobeyed were transferred to a special area dedicated to physical punishment, torture and interrogation. According to survivors’ testimonies, sometimes punishment was administered on a whim, depending on the bad mood of the guards.

Much like Nocra, also Dhanaane was plagued by hellish heat and unbearable humidity, which made sanitary conditions ‘disastrous’—as noted by Italian medical authorities themselves. Prisoners felled by recurring outbreaks of malaria and pneumonia were transferred to an isolated tent just outside the camp. According to survivor Imru Zelleke:

‘[The tent] was used as a place for the dying who could not look after themselves. They were simply left there to die. A young nurse and I were the only ones who would bring them food and water. Very few of them resisted more that two or three days before dying.’

Another survivor, civil servant Michel Tessema, reported how Dhanaane had its own ‘Italian Mengele’: the medical director Captain Antonino Niosi.

‘If the prisoners fell ill, the captain said it would have been better for them to die. And he killed them with an injection of strychnine and arsenic. Others, who came to him to be treated, were restrained and subjected to surgery against their will.’

As per Captain Niosi himself, he was rather optimistic in his official reports: ‘The prisoners’ health is optimal, their diet is perfect, the healthcare provided is dutiful, and the morale of the medical personnel is excellent.’ You go doctor!

The ‘perfect diet’ mentioned by Niosi actually consisted almost exclusively of hardtack and rice, sometimes enriched with maggots. Because you need some protein, come on. Prisoners could wash it all down with a gulp of polluted water from Dhanaane’s well, by itself the cause of hundreds of deaths. Mortality was estimated at up to 30 deaths per day, totalling at 3,175. During its years in activity, Dhanaane housed some 6,500 prisoners, making its death rate a staggering 49%!

Graziani’s Killing Fields

Despite this mortality rate, Dhanaane was never officially designated as an extermination camp. Graziani’s stated purpose was to use the camp to keep dissidents ‘out of sight’. Other facilities in Ethiopia, however, were conceived exactly for that purpose: assembling enemies of Fascist occupation, before killing them in large numbers.

This was the case for the camps of Shano, Ambo, Mojo and Akaki, four hubs of mass murder in the context of ongoing colonial repression from 1936 to 1941.

Michel Tessema, before being locked at Dhanaane, had briefly experienced life and death at Ambo:

‘Every afternoon at about two o’clock the Italians handcuffed some prisoners and took them away by truck. When the Italians returned, we asked them where the prisoners were taken to, and they used to say boastfully: “We have killed them, and it will be your turn next.” During my stay of five days there, I saw 27 people taken like this.’

Judge Kidan Blatta Haile Wolde was interned at the Mojo camp, later reporting how diseases competed with Italian bullets when claiming new victims:

‘I was put in a little hut among 80 prisoners in a room which measured three by five metres. The conditions were horrible and stifling. Afterwards they brought other prisoners and put them among us, and for this reason we used to stand on one another. When a prisoner died, his body was kept for three or four days in the prison.

Because of the noxious insects which prevailed in the prison the conditions were terrible. The number of deaths in this prison daily was higher than those who were murdered by the Italians.’

Shortly after Wolde’s internment, the judge noted the arrival of a new batch of prisoners, mostly monks and nuns, but also elderly and ill people. They were corralled into a roof-less enclosure on marshy ground, where most of them were left to die from sickness. Those who survived were shot.

Judge Wolde was later transferred to the camp of Akaki, housed within the facilities of the Radio Station of Ethiopia. Besides the frequent beatings, Wolde witnessed a grotesque torture enacted by military police personnel, who squeezed the heads of Ethiopian officers by using a sort of vice made of stone. Italian authorities also made good use of the swampy terrain to inflict misery, by forcing prisoners to sleep directly on the marshy ground. During his four-month stay at Akaki, judge Wolde counted some 300 prisoners dying as a consequence of this treatment.

However terrible, the camps covered so far were relatively small. The largest internment facilities built by the Italians were located in Libya, and the largest by number of prisoners was Al-Aqaylah, which housed more than 20,000 internees.

It was inaugurated in January 1930 to hold prisoner the leaders of the rebellion against Italian colonisation, mainly those belonging to the Senussi religious order and the nomadic tribes of Marmarica. The latter group of prisoners had to endure a death march, 1,100 km long, to reach Al-Aqaylah: a death march during which 3,000 out of 5,000 people lost their lives.

The camp consisted of a large courtyard, surrounded by eight tents, enclosed within four stone walls. At the centre of the courtyard stood a raised platform, used for public executions. The eight tents were used to interrogate and torture prisoners, while one of the stone walls on the long side was used for executions by firing squad. Right next to this wall, the guards had set up their equivalent of a Nazi ‘Joy Division’: a ‘tukul’ or round hut, to sexually assault female prisoners.

The guards had also designated four special areas, at the corners of the camp, for non-lethal punishment of transgressing prisoners. These ranged from beatings and floggings, to the mutilation of hands, feets and tongue, or even the insertion of insects in body cavities. Prisoners risked also being buried alive in sand pits, with only their heads sticking out under the ruthless Libyan sun.

Besides gruesome torture, prisoners had to endure 12-hour shifts of forced labour, digging in mines, building roads or laying down railway lines—all fuelled by a meagre daily diet of 650 grams of bread, 28 grams of meat, one plate of rice or pasta, two cups of tea, one lemon and one onion.

Al-Aqaylah was shut down after only two years in operation, and its facilities converted into a military depot. After 1932, the mantle of largest and probably, worst, camp in Libya was picked up by Soluch, whose population also hovered around the 20,000 mark. Conditions were not dissimilar, even though records show that here prisoners were paid for their labour: a wage of 7 to 10 liras per day, less than one third of the average wages of an Italian citizen and the time.

Soluch was also the backdrop of frequent torture and executions. It was here, in fact, that Marshal Graziani organised the hanging of Omar al-Mukhtar, leader of the Libyan resistance, on September 16, 1931. When the camp was closed, in May 1933, it had reached a mortality rate of 27.5%, mostly due to disease and poor medical treatment.

Reign of the Black Beast

Most of the camps described thus far saw their peak of activity before the start of WWII. For a camp actively used after Italy’s entry into the war, we have to travel to Croatia, and more precisely to the island of Rab. It was here, that in May 1942, Italian occupation forces in former Yugoslavia laid out an infamous facility, under the orders of General Mario Roatta, nicknamed ‘the Black Beast’.

The first prisoners arrived in late July: 4,747 internees were rushed into Rab within the span of one week, long before construction was complete. Prisoners had to be housed within small tents, each holding six people. A further 3,000 prisoners arrived in September. By then, camp administration had built some wooden barracks, only marginally better than the pre-existing tents. By October 1942, the camp reached its maximum capacity, at 8,260.

The population of Rab consisted mainly of Slovenian partisans and dissidents, but it also included about 1,000 Jewish prisoners, who were granted a relatively humane treatment thanks to the direct intervention of General Roatta. Similar to many Fascist hardliners, Roatta never bought into the anti-Semitic hogwash espoused by his Nazi allies. Before Mussolini issued the infamous Racial Laws, in November 1938, Italian Jews actually supported Fascism. Just to quote a figure, the Racial Laws triggered the dismissal of almost 450 officers in the Italian armed forces.

Of these, 279 were serving with the Blackshirt militia!

Thus, Roatta ensured that a section of the Rab camp was dedicated to housing and protecting Jews from the German occupation forces and the Ustasha militias. Nonetheless, there was a reason why the General was known as ‘Black Beast’. His reign of terror in Slovenia is responsible for the death of more than 13,000 individuals, of which 4,500 were executed by firing squad, 187 died to torture, beatings and arson, and some 7,000 perished in concentration camps.

About one fifth of these 7,000 died in Rab alone. We are sorry for banging on about numbers, but we feel they are helpful to make an important point. The estimated death toll at Rab places its mortality rate around the 18% mortality rate—a higher rate than the infamous Nazi camp at Buchenwald! Italian guards enacted frequent acts of violence against prisoners, but the main causes of death were exposure and malnutrition.

Internees received a daily ration of 80 grams of bread, served with a slop cooked inside emptied fuel drums. Starvation was so severe that even the High Commissioner for the Province of Ljubljana, Fascist Party official Emilio Grazioli, sent a complaint to the army on December 15, 1942. One General Gambara replied: ‘It is understandable and right for a concentration camp not to become a ‘fattening camp’. Sick individual = subdued individual.‘

The Contradictions of a Regime

We continue our grim tour of Fascist-controlled territories by looking at internment camps on Italian soil. Early in his regime, Mussolini delegated the repression of Italian dissidents to regular police forces, the Blackshirts and the secret police, known as OVRA. Their most frequent modus operandi was the ‘confino’, which may be translated as a sort of internal exile. Those deemed dangerous for the fascist government were forced to live in remote areas, such as small islands or villages on the mountains, under constant police surveillance.

Up until the declaration of war, the use of camps was limited to the colonial holdings. But after June 1940, the Fascist government realised the importance of using these facilities as a preventative measure against Italian and foreign civilians deemed ‘dangerous to the war-time contingencies’.

The largest camp on Italian soil was the one at Ferramonti, in the southern region of Calabria. Inaugurated in the very June of 1940, it consisted of 92 shacks, spread over a 16-hectare surface, which housed a maximum of 2,700 prisoners at one time. Categories of internees included stateless individuals, dissidents, Romani people, as well as several hundreds of Yugoslavian, Slovakian, and German Jews. Some 495 of them had attempted to reach Palestine from Bratislava with an old paddle steamer, the ‘Pentcho’, which had almost sunk in Italian-controlled waters.

It appears that Ferramonti’s conditions were altogether bearable: despite the scarcity of food and endemic malaria, the camp was administered by ‘regular’ police forces, who allowed the prisoners to conduct cultural, physical and religious activities rather freely. More importantly, the police had relegated the more hard-line Blackshirts to securing the outer perimeter.

Following the ousting of Mussolini in July 1943, King Victor Emmanuel III signed an armistice with the Allies in September. This prompted the German to launch Operation Achse: the occupation of Italy and restoration of a Fascist regime in the central and northern regions of the country, yet to be reached by the Allies.

As early as September 14th, 1943, the British Army had liberated Ferramonti. But for a short time window, the camp risked being taken over by German forces. On that occasion, the Italian police units in charge acted decisively, ensuring all interned Jews were hidden in the surrounding farms. Some of them were too sick or elderly to escape, but the camp administrators simply raised a yellow flag at the entrance, signifying a typhus outbreak. The ruse worked and at least 500 Jews were saved at Ferramonti.

The same unfortunately cannot be said for thousands more that were interned in the camps erected by German occupation forces in Northern Italy after September 1943. As a reminder, Mussolini had been reinstated as head of a new Fascist State, the Italian Social Republic. Nazis and Fascist hardliners now cooperated in the rounding up of Italian Jews, who were assembled and processed in Bozen, Fossoli, San Sabba and other infamous camps, before being loaded on trains and sent to labour or extermination camps in Germany and Poland.

These camps however were administered in part or entirely by German forces, and could be considered as being part of the network of Nazi camps in occupied Europe. Therefore we will exclude them from this overview.

And we will only briefly mention the PoW camps, which at their peak held 70,000 Allied personnel in Italy and almost 38,000 in Libya. The figures for camps in Eastern Africa and former Yugoslavia are not known, but likely to be in the low hundreds.

Now, from our overview of camps for civilians you should have already picked up a recurring trend: Fascist authorities were willing to challenge their Nazi allies to protect certain categories of prisoners, especially Jewish citizens, but had little qualms in making life hell for Libyans, Ethiopians, Croatians and Slovenes.

A similar, contradictory approach applied to their conduct in PoW camps. According to regular Red Cross war time inspections, prisoners of British, American, French and even Soviet nationality were generally treated with respect, according to the Geneva convention. If PoWs experienced hardship, it was due to extreme heat in Libya and Southern Italy and lack of supplies.

Jugoslavian and Greek prisoners, instead, suffered significantly harsher treatment and were housed in dilapidated facilities. PoWs from these countries frequently reported to the Red Cross a violation of Section IV of the 1929 Geneva Convention, which sanctions the internees’ right to communicate with their families and the exterior.

No ‘Italian Nuremberg’?

The camps we described so far are just a fraction, a sample, of the concentration and forced labour camps managed by fascist authorities during their stay in power. And the camp system itself is just one facet of the numerous war crimes and crimes against humanity which Italian armed forces and the fascist militia perpetrated either alone or in conjunction with other Axis allies—a broader topic which would require a separate episode of its own.

A particularly dark chapter is the Civil War, which ravaged northern Italy from 1943 and 1945, pitting resistance forces against the Nazis and Fascists. As it was the case in other parts of Europe, attacks launched by the partisans against their enemy were followed by reprisals which did not spare the civilian population.

On April 25, 1945, hostilities ceased in Italy. On the 28th, Benito Mussolini was executed. Several other high-ranking fascist officials were swiftly tried and executed—or simply executed—by the resistance. And yet, the vast majority of those responsible for the camps we described, as well as other crimes, got away scot free.

Nazi Germany had the Nuremberg Trials. Imperial Japan had the Tokyo Trials. But Fascist Italy had nothing of the sort. Instead, reprisal, retribution and revenge took precedence.

On the border regions between Italy and Yugoslavia, for example, the partisan forces under Marshal Tito enacted killings and forced relocations of Italians and local opposers to the new communist authorities. These are remembered as the ‘foibe massacres’, after the name of the natural sinkholes in which many victims were thrown alive. The death toll of these massacres ranges from 3,000 to 20,000.

As per northern Italy itself, the second half of 1945 was marked by an onslaught of revenge killings perpetrated mainly by communist resistance fighters, as if the Civil War had never really ended: more than 8,000 former Fascist officials, soldiers, militiamen, or simple supporters were reported dead or missing.

Allied occupation authorities and the new, democratic and republican Italian government, however, failed to bring fascist criminals to trial. Most of them were formally exonerated by a general amnesty issued on June 22, 1946, ironically issued by the communist Minister of Justice.

There are several reasons for this swift break with the past. But to oversimplify, the Allied occupation forces needed Italian society to quickly move past its internecine rift. Civil service and the military could not be depleted from former fascists, lest they be taken over by an increasingly strong Communist Party, as tensions with the Soviet Bloc were mounting and Tito’s Yugoslavia was yet to break from Moscow’s sphere of influence.

The consequence of the lack of war crimes and crimes against humanity trials was threefold. First, it allowed the most high ranking culprits to evade justice. Second, it encouraged the extra-judiciary reprisals and mass killings. And finally, it allowed for the memory of Italian atrocities to fade from memory.

Key Takeaways

• Italian Fascist regime operated numerous concentration and labor camps across colonies and Italy.,The regime targeted various groups, including political dissidents, ethnic minorities, and civilians.,Conditions in these camps were often brutal, with high mortality rates due to disease, malnutrition, and violence.,Italian authorities sometimes protected Jewish prisoners from Nazi allies but were harsh towards others.,Post-war Italy lacked comprehensive trials for fascist war crimes, leading to impunity for many perpetrators.

Frequently Asked Questions

What was the phrase used to describe the Italian Armed Forces post-WWII?

The phrase used was ‘Italiani brava gente’ or ‘Italians, decent people’.

How many concentration camps did the Kingdom of Italy administer during its 21 years of Fascist rule?

The Kingdom of Italy administered a total of 135 concentration camps during its 21 years of Fascist rule.

What was the first concentration camp established by the Kingdom of Italy?

The first concentration camp established by the Kingdom of Italy was on the island of Nocra, Eritrea, in 1895.

What was the purpose of the camp at Dhanaane, Somalia?

The camp at Dhanaane, Somalia, was built to house Ethiopian PoWs and dissident élites, and later became a site for the internment of civilians arrested during and after the Yekatit 12 massacre.

What was the mortality rate at the Dhanaane camp?

The mortality rate at the Dhanaane camp was estimated at up to 30 deaths per day, totaling 3,175 deaths, with a death rate of 49%.

What was the largest internment facility built by the Italians in Libya?

The largest internment facility built by the Italians in Libya was Al-Aqaylah, which housed more than 20,000 internees.

What was the mortality rate at the Rab camp in Croatia?

The estimated death toll at Rab places its mortality rate around 18%, higher than the infamous Nazi camp at Buchenwald.

What was the largest camp on Italian soil during WWII?

The largest camp on Italian soil was Ferramonti, in the southern region of Calabria, which housed a maximum of 2,700 prisoners at one time.

Why were there no war crimes trials for Italian fascists similar to the Nuremberg Trials?

There were no war crimes trials for Italian fascists because Allied occupation authorities and the new Italian government needed to quickly move past the internecine rift and prevent the Communist Party from gaining too much influence.

What was the impact of the lack of war crimes trials on Italian society?

The lack of war crimes trials allowed high-ranking culprits to evade justice, encouraged extra-judiciary reprisals and mass killings, and allowed the memory of Italian atrocities to fade from memory.

Sources

• Original Into the Shadows video: The ‘Other’ Axis Concentration Camps
• https://campifascisti.it/https://www.englesprofili.it/engles3/engles3.fabersoft.net/index8e6b.html?option=com_content&view=article&id=81&Itemid=119
• https://www.anpi.it/libri/prigionia-internamento-concentramento-e-sterminio-i-campi-italia#:~:text=I%20cosiddetti%20campi%20di%20smistamento,%2C%20Grosseto%20e%20Bolzano%2DGries
• https://www.museodiffusotorino.it/files/immagini_pagine/435_CAMPI%20ITALIANI.pdf
• https://journals.openedition.org/diacronie/9463#bodyftn5
• Hero image source by Wolfmann / openverse, by-sa.

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