Italian Militaries in the USSR during the Second World War. Objectives of the Campaign and Negotiations in the Post-War Period

Abstract

Italy’s participation in the war against the USSR was dictated by at least three reasons: the common ideology which Mussolini and Hitler shared; Mussolini’s aspiration to revise the European order in the Mediterranean area, to the detriment of France and Great Britain; the goal of supplying Italy with the Russian raw material. The article examines the behavior of the Italian troops towards the Soviet war prisoners and the local population during the occupation from July 1941 to winter 1942–1943, which also depended on these reasons. Since 1944 some countries occupied by Italian forces, such as the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, had started asking the Italian government for the extradition of Italian alleged war criminals to be judged by local courts. In 1944, on the grounds of the reports produced by state and local commissions, the list of alleged war criminals in response to the USSR’s requests was limited to ten militaries who had been repatriated after the defeat. Initially the USSR was intransigent, but afterwards began changing its tune, and finally Moscow proved less adamant in its accusations. This new attitude was connected to negotiations on handing over of Soviet citizens who stayed in Italy after the end of the war. This was most likely a contributing factor in persuading the Soviets to relax their demands on the matter of alleged Italian war criminals. The strategy was successful and, according to the Yalta conference, many Russian and Soviet citizens, who had left the Soviet Union, against their own will were handed over to the Soviet authorities facing a very uncertain fate.