By 1943 many, if not all, Italians knew that Hitler’s Germany was fighting the war by the most unorthodox means. The magazine Signal, with the entire Fascist press in tow, depicted the National Socialist fighter in an idealized and heroic manner: handsome, athletic, splendidly armed, proud, noble, gallant. But those who had seen the Germans in action (first and foremost, the Italian soldiers returning from the Russian and Baltic fronts) knew how harsh they could be. Still, the way the German military in Italy reacted to Badoglio’s September 8 armistice was astonishing, and caught everyone unprepared.1
People had expected bloody acts of reprisal in response to the Italian “betrayal,” and, as we know, reprisals did indeed take place. But they had not expected the swift determination with which the Nazis resorted to the mass deportation of all those who were considered hostile or potentially dangerous. Within days, or even hours, the Italian armed forces, whether within the country or in the occupied territories, were disarmed and loaded on trains heading north. It was immediately evident—and the long months of German occupation of northern Italy confirmed this—that the train, this nineteenth-century symbol of progress and civilization, in Nazi hands had become a sophisticated instrument of persecution, humiliation, and death.
Partisans, real or suspected political opponents, Jews, striking workers, men and women, ordinary people surprised in their homes or in the street by a roundup: for all of them, the sinister trains of boxcars sealed from the outside, the windows (when there were windows) screened by barbed wire, were the first chapter of a new ordeal—deportation. It is no accident that for the deportees the journey toward an unknown destination, during which they were packed like cheap merchandise into a few square meters of wooden floor, without air, often without food or water, is engraved in indelible characters in their memory.
For all of them, the journey was a tragic revelation: a passage from home and country toward nothingness; from civilization toward barbarism. The very way in which the journey was organized and carried out demonstrated openly, even to the most optimistic, that in the Nazi universe there was no place for humanity.
In Notizie della Regione Piemonte, April 1983 (special issue on the resistance and deportation)
1. On September 8, 1943, an armistice was announced between the government led by Marshal Pietro Badoglio and Allied forces in Italy.