“The more than 600,000 Italian Military internees are children of a lesser god. Their fate [...] was one of neglect and forgetfulness, as they were inconvenient for anyone.” This is how Mimmo Franzinelli recently expressed himself regarding the many young Italian soldiers who were imprisoned in Nazi concentration camps at the time of the last World War. Forgotten, even though they died by the tens of thousands.

Undoubtedly our children know nothing or very little about them, and school history textbooks are largely silent.

“Forgotten,” then. But why?

And also “inconvenient.” But for whom? And, again, why?

Who are these grandfathers and great-grandfathers and distant relatives of ours?

What were they doing up there, eighty years ago, in the lands of the Third Reich? Had they perhaps gone “on vacation,” as even some dared to say?

The present small volume, bereft of any particular claim to originality, attempts to divulge some of the answers that more recent historiography has offered to the above questions, and it does so also with the valuable assistance of direct and indirect testimonies granted by relatives of those “children of a lesser god” mentioned above. And it undoubtedly does so with the intention of sewing some tears, if not actually “plugging a hole,” in the public knowledge of our history.