After Italy annexed the Province of Ljubljana and parts of the Croatian coast in 1941, the Italian Second Army responded to partisan activity with reprisals, house burnings and the mass internment of civilians. Camps were opened at Gonars and Monigo in Italy in early 1942 and on the island of Rab in July 1942, the latter holding whole families, including women, infants and the elderly, in tents behind wire; conditions there were severe enough that the historians Carlo Spartaco Capogreco and James Walston calculated an annual mortality rate of about 18 per cent, which they compared with 15 per cent at Buchenwald. Circulars issued by General Mario Roatta directed commanders to act without 'false compassion' and envisaged clearing and replacing populations, and are the principal documentary basis for characterising the policy as more than security internment. The camps were closed after Italy's armistice in September 1943; Yugoslav partisans evacuated some 2,500 Jewish internees from Rab, while some who remained were deported by German forces to Auschwitz. Yugoslavia, Greece and Ethiopia sought the extradition of about 1,200 Italians accused of war crimes, but no Italian was tried, and the episode was largely absent from Italian public memory for decades.
The Italian army interned civilians from the annexed Province of Ljubljana and the Croatian coast in camps on Rab and in Italy
Italy's annexed Province of Ljubljana had roughly 340,000 inhabitants when it was created in 1941, based on the last Yugoslav administrative counts. Internees were also taken from annexed Dalmatia, the Croatian Littoral and Gorski Kotar, so the population the internment system actually drew on was larger — plausibly 700,000 or more.
The upper bound is the figure of 4,641 produced by Yugoslavia's Commission for Determining the Crimes of the Occupiers for the Rab camp; the Bishop of Krk reported at least 3,500 to the Vatican in August 1943 on the basis of burial witnesses, and other estimates put the toll near 2,000. Several hundred more died at Gonars, where 453 identified victims were reinterred in 1973.
Mass internment without charge, starvation conditions in the camps, the burning of villages and the shooting of hostages under Roatta's circulars are documented in Italian army orders, in the postwar Yugoslav commission's investigation and in the work of historians including Carlo Spartaco Capogreco and Alessandra Kersevan.
Croatia, Slovenia, Italy