South Tyrol had been annexed by Italy in 1919 and subjected to a policy of Italianization that banned German-language schooling and public use of German. On 23 June 1939 German and Italian officials agreed that the province's German- and Ladin-speaking inhabitants would be given a choice: opt for German citizenship and resettlement in the Reich, or remain as Italian citizens and accept assimilation. The campaign that followed split families and villages between 'optants' and 'stayers'. About 185,000 registered to leave, though only some 75,000 had gone by 1943, when the German occupation of northern Italy made further transfers pointless. Most emigrants were settled in Austria rather than in the eastern territories originally envisaged. After the war Italy and Austria agreed in 1946 that optants could return and recover citizenship, and most of those who had left came back; the episode left a lasting division in South Tyrolean society.
Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy agreed that the German-speaking population of South Tyrol must choose between emigration to the Reich and assimilation in Italy
The joint German-Italian option registers recorded 246,036 eligible people, of whom 185,085 - about 75 per cent - opted for German citizenship and emigration; roughly 75,000 had actually left for the Reich by 1943, when the German occupation of northern Italy ended the transfer. The figures come from the option commission's own records.
The option produced no significant death toll. It was an administered population transfer carried out under political pressure rather than by force of arms, and its harms were the division of communities, loss of property and the uprooting of those who left.
The requirement that those who stayed abandon their language and identity, and that those who left surrender Italian citizenship, is documented in the text of the 1939 agreement and in the administrative record examined in The Historical Journal.
Italy, Austria