Axis POWs didnt just sit in a prison camp, they also did menial labor that others wouldn't do. So useful was this large pool of unpaid labor that the allies were hesitant to give up their free laborers to their native countries such as Italy in this case.
by Kreanxx
6 Comments
There was also cases of Italian POW who’d later married British women and stay in the UK even after the war ended.
I remember some early post war footage of French forces ordering several low level German to demine a field and one of them being… less of himself after missing one on the way.
Some 15 years ago I lived in apartment built by Japanese POWs.
My grandfather was an 18 year old German conscript who spent just three months in the Wehrmacht before being captured during the Battle of the Bulge. He ended up in a British POW camp didn’t get released until 1948. He was compensated for all that though; he died over thirty years ago but the German government still pays a monthly stipend to his now 101 year old widow.
Australia simply didn’t have the transportation to repatriate all the Italian POWs even after a fifth of them liked it so much here they decided to stay, and the last POW wasn’t shipped out until 1947.
Ah yes, let’s release a bunch of vets/military age men into the fascist/monarchist/communist soup that was was post Mussolini Italy and see what happens.
We’ve got nothing else to do right now but monitor a Petrie dish we created for….reasons.