Following the signing of the Armistice with the Allies, around 800,000 Italian soldiers were arrested and sent to Germany. Of these some 630,000 refused to continue fighting for the new Social Republic alongside the Nazis. They were not considered prisoners of war (a condition protected by the Geneva Convention) but rather IMI (Italian Military Internees), used as forced labour and subjected to deprivation and harassment. This meant Germany could conceal the fact that they were effectively prisoners from the allied Fascist state.

Their diaries, memoirs, and testimonies often constitute the only historical sources available since the Germans destroyed all documentation after their defeat.

In 2018, in the presence of Ambassador of the Federal Republic of Germany Susanne Marianne Wasum Rainer, the multimedia tour Vite di IMI: Percorsi dal fronte di guerra ai lager tedeschi 1943-1945 (Lives of IMI: Paths from the War Front to the German camps 1943-1945) was inaugurated in Rome. This was developed and designed by the National Association of Prison, Internment and Liberation War Veterans and their families. The exhibition, also supported by the German-Italian Future Fund, is divided into six rooms that document the consequences of the Armistice, the Italian soldiers’ refusal to cooperate, their capture, life in the internment camps, as well as their difficult return home and the way in which their stories were erased for many years.

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