The sergeant's ring

A very particular ring is preserved in the National Museum of Internment in Padua. It belonged to Giacomo Chiappero, from Cuneo, born in 1917, a gunner sergeant of the Royal Army engaged in the Second World War. Giacomo was captured in Athens on 9 September 1943, the day after the armistice that ended the Italian war against the Anglo-Americans. Transferred to Germany he was interned with serial number 03121 at Stalag III D near Berlin and forced to work in a munitions factory, Butzke-Werke AG. Precisely during the long months of imprisonment and forced labor, a fellow prisoner forged a ring for him, making it from the remains of a bullet. An extraordinary work of craftsmanship - considering the precarious conditions in which it was produced - which bears the finely chiseled initials of Giacomo and which testifies to the human will not to surrender to the brutalization of imprisonment. Giacomo preserved it with care, even after his release.

His story is one of the many small stories that belong to that great tragedy that was September 8, 1943. On that date the armistice with the Anglo-Americans was made public: for our country it began a dramatic and painful phase of military and political confusion. The flight of the king, the collapse of monarchical and military institutions, the lack of any political reference, the Nazi occupation and the continuation of the Allied advance. Among the first victims of that absurd situation we find the soldiers of the Royal Army, who found themselves literally abandoned in Italy and on the various foreign fronts of Yugoslavia, France, Albania, Greece and the Aegean islands, Poland, the Baltic countries and the Soviet Union. Adrift, without orders, alongside the Nazis, first allies, now enemies. Many, around 800 thousand, found themselves faced with a terrible dilemma: to continue fighting with the Germans or, otherwise, to be considered enemies of the Reich, with all the consequences of that.

Over 650 thousand soldiers refused to fight with the Nazis, a large minority even decided to take up arms against their former ally. Like the Acqui division in Kefalonia: barbarically killed by the thousands by the Nazis in retaliation, even after the surrender. Most of the captured soldiers were instead transferred to Germany and interned in labor and concentration camps. For them the Reich coined the classification of Italian military internees (IMI), a way to deprive them of the status of prisoners of war and the supervision of the Red Cross. They therefore became real war slaves, kept alive to increase war production. On several occasions the Germans invited Italian soldiers to join them or the forces of the collaborationist Italian Social Republic in exchange for freedom. The fact that so many refused is for some historians a sort of "unarmed" resistance, equal to that carried out by the partisans in the areas occupied by the Nazi-Fascists. A resistance that had a very notable human cost: between 40 thousand and 50 thousand "civilian workers" (as the IMI were called in the RSI), died exhausted from working in the Nazi camps.


Renato Bonomo
NP March 2024