Austro-Hungarian POWs died in Italian captivity

[PeterH]

According to Mark Thompson's The White War of the "430,000 Hapsburg prisoners [taken by the Italians 3-11 November 1918]..their harsh treatment led to some 30,000 deaths"(page 363).

Thompson infers this was a deliberate policy due to neglect and indifference to the plight of the prisoners.Some experienced hard labour conditions as well.The flu also took some.

[bob lembke]

According to Mark Thompson's The White War of the "430,000 Hapsburg prisoners [taken by the Italians 3-11 November 1918]..their harsh treatment led to some 30,000 deaths"(page 363).

Thompson infers this was a deliberate policy due to neglect and indifference to the plight of the prisoners.Some experienced hard labour conditions as well.The flu also took some.

Hi, Peter!

Hardly surprising, considering how brutal the Italians were to their own men. However, they seemed to have improved that somewhat after Caparetto. I have read a memoire by an Austrian officer captured by the Italians at the end of the war, and I believe that they were badly handled, although I forget the details. He eventually managed to escape.

In my own family, the immediate postwar period proved much more dangerous than the participation in the war itself after WW I as well as after WW II. But this is not a popular topic in the English-language literature, and in Germany, for most of the post-war period, dwelling too much on the topic might bring down legal sanctions. Better to skate away from the topic.

Bob Lembke

[barbierir]

It's unfortunate but it's only a 7% death rate. I read that about 6% of allied pow died in German captivity so that doesn't sound too bad considering that many prisoners may be already wounded and also the spanish flu pandemic of 1918-19. Or am I missing something?

Andrea

[phil andrade]

From Alan Kramer's Dynamic of Destruction, page 65:

"Italian prisoners in Austro-Hungarian captivity fared particularly badly: out of 468,000 men at least 92,451 (19.75 per cent), possibly 93,184 (19.91 per cent) died."

That is an outrageous mortality rate, and if the figures are correct, it's easy to understand why the Italians were none too solicitous about the welfare of those they captured.

Phil

[barbierir]

From Alan Kramer's Dynamic of Destruction, page 65:

"Italian prisoners in Austro-Hungarian captivity fared particularly badly: out of 468,000 men at least 92,451 (19.75 per cent), possibly 93,184 (19.91 per cent) died."

That is an outrageous mortality rate, and if the figures are correct, it's easy to understand why the Italians were none too solicitous about the welfare of those they captured.

Phil

The higher rate of death among italian prisoners was due to a deliberate policy by italian government and the Comando Supremo, they refused to send food packages through the Red Cross as the other nations did. Even the sending of food by the families or private donations were discouraged and delayed. This criminal policy was motivated by the fear of desertion, they wanted to make the prisoner's conditions so appalling that no one dared to surrender to the enemy. This was expecially true after Caporetto.

Of course this policy doesn't apply to austro-hungarian prisoners.

The fact is that at the present we don't know enough about austrian prisoners to draw a conclusion, the sources are contradictory and there isn't a single study devoted to this subject. I found a summary of our knowledge in "Mario Isnenghi, Giorgio Rochat - La Grande Guerra" published in 2000. Here are the relevant passages:

Austrian prisoners

We know very little about austro-hungarian prisoners in italian hands. The number of those captured before Vittorio Veneto differs between 100.000 and 180.000 according to sources; if we take the numbers from an High Command' s memo, the prisoners were 168.898 and the deserters 5.513. They were parted in almost a hundred of camps from the valley of Po to Sicily.

. . . We don't know anymore, even the data about mortality don't differentiate between the former prisoners and those much more numerous captured at Vittorio Veneto.

. . . A little studied drama is the story of the austrian prisoners that the serbs took with them in the retreat to Durrës. In december 1915 the Italian Navy carried the 23.000 survivors to the isle of Asinara, where these men already worn out by hardships and epidemics, didn't found adeguate food, accomodation and medical care but only strict discipline. Thousands died, then the prisoners were in part ceded to France and in part transferred to camps on the italian peninsula. We don't know if their number is counted in the total of austrian prisoners in italian hands.

. . . Before the armistice took effect the italian troops captured 415.116 soldiers and 10.658 officers.

. . . almost all were released by the end of 1919.

. . . The austrian prisoners who died in Italy were 40.947, of whom 13.217 died for wounds received in combat and 27.740 for other causes. We don't know how these deaths are divided among the prisoners taken before or after Vittorio Veneto, neither we know if they include those who died at the Asinara; anyway they are not few, considering that they had almost always adeguate food.

[phil andrade]

Brilliant post, sir ....thank you. Information like that is so needed : especially, for example, the statistc that roughtly one third of the AH POWs who died were already wounded. This implies that - if we allow for a death rate of approx.10% among wounded, that nearly one third of all prisoners captured by the Italians were wounded. I wonder if this applies to other fronts and armies.

Five years ago I visited an AH military cemetery in Verona, with about 6000 graves. The names were roughly equally divided between Teutonic and Slavic. There were no "Unknowns". This, combined with the location which was a long way from the frontline ( I think Verona is a railhead), suggests that all these men were POWs.

Phil

[deutscherinfanteriest]

probably true. collaborating with Austrian Black Cross I signalled to them many died in my town in 1919!