The work of the prisoners of war, which was not just a necessity
Analyses up to now have typically been based on official documentation and have not, or only to a very limited extent, examined the issue of labour from the perspective of the POWs involved. The war created an inherently coercive situation, as the later POWs typically served as conscripts, with very few volunteering for the front, and were expected to execute the orders of their superiors without thinking. Before the war, they also had to work at home, and the general literacy rates of the time and limited social mobility also limited the nature of the tasks they could perform. In other words, prisoner-of-war work among the enlisted personnel can be understood as a normal manifestation of everyday wartime life.
During the war years, the Italian authorities were characterised by compliance with the rules, so that we know of very few cases where a POW was deliberately put at risk. Perhaps only the work in Albania falls into this category, but the conditions here did not result in anything approaching the number of victims of the notorious Murmansk railway construction, for example. Working conditions in Italy were therefore generally average, so a comparison of the experience at home and the procedures at the internment site might even suggest that working conditions were more favourable as a prisoner of war than in civilian life. One of the novelties of this paper and of the related research is that it explores these possibilities and examines the work of POWs as part of a larger context.
In the context of prisoner-of-war research in Italy, the study had already begun to examine the world of prisoners of war and civilians as a unified system, so Balázs Juhász was only following the work of Sonia Residori in this field. However, with the help of the available ego-documents, as well as the previously overlooked judiciary and internal security documents, he has also explored social and political entanglements that go far beyond the local dimension of POW labour.
So, the essay deals with the criteria for the employment of POWs in Italy during the Great War. It is a contribution to the current research demonstrating the close connection between civilian and military spheres during the war, including in the area of internment. This intertwining is particularly evident when one studies the wartime economic system. Although the article shows that the contribution of POWs was marginal, their work was diverse and particularly visible in certain sectors. Therefore, it is important to clarify the rules that governed their employment, and the outcomes of their work. Many of which are still associated with prisoners of war in local memory, meaning that more than 100 years after the First World War, the contribution of enemy interned military personnel to the life of their communities has not been lost.
Photo: Fortepan