A page dedicated to my father, an Alpino and Italian military internee who, after 8 September 1943, refused to join the Italian Social Republic and was deported to the German camps. Versione italiana — Version française

Zolimo “Gino” De Bastiani

My father's name was Zolimo De Bastiani, Gino to everyone. He was an Alpino, a soldier of the Italian mountain troops.

After the armistice of 8 September 1943 he refused to go on fighting on the side of the Italian Social Republic. That meant accepting deportation, the loss of his freedom and inhuman living conditions in the German camps.

Saying no often meant being loaded onto cattle wagons, crossing Europe without food or water, being shut up in freezing barracks, living on starvation rations, working to the point of exhaustion, falling ill without care and watching one's comrades die.

And yet, for many, that captivity was a form of resistance without weapons. A choice of dignity: not to collaborate with Nazi-fascism, not to lend the war any further legitimacy, not to betray one's own conscience.

That is why the War Merit Cross he received means so much to me. It is not merely a personal decoration: it is the mark of a moral choice made at the very moment when staying true to one's conscience was hardest.

My father died in 1962 in a road accident. I never had the time to ask him how it had been. This page is the way I found, many years later, to keep his memory — and to understand what that refusal really meant.

"More than half a million noes thrown in the faces of Hitler and Mussolini."

IMI stands for Internati Militari Italiani — Italian Military Internees. After the armistice, hundreds of thousands of Italian servicemen captured by the Germans were deported to the camps of the Reich. Hitler chose this label for them in order to deny them prisoner-of-war status and keep them outside the protection of the Geneva Convention.

Many were offered a way out: join the German army or the RSI. Around 650,000 said no — and remained internees, subjected to hunger, cold, forced labour, disease, humiliation and death. Around 50,000 never came home.

For years the story of the IMI stayed in the background, seldom told and often little understood. Finding out what that refusal really meant — the hunger, the cold, the fear, the abandonment — changes the way you look at it.

A man who could have signed his way out of the camp and did not, choosing to suffer rather than bend, is not, to me, just another veteran. He is a man who, at the lowest point in history, kept his inner freedom.

Source

This page also grew out of listening to the podcast Guareschi e il coraggio di dire no ("Guareschi and the courage to say no"), the second season of History Telling by Paolo Colombo, produced by Il Sole 24 Ore and Radio 24, in six episodes devoted to the story of the Italian Military Internees.

— R.D.B., May 2026