List of Italian prisoners in the San Miguel de los Reyes Jail, Valencia

The Republican army took 400 Italians prisoner during the Battle of Guadalajara. The documents that were found among their belongings provided undeniable proof of Fascist assistance to the rebels, but the taking of these prisoners was important in other ways. Minister Galeazzo Ciano’s order that any “Italian renegades” captured be shot was revoked with an eye towards future prisoner exchanges. The men held  by the Republicans also posed a problems for the Fascist regime. The patriotic rhetoric praising the fallen did not apply to them. Instead, they were a stain on the honour of the CTV, and they were suspected of being cowards or deserters. It was the case that some did collaborate with their captors, writing in Il Garibaldino, the paper of the Garibaldi Brigade, or appearing on Radio Barcelona where the Italian-language talks of the former “Blackshirt” Mario Santini became popular.

The Red Cross and the International Red Aid organization started by Communists Luigoi Longo, inspector general of the International Brigades, and political comisar Ilio Barontini, most of the prisoners were able to contact their families, putting an end to months of anguish. The Republican authorities did not censor their letters, which were almost unanimous in describing how well they were being treated, even when they also declared their faith in Fascism, and made it possible to assess their spirits and those of their families.

Carlos Roselli, who was charged with examining the letters, discovered that the Italian soldiers were peasants and workers who joined up under coercion, were pressured by their circumstances and attracted by the pay, or had been tricked because they had wanted to go to Abyssinia. He concluded that “the immense majority of these young men sent to Spain it fight against the cause of the people are not responsible”. Giuseppe Alberganti, a Communist tasked with the political re-education of the prisoners, wrote a report which made their social origins clear: 51 agricultural day labourers, 17 small farmers, 42 construction labourers, 32 bricklayers, 12 carters, 11 carpenters, 11 shoemakers, 9 mechanics and 8 tailors, as well as other manual workers, compared to 11 office workers, 3 accountants, 2 telegraph operators, and only 1 university student.

For their part, Italian authorities kept an eye on this correspondence and the Caranineros even arrested some relatives and took away the payments they were due. In November 1937, a woman from Agrigento, in Sicily, wrote to her imprisoned husband: “They have taken away the subsidy and I cannot feed our children, who are in the street”.

FJMS