WWII Italian soldiers who resisted Germany — one with ties to LI — honored in NYC 

In September 1943, as Nazi paratroopers and SS commandos were rescuing the deposed fascist dictator Benito Mussolini from his mountaintop prison in Italy, elsewhere in Europe Italian soldiers were facing a choice: keep fighting for the Germans, or face capture, deportation and detention by Germany.

With Italy switching sides to the Allies, a fraction agreed to continue fighting alongside the German army, but nearly 650,000 said no — and paid the price. Most would be forced into internment camps, and tens of thousands would die, said Stanislao G. Pugliese, a Hofstra professor of Italian and Italian-American Studies.

Nursing anti-Italy grievances dating back to World War I, the Germans refused to consider these Italians as prisoners of war subject to protections of the Geneva Conventions, instead calling them Italian Military Internees, the enemy combatants of their day.

On Monday, two of those internees with ties to the New York region were posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor at the Italian Consulate in Manhattan, their families given the medals for what the men did, and didn’t do, during World War II.

“They were starved. They were beaten. They were put to hard labor. For two years. And then at war’s end, no one came to collect them,” said Mary Ann Fusco, whose dad, Rosario Castronovo, a longtime painter for L & L Painting of Hicksville, was honored.

Castronovo — who was imprisoned outside Dresden — later immigrated to the United States, became a citizen, and would go on to paint buildings such as what was then the Rockefeller University and the Lipstick Building in Manhattan for the Hicksville company, his daughter said.

Castronovo, who later in life returned to Germany with family to tour the remains of the camp, died in 2012 at 91.

Fusco and several other family members, including widow Paola Castronovo, accepted the medal from Fabrizio Di Michele, the consul general of Italy in New York.

'A man of principle'

“This is a typical story of a man of principle who didn’t accept to fight alongside the Nazis after the armistice, and he preferred, basically, to be forced to work and live in the Nazi internment camps ... starving, witnessing lots of his colleagues and friends perishing due to the conditions, and yet survived,” Di Michele said, according to a video of the ceremony, which was closed to the public.

Monday's honoring of the men — the medal has been awarded by the Italian government since 2006 — is the result of a one-woman campaign of sorts by Fusco, who set out to find other men like her dad.

“DO YOU KNOW OF AN ITALIAN SOLDIER IMPRISONED IN GERMANY DURING WORLD WAR II?” read a flyer she distributed starting several years ago.

Among those Fusco found was the family of Giuseppe Maurantonio, who during the war was serving in the Balkans in the Italian military when he was captured by the Germans, said his son Nicholas Maurantonio, 68, of Sag Harbor.

“My grandparents thought he was dead — for two years — no communication, no nothing,” Nicholas said.

A handwritten diary kept by Giuseppe — which the family brought to the ceremony and handled gingerly  — documents the horrors of that time: extreme cold, his body breaking down from neglect, constant hunger, and inhuman conditions. During the war, sometime in 1945, he was either liberated or he escaped, and he took five months to find his way back to Italy, his son said.

By 1959, Giuseppe had immigrated to the U.S. and become a shoemaker in the Bronx. He died in 2007 and would have been 101 this year.

A history of mistrust

What happened during the war to Giuseppe Maurantonio and Rosario Castronovo unfolded in the shadow of World War I, when Italy was in a treaty of alliance between Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and Italy's fighting in accord with the alliance was deeply unpopular. Italy managed to escape that obligation and came into the war on the side of France and Britain in May 1915.

“So, there was already this, like, history of what the Germans called betrayal by the Italians,” said Pugliese, the Hofstra professor.

And in World War II, Italy didn’t enter initially, as Mussolini wanted, because Italian generals weren’t ready. It wasn’t until June 1940 that Italy finally did, after Germany conquered Poland and was on the brink of defeating France.

“This also looks very bad. So the Germans accepted Italy as an ally in the Second World War, but they were never very trustful of the Italians,” Pugliese said.

Because of Allied bombings of Italian cities, particularly Rome, and the invasion of Sicily from North Africa, the Italian king finally deposed Mussolini in July 1943. 

Between July and September of that year, the king abandoned Rome, the military dissolved, “many Italian soldiers simply took off their uniforms and hit the road and literally walked home, sometimes hundreds of miles home,” Pugliese said. 

So when Italy signed the armistice with the Allies in September 1943, Hitler was infuriated, and his troops occupied Italy with extra animosity because the Germans thought the Italians “had stabbed them in the back,” Pugliese said. 

Giovanni Frisone, who delivered a lecture last year titled “The Other Resistance: Hitler's Slaves,” at the Wright Museum of World War II in New Hampshire, said: “The great majority of Italian soldiers did not agree to fight for Mussolini or for Hitler.” His own father, Ferruccio Francesco Frisone, was one of those soldiers, too. He died in 1973. 

Italian internees have been denied compensation from a German fund set up for former slave and forced laborers during the Nazi era.

Although most of the Italian soldiers balked at continuing to fight with the Germans, not all did.

“The skeleton in the closet is that a small number did decide to fight for Germany,” Pugliese said. “One of the dirty little secrets of this whole history is that there were Italians who were fanatically fascist.”

By Matthew Chayes

matthew.chayes@newsday.comchayesmatthew

Matthew Chayes, a Newsday reporter since 2007, covers New York City.