Written by Angelo Martino
One of the most clamorous falsehoods that so-called revisionist journalists and some historians — who are not attentive to rigorous and documented historical research — have touted with harsh language has been that of an alleged concentration camp or lager at Fenestrelle in Piedmont.
On the web such gigantic historical falsehood is commented upon with a harshness of language that Alessandro Barbero, in the preface to his book “I prigionieri dei Savoia”, defines as “ignoble”.
With thorough historical research, Alessandro Barbero (in a volume whose complete title is “The Prisoners of Savoy: The True Story of the Fenestrelle Conspiracy”, published by Laterza, with 316 pages of rigorous documentation and archival research, and 42 pages of notes) has proven the whole story to be false.
As Alessandro Barbero writes, between the 9th and 10th of November 1861 a column of Bourbon prisoners (who had been captured in Capua on November 2nd) arrived at Fenestrelle. In total they numbered 1,186, which is a far cry from the fabled 40,000 claimed by historical counterfeiters.
Barbero says that most of these prisoners stayed in Fenestrelle for no more than three weeks, since there was a ministerial circular dated November 20, 1861 which did not foresee that the Bourbon prisoners would be sent to the depots and regiments to be enrolled in the Italian army.
In fact, already on November 28, 1861, the first contingents of Bourbon prisoners left, endowed with food for the journey, and on the first of December the prisoners had been reduced to just 70 men, all of whom were hospitalized and therefore were unable to leave at the time.
The historian also denies the rumors about the conditions of the prisoners and much of what has been said and written about extermination, demonstrating how the soldiers who arrived in Fenestrelle, effectively exhausted from the trip, were regularly treated and hospitalized, not only in Fenestrelle, but also in other hospitals where they could receive better treatment, such as in Pinerolo, where there was a center specializing in venereal diseases.
The author reviews the military records which record the movements of each individual soldier; therefore it is possible to establish how many were hospitalized (the number reached its maximum peak of 143 on the 17th of November), which refutes the false claims that the soldiers were not treated, or that they were kept in brutal conditions similar to those of Nazi concentration camps.
Equally absurd is the often-repeated rumor that the average life expectancy at Fenestrelle did not exceed three months, because in reality the imprisonment did not exceed three weeks.
Finally, to demonstrate the groundlessness and unacceptable machinations that have been crafted in recent years, Barbero mentions a website containing many black and white photographs of alleged Bourbon prisoners which, after serious historical analysis, Barbero unmasks: he demonstrates that the images in fact depict a group of deportees in a Nazi camp.
Alessandro Barbero, with arduous documentation, says that there were only 5 (five) deceased men from Fenestrelle Fort recorded in the parish registers of the church of Fenestrelle. This gives you an idea of how colossal the historical myth is: 5 deaths becomes “thousands of deaths”, about 1,200 prisoners becomes “tens of thousands of prisoners”, and three weeks of imprisonment becomes “years of imprisonment with a life expectancy of no more than three months”.
Apart from the fact that there is no proof for any of this, the idea that anyone wanted to exterminate the Bourbon soldiers is absolutely unfounded, since the House of Savoy and all the various rulers of the Risorgimento had very different intentions. They sought to enlist the Bourbon soldiers as soon as possible, and they planned to frame them quickly into the ranks of the newly-formed Italian army, because the war with Austria would soon be resumed and they needed more men. Indeed, they deluded themselves into thinking they could enlist at least 50,000 former Bourbon soldiers, since they were convinced that they would join the national cause once they were freed from Bourbon slavery.
The overwhelming majority of former Bourbon soldiers were later enlisted in the Italian army, albeit not with the enthusiasm that was expected, but certainly without any bloodshed, and at most there were cases of desertion or attempted desertion, as well as cases of insubordination punished by military tribunals.
Furthermore, soldiers were also sent to Fenestrelle in the following years because Fenestrelle was a place of punishment, just as Bolzano and Sardinia later were, and all troublesome soldiers were sent there, including those caught committing ordinary crimes and crimes linked to the Camorra.
Returning to the question of deaths, the historian Barbero explains that it would not have any historiographical relevance if it were not for the “stunning exploitation by online media”.
On page 263 Alessandro Barbero writes that, in addition to the five prisoners of war Francesco Conte, Leonardo Valente, Salvatore Palatucci, Francesco Lucchese and Lorenzo Genovese, who died between November 1860 and January 1861, we can count another twelve deceased, two of them in 1861 and ten in 1862. These deaths (with the exception of Domenico Carafa whose source is not clear) are clearly recorded with the title “Soldiers of the Corpo dei Cacciatori Franchi” [editor's note: soldiers who committed offenses mild enough to be confined to the regiment, but not so serious as to require being sent to a military prison].
In chapter 9, appropriately titled “Poor Historiography”, Alessandro Barbero — with punctuality and with rigorous scientific and historical precision — refutes the claims of all those who have spread the historical hoax of a concentration camp at Fenestrelle and the false myth of genocide, beginning with an article by Francesco Maurizio Di Giovine in the pro-Bourbonist magazine “Alfiere”, to all other pseudo-historians from Fulvio Izzo to Lorenzo Del Boca, Roberto Martucci, Gigi Di Fiore and Pino Aprile.
Regarding the latter, Alessandro Barbero writes verbatim that all the “mystifications and lies from previous years resurface all together in his book (“Terroni”), which in the future will be read with disbelief and dismay as evidence of the levels of internal division, mutual hatred and shameless rewriting of the past”.
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