The 64,000 Question

"The Italians," says Field Marshal Erich von Manstein in his memoirs of Stalingrad, simply "disappeared from the battlefield." In the most decisive battle of World War II, the Russians, breaking through west of the city on the front held by 220,000 men of Mussolini's Italian Expeditionary Force among others, hurtled on across the Don steppes and never finally stopped till they got to Berlin. In six weeks of catastrophic rout and retreat, the Italians' ten divisions suffered casualties officially estimated at 115,000 men. Of these, they evacuated 30,000 wounded and listed 11,000 as dead. Later, the Russians returned 10,000 Italian P.W.s. What became of the other 64,000?

The Russians say that they have none. But in Italy, the question dogs the Communists in every election. In the Neapolitan district of Mergellina, an association of several hundred mothers holds regular meetings and petitions Parliament for word of their sons in Russia. When Italy's President Giovanni Gronchi was in Moscow last month, his wife, Donna Carla Gronchi, demanded an official accounting on behalf of the Italian Red Cross. "I asked for documentation for every one of the missing," she said, "and if any one of them is dead, I want to know how he died, why he died, and where he died."

Last week Komsomolskaya Pravda offered a partial accounting. The Soviet Commission Investigating German Atrocities had taken testimony from one Nina Pietruszkowna, a young Polish interpreter for the Italian command, who said that after Mussolini's fall in 1943, Nazi authorities in Lvov asked Italian troops and officers to swear allegiance to Hitler Germany and continue the war against the Soviet Union, and that those who refused were arrested. "More than 2,000 Italians were arrested, and the Nazis shot them all," she testified. "Among those shot were five generals and 45 officers, many of whom I knew personally."

If true, this would account for several thousand, but not the full 64,000. But Italian diplomats in Russia doubt that the Russians are now holding many Italians against their will. Perhaps many died in slave-labor camps. But most of them probably fell in battle or died of starvation or disease in the terrible winter retreat of 1942-43. Uncounted thousands of Germans, Russians and probably Italians lie buried in shallow graves hurriedly hacked in the frozen steppes across the Ukraine.

Khrushchev's own son Leonid was killed in battle against the Italians. And the father once put brutally what he thinks on the subject: "They write that we should answer what happened to the Italian soldiers who fought against us, invaded our country, and never returned to Italy. Don't they know what war is? War is a holocaust into which you jump, but it is hard to jump out again. You burn up. And in the war, the Italian soldiers burned up."

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