Museo Nazionale dell'Internamento

The Museo Nazionale dell'Internamento (National Internment Museum) in Padova is a national museum presenting the history of Italian military, political, and racial internees and deportees in the German camps system from 1943-45. In particular, the museum commemorates the internment, daily life, and ultimate fate of Italian Military Internees: the approximately 800 000 members of the Italian military forcibly demobilized and interned by German forces following the Italian-Allied Armistice and the German occupation of Italy.    

Displays present the historical context of the Italian situation in the Second World War, the Italin-Allied Armistice and subsequent German occupation, and the establishment of German internment camps in Italy. Artifacts belonging to internees and recovered from camps across the Italian peninsula are displayed, including clothing, diaries, letters and correspondence, photographs, identification documents and tags, and pieces of Italian uniforms and flags kept hidden from German guards.

The museum was inaugurated on September 19, 1965 by Archbishop of Prague Cardinal Giuseppe Beran, a former deportee in the German camps system, and by the Italian Minister of Public Education Luigi Gui, a former partisan.