Participation of Romanian and Italian military personnel in the extermination policy against the population of the occupied territory of the Rostov region

The first documented facts about the participation of soldiers of foreign armies in the slaughter of civilians and war prisoners on the occupied Soviet territory became known to the general public during the Great Patriotic War. These materials were mainly collected by the Extraordinary State Commission of the USSR and its regional commissions for the establishment and investigation of the atrocities of Nazi invaders and their accomplices and the damage they caused to citizens, collective farms, public organizations, state enterprises and institutions. These documents were used during the war and in the first post-war years in the trials of the German, Hungarian, Romanian and other foreign war criminals. In the post-war period, many issues of this topic for various reasons were not adequately highlighted in the Soviet historiography. The historians proposed new study approaches for the actions of the Romanian and Italian occupation troops on the Don in 1990s-2000s. Declassification and introduction into scientific circulation of new archival documents and publication of the multi-volume edition “Without statute of limitations” in 2020 create opportunities for a systematic and comprehensive study of scale and culpability degree of the armed forces of Romania, Italy and other allies of Germany in the extermination policy on the occupied territory of the Rostov region in 1941-1943.