The Turin area, like the whole industrial triangle, had enormous importance in the recruitment of manpower for Germany, both before and after 8 September 1943.
After the armistice and occupation, Piedmont was the fourth most important region of Italy in terms of numbers of workers sent to the Reich, with over 7,000 from the province of Turin alone.
Apart from those who went there “voluntarily”, the methods of coercive conscription that led to the greatest results were the “prison actions”, i.e. the emptying of the prisons in the territories where the Nazis and Italian Social Republic government were based, incurred as a result of the agreements of June 1944 stipulated between Mussolini and Hitler, and the Nazi-Fascist roundups.
After the Adriatisches Küstenland, Piedmont was the area most affected by roundups in the mountains and hills, which from April 1944 onwards led to substantial levies of manpower for the Reich.
The peak was reached with the roundup in Val di Susa at the end of June of that same year, which allowed about 600-700 people to be sent from the Turin area to Germany.