«Soldiers! This time it is not just the freedom of your lands that I offer you if you win this battle. Behind the enemy there are women, case, there is a wine among the best in the world, there is gold. All of this will be yours if you win. You will have to kill the Germans down to the last man and pass at any cost. What I told you and promised you I keep. For fifty hours you will be the absolute masters of what you will find beyond the enemy. Nobody will punish you for what you do, no one will ask you to account for what you take » This is what the French war leaflets said which "encouraged" the goumiers, the Moroccan soldiers hired through the so-called Cef (the French colonial army) which had the aim of helping the allied divisions during the Italian campaign, in the last acts of the Second World War. The words were attributed to General Alphonse Juin, who after the first operations promised "fifty hours of freedom" to the soldiers. After the 14 May of 1944 the goumiers of the French Expeditionary Force in Italy, who avoided the German lines in the Liri Valley, in the province of Frosinone, and allowed the British army to cross the Gustav Line (that is, the fortification that divided Italy between the RSI and the Allied occupation zone), they raided the surrounding areas without too many compliments, of lower Lazio, carrying out violence on the population - in particular on women - which today we all remember and bitterly define as Moroccan. In the year in which the violence continued, they went as far as lower Tuscany. Actually, the rapes by Moroccan troops had already begun in July 1943, after the Allied landing in Sicily. On that occasion further 800 North Africans carried out looting of all kinds, raping women and children in the Troina area, in the province of Enna. According to the historian Michelangelo Ingrassia, the Sicilians reacted by killing some with shotguns and pitchforks. But what happened in Ciociaria and the surrounding areas produced even more dramatic numbers. In the 2011 Emiliano Ciotti, president of the Association of Victims of the Marocchinate, declares: “In the night session of the Chamber of 7 April 1952 the PCI deputy Maria Maddalena Rossi reported that only in the province of Frosinone there had been 60.000 violence by General Juin's troops. From the numerous documents collected today we can affirm that there were 20.000 confirmed cases of violence, completely underestimated number; several medical reports of the time reported that a third of women were raped, who had undergone treatment, whether out of shame or modesty, he preferred not to report. Making an overall assessment of the violence committed by the Cef, starting in Sicily and ending at the gates of Florence, we can therefore say with certainty that there was a minimum of 60.000 raped women, each one, almost always by multiple men. The North African soldiers, for example, on average they raped in groups of two or three, but we have also collected testimonies of women raped by 100, 200 e 300 men. Read More