Italian colonists in the Dodecanese colonists of Rhodes. In the Treaty of Paris in 1947, the islands were ceded to Greece. For the nearly 8,000 Italian colonists, after the Italian defeat in World War II, started a process of return to Italy and successive disappearance. The Dodecanese officially passed from Italy to Greece in 1947, and in that year all the Italian schools were closed. Some of the Italian colonists remained in Rhodes and were quickly assimilated. Actually only a few dozen old colonists remain, but the influence of their legacy is evident in the relative diffusion of the Italian language mainly in Rhodes and
Massacre of the Acqui Division of the defence, Gandin and his men were either mutineers or "franc-tireurs" and did not qualify for POW status under the Geneva conventions. The Germans justified their behaviour by claiming the Italians were negotiating the surrender of the island to the British. The German claim was not entirely unfounded: in the Greek mainland, an entire division went over to the Greek guerrillas, and in the Dodecanese, the Italians had joined forces with the British, resulting in a two-month German campaign to evict them. An attempt to revisit the case by the Dortmund state prosecutor Johannes Obluda in 1964 came to