It is not clear how many perished in the camps. Official Italian census records show that the population of Cyrenaica plummeted from 225,000 to 142,000. The orphans, numbering in the thousands, were sent to Fascist camps to be “reeducated.” Brand-new planes machine-gunned herds of livestock. An Italian general boasted that between 1930 and 1931 the army reduced the number of sheep and goats from 270,000 to 67,000. As a consequence, many people starved to death.
