This period was marked by a brutal campaign characterized by widespread major Italian war crimes, including ethnic cleansing, mass killings, forced displacement, forced death marches, settler colonialism, the use of chemical weapons, the use of concentration camps, mass executions of civilians and refusing to take prisoners of war and instead executing surrendering combatants.

[4] Upon gaining entry in Libya, Italy promptly initiated racist and discriminatory practices of class division, including the construction of concentration camps, where approximately 50,000 Libyans lost their lives during the 1930s.

[6] Italo Balbo, field marshal and an architect of the colony, planned on settling 500,000 Italians by the 1960s,[7] particularly in the Jabal al Akhdar region ("Green Mountains" in Arabic) by displacing the local Libyan population to the desert.

[8] The most common case of forced displacement was from the Jebel Al-Akthar region, to make way for Italian settlers, to Sirte, an inhospitable city on the edge of the Sahara desert.

There were also several displacements from oases to the Sahara desert proper; such as the Magharba, and Zuwayya, Fawakhir, Firjan, and Hussun tribes who lived near Ijdabiyya, west of Benghazi.

These displacements were harsh with a high mortality rate, done under the coercion of the Italian Army who were given orders to kill any person or animal who did not hurry.

[11] According to Melvin Page and Penny Sonneberg, Benito Mussolini was the person ultimately responsible for "putting 80,000 Libyans in concentration camps, blocking and poisoning wells, building a network of garrisons in troubled areas, bombing villages with mustard gas, killing and confiscating hundreds of thousands of sheep and camels, and constructing a 200-mile barbed wire fence between Libya and Egypt to prevent rebel border crossings".

[11][33] Historian Ali Abdullatif Ahmida writes that some 250,000 Libyans left the country during the entire period from the start of the Italo-Turkish war in 1911 to the end of Italian governance in 1943,[34] following the success of the Tunisian campaign.

[28][37] During the Allied administration of Libya prior to independence, the United Nations estimated that 250,000 to 300,000 Libyan natives died under the Italians between 1912 and 1942 from all non-natural causes (e.g. combat, execution, disease, famine, and thirst).

Historian Ali Abdullatif Ahmida stated that the extreme violence carried out against Libyans by Italian fascists served as a blueprint for the atrocities that Nazi Germans later committed in Europe.

[40] In April 1939, Nazi German Field Marshal Hermann Göring made an official visit to Tripoli, where he held discussions with the Italian colonial governor general of Libya, Italo Balbo.

Also in 1939, Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS and the architect behind the concentration camps, also made an official visit to Libya to witness the outcomes of the Italian methods.

Visits to Tripoli occurred in 1937 and 1938 by high Nazi leaders such as Robert Ley, Rudolf Hess, the head of the SS Heinrich Himmler, and Marshal Hermann Göring.

[42] The primary legacy is the reframing of colonial history, seeing events that happened in Africa as a precursor to the abuses of the totalitarian regimes in Europe in particular Nazi Germany.