According to a report by Monsignor Jože Srebrnič, Bishop of Krk on 5 August 1943 to Pope Pius XII: "witnesses, who took part in the burials, state unequivocally that the number of the dead totals at least 3,500".

[7] Under Italian army commander Mario Roatta's watch, the ethnic cleansing and violence committed against the Slovene and Croat civilian population easily matched that of the Germans[8][9] with summary executions, hostage-taking and hostage killing, reprisals, internments (both in Rab and at the Gonars concentration camp), and the burning of houses and villages.

Additional special instructions, which included an edict that orders must be "carried out most energetically and without any false compassion", were issued by Roatta:[10] Roatta in his Circolare No.3 "issued orders to kill hostages, demolish houses and whole villages: his idea was to deport all inhabitants of Slovenia and replace them with Italian settlers" in the Province of Ljubljana, in response to Slovene partisans' resistance in the province.

[12] Following Roatta's orders, one of his soldiers in his July 1, 1942 letter wrote home: Uroš Roessmann, one of the Rab internees, a student at the time, remembers: The camp at Rab, built near the village of Kampor, was one of a number of such camps established along the Adriatic coast to accommodate Slovenian and Croatian prisoners.

Slovene writer Metod Milač, an inmate at the camp, described in his memoirs how prisoners were quartered six to a tent and slowly starved to death on a daily diet of thin soup, a few grains of rice and small pieces of bread.

Prisoners fought with each other for access to the camp's meager water supply, a single barrel, while many became infested with lice and wracked with dysentery caused by the unhygienic conditions.

"[11] According to the Slovenian Rab survivor, Anton Vratuša, who later became Yugoslavia's ambassador to the United Nations: "We were prisoners; they were protected people.

[21] The island remained in Italian hands until after the Armistice with Italy was signed on 8 September 1943, when the Germans seized control.

[23] Ivan Vranetić was honored as one of the Croatian Righteous among the Nations for helping save the Jews evacuated from Rab in September 1943, one of whom he would later marry and retire to Israel.

[28] In 2003 the Italian media published Silvio Berlusconi's statement that Benito Mussolini merely "used to send people on vacation".