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In OTL, the 1943 surrender of Italy in the short run did not result in the immediate liberation of all Italian held territory or allied advancement into all those territories.

Rather, the Allies gained southern Italy, Sardinia and Corsica fairly quickly, and gradually and painfully pushed up into central and northern Italy over the remaining almost two years of the European war. In the meantime, the immediate effect of Italian surrender was Operation Acshe, the Nazi occupation of central and northern Italy, Italian occupied sectors of France, Yugoslavia, Albania, Greece and the Dodecanese.

Although the Germans got to man a series of positions in good defensive terrain, having to spread their forces to take over occupation of such large territories had its own cost to the Germans militarily by forcing forces to engage there that were subsequently unavailable for the Russian front or to resist or counter the cross-Channel invasion. So, militarily, the German spread into more territories was a net advantage for the Allies.

However, the spread of Nazi occupation was a humanitarian disaster for the civilians and surrendered Italian troops in the areas the Nazis took over. The Germans had a harsher occupation regime toward civilians in general and subjected the Jews and other targeted minorities to massacres in place or deportation to death camps, many surrendering Italian troops were massacred or conscripted for hard labor in Germany. Partisan warfare intensified in Greece and Yugoslavia, and emerged in northern Italy, with the attendant German reprisals all increasing.

Is there a way, from any point after January 1942, that these tragic consequences could have been averted?

Could the Italians have held off their surrender and collapse until some point at which Allied forces could take the surrender of virtually all their people and territory with the Germans getting hardly any of either?

If there had been no Italian surrender, or Italian campaign, of 1943, presumably D-Day in France would still be successful and Soviet victories in the east including the destruction Army Group Centre in Operation Bagration still would have happened in 1944, and Germany still would have been defeated in 1945? Or is that wrong?

I would assume that without an occupation of the Italian zones by either the Germans or Allies however, that German forces could make Allied operations in France, Germany and the eastern front much bloodier and perhaps at times slower than OTL, even if it does not make the Germans able to extend the war past 1945 or even past OTL's May 1945 VE Day.

Overall, is there any way that the Nazi occupations of formerly Italian held territories have been avoided, with the Soviets and Western Allies still defeating the Germans no later than 8 May 1945, so "on-time" but also at no greater cost in lives of Allied and Soviet service members or civilians in occupied western, central and eastern Europe than OTL, and thus "on-budget"?
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