“We Istrians Do Very Well in Russia” 275

Chapter 12 “We Istrians Do Very Well in Russia”: Istrian Combatants, Fascist Propaganda, and Brutalization on the Eastern Front

Nicolas G. Virtue

A growing emphasis on history “from below” has dramatically altered our understanding of the experience and role of the German soldier on the eastern front. Historians have used unit war logs, army propaganda, testimony from war crimes trials and prisoners of war, personnel files, and soldiers’ memoirs, diaries, and letters to demonstrate the interrelation of physical conditions, ideological indoctrination, and troop behaviour in the east. The resulting pic- ture has revealed a high level of brutalization alongside ideological enthusiasm among the German rank and file in this particularly vicious theatre of combat and occupation.1 Whether viewed from above or from below, the Wehrmacht

1 The pioneering work of Omer Bartov illustrated the impact of combat and environmental conditions, harsh discipline, and propaganda on the frontline German soldier. Omer Bartov, The Eastern Front, 1941–45: German Troops and the Barbarisation of Warfare (London: Macmillan, 1985). Omer Bartov, Hitler’s Army: Soldiers, Nazis, and War in the Third Reich (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). Schulte combined history from below with history from above in his study of German security units in the rear area of Army Group Centre, emphasiz- ing the role of local conditions on troop behaviour. Theo J. Schulte, The German Army and Nazi Policies in Occupied Russia (Oxford: Berg, 1989). Fritz examined the motivations of front- line troops through an analysis of memoirs and correspondence. Stephen G. Fritz, Frontsoldaten: The German Soldier in World War II (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1995). Heer and Beorn used material from postwar investigations to identify lower-level brutal- ity and complicity in the elimination of Jews as partisans. Hannes Heer, “Killing Fields: The Wehrmacht and the Holocaust in Belorussia, 1941–42,” trans. Carol Scherer, in War of Extermination: The German Military in World War II, 1941–1944, ed. Hannes Heer and Klaus Naumann (New York: Berghahn, 2000), pp. 60–64. Waitman Wade Beorn, Marching into Darkness: The Wehrmacht and the Holocaust in Belarus (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014). Using personnel files and correspondence from select infantry divisions, Rass and Rutherford demonstrated the widespread acceptance of Nazi ideology by ordinary soldiers while emphasizing that war crimes emanated from a broad range of structural factors. Christoph Rass, ‘Menschenmaterial’: Deutsche Soldaten an der Ostfront (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2003). Jeff Rutherford, Combat and Genocide on the Eastern Front: The German Infantry’s War, 1941–1944 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). Recently, historians

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2018 | doi 10.1163/9789004363762_014 276 Virtue can no longer be seen as an apolitical institution.2 Even so, the bottom-up approach to understanding German behaviour in the east has had its detrac- tors, due to the limited availability of sources below the division level, the unreliability of extant sources, and the tendency of historians to focus their attention more upon junior officers than on common soldiers.3 A bottom-up analysis of the Italian experience on the eastern front faces these same challenges and limitations, often compounded by circumstances. The source base is automatically restricted by numbers and timeframe. Com­ pared to the millions of German soldiers who served on the eastern front between 1941 and 1945, Italian participants numbered in the hundreds of thou- sands, and their experience was limited to a two-year period between summer 1941 and spring 1943. The disastrous rout of Italian forces during the Red Army’s Stalingrad offensive in winter 1942–43 resulted in further challenges for the historian. Many of the official sources were destroyed or went missing during the Italian army’s retreat from the Don River. Some Italian documents have been unearthed in German and Russian archives, but war logs for many units remain incomplete or missing entirely.4 The events on the Don also had a profound impact on the collective and individual memory of Italy’s war in the east. Of the 150,000 men deployed on the frontline that winter—from a total force of 230,000—as many as 95,000 were killed or captured. Only 10,032 Italian soldiers survived captivity to be

have tapped into the secretly recorded conversations between German prisoners of war held in British and American camps. Many of these prisoners had served in the east and spoke about their experiences. Sönke Neitzel and Harald Welzer, Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing, and Dying; The Secret World War II Transcripts of German POWs, trans. Jefferson Chase (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2011). 2 The myth that the German army fought an honourable war in the east, distinct from the poli- cies of the Nazi Party and SS, was brought into question by Christian Streit, Keine Kameraden: Die Wehrmacht und die sowjetischen Kriegsgefangenen, 1941–1945 (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags- Anstalt, 1978). For recent historiography on the Wehrmacht as an institution, see Samson Madievski, “The War of Extermination: The Crimes of the Wehrmacht in 1941 to 1944,” Rethinking History 7, no. 2 (2003), 243–54; Wolfram Wette, The Wehrmacht: History, Myth, Reality, trans. Deborah Lucas Schneider (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006); and, Ben Shepherd, “The Clean Wehrmacht, the War of Extermination, and Beyond,” Historical Journal 52, no. 1 (2009), 455–73. 3 Shepherd, “The Clean Wehrmacht,” 456. Schulte, German Army and Nazi Policies, 25. 4 On documentation held in German and Russian archives, see Carlo Gentile, “Alle spalle dell’ARMIR: Documenti sulla repressione antipartigiana al fronte russo,” Il presente e la storia, no. 53 (June 1998), 168–81; and, Giorgio Scotoni and Sergej Ivanovich Filonenko (eds.), Retro­ scena della disfatta italiana in Russia nei documenti inediti dell’8 a Armata, 2 vols. (Trento: Panorama, 2008), 1:47–52.