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This book reconstructs the fate of Italian prisoners of war captured by the Red Army between August 1941 and the winter of 1942-43. On 230.000 Italians left on the Eastern front almost 100.000 did not come back home. Testimonies and memoirs from surviving veterans complement the author's intensive work in Russian and Italian archives. The study examines Italian war crimes against the Soviet civilian population and describes the particularly grim fate of the thousands of Italian military internees who after the 8 September 1943 Armistice had been sent to Germany and were subsequently captured by the Soviet army to be deported to the USSR. The book presents everyday life and death in the Sovie...
The 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union, codenamed Operation Barbarossa, remains one of Nazi Germany’s most significant military campaigns. Executed by Hitler’s Wehrmacht army, this event saw troops from all over Europe defeat the Red Army and temporarily colonize large swathes of Eastern Europe, ultimately laying the groundwork for the Holocaust. In this illuminating re-examination of this multifaceted event, Operation Barbarossa and its Aftermath refocuses our attention on the multiethnic nature of the campaign, shedding light on the role of soldiers from Slovakia, Italy, Romania, and Spain as well as other important issues. This volume highlights how viewing Operation Barbarossa as a multiethnic campaign, rather than a strictly German-Russian conflict, offers new ways of understanding the Holocaust, World War II and the history of European collaboration.
‘Panzersoldaten!’ is a history of the Milizia Volontaria per la Sicurezza Nazionale (MVSN), commonly referred to as the Blackshirts due to their wartime attire. They were an anti-Communist paramilitary organisation that fought for Mussolini while Italy was under fascist rule; following the Duce’s removal from power, the organisation was quickly swept up by the Italian Army, and forced to swear allegiance to the king. Some, however, defected and continued to fight for the Axis alliance as volunteer units in the German Army. This volume covers the history of the Blackshirt Division during the campaign on the Eastern Front, focusing on its relations with the Italian Army, the history of the MVSN, its advance into Ukraine, and the First and Second Battles of the Don River. Morisi, using almost exclusively contemporary resources and battalion war diaries, as well memoirs from senior officers of the division, has created a definitive analysis of the Blackshirts.
The epic story of Ture Di Nardo, known as “Pileri”, a young Sicilian peasant torn away from his family and his woman by the call to arms during the Second World War. Enlisted in the Alpini and part of the Julia Division, he followed the bitter fate of the Italian Army in Russia in what was to be the biggest Italian military defeat of the 20th century. Like a new Ulysses, the young Ture Pileri will have to face terrible trials on the long journey home. With this engaging historical novel, Cristiano Parafioriti brings to light a real story that has been kept in the heart of its protagonist for seventy years. The strength of a man, driven by love, able to resist and react to the defeat of a...
The Second World War between the European Axis powers and the Allies saw more than twenty million soldiers taken as prisoners of war. While this total is inflated by the unconditional surrender of all German forces in Europe on 8 May 1945, it nonetheless highlights the fact that captivity was one of the most common experiences for all those in uniform - even more common than frontline service. Despite this, and the huge literature on so many aspects of the war, prisoner of war histories have remained a separate and sometimes isolated element in the wider national chronicles of the conflict constructed in the post war era. Prisoners of every nationality had their own narratives of military se...
The Italian Army’s participation in Hitler’s war against the Soviet Union has remained unrecognized and understudied. Bastian Matteo Scianna offers a wide-ranging, in-depth corrective. Mining Italian, German and Russian sources, he examines the history of the Italian campaign in the East between 1941 and 1943, as well as how the campaign was remembered and memorialized in the domestic and international arena during the Cold War. Linking operational military history with memory studies, this book revises our understanding of the Italian Army in the Second World War.
The story of the origin of Vatican Radio provides a unique look at the history of World War II The book offers the first wide-ranging study on the history of Vatican Radio from its origins (1931) to the end of Pius XII’s pontificate (1958) based on unpublished sources. The opening of the Secret Vatican Archives on the records regarding Pius XII will shed light on the most controversial pontificate of the 20th century. Moreover, the recent rearrangement of the Vatican media provided the creation of a multimedia archive that is still in Fieri. This research is an original point of view on the most relevant questions concerning these decades: the relation of the Catholic Church with the Fascist regimes and Western democracies; the attitude toward anti-Semitism and the Shoah in Europe, and in general toward the total war; the relationship of the Holy See with the new media in the mass society; the questions arisen in the after-war period such as the Christian Democratic Party in Italy; the new role of women; and anti-communism and the competition for the consensus in the social and moral order in a secularized society.
Italy in the Second World War: Alternative Perspectives stems from the necessity to write an important page of Second World War history, by focusing on the Italian war experience, which has been overshadowed in international research by the attention given to its senior Axis partner. Drawing extensively on material from Italian and international archives, a team of Italian and international historians, led by Emanuele Sica and Richard Carrier, offers a broad-ranging volume on the war seen through the lens of Italian soldiers and civilians, and populations occupied by the Italian army. Contributors are: Luca Baldissara, Cindy Brown, Federico Ciavattone, Nicolò Da Lio, Paolo Fonzi, Francesco Fusi, Eric Gobetti, Federico Goddi, Andrea Martini, Niall MacGalloway, Amedeo Osti Guerrazzi, Paolo Pezzino, Matteo Pretelli, Nicholas Virtue.
Past (Im)perfect Continuous. Trans-Cultural Articulations of the Postmemory of WWII presents an international and interdisciplinary approach to the comprehension of the postmemory of WWII, accounting for a number of different intellectual trajectories that investigate WWII and the Holocaust as paradigms for other traumas within a global and multidirectional context. Indeed, by exceeding the geographical boundaries of nations and states and overcoming contextual specificities, postmemory foregrounds continuous, active, connective, transcultural, and always imperfect representations of violence that engage with the alterity of other histories and other subjects. 75 years after the end of WWII, this volume is primarily concerned with the convergence between postmemory and underexamined aspects of the history and aftermath of WWII, as well as with several sociopolitical anxieties and representational preoccupations. Drawing from different disciplines, the critical and visual works gathered in this volume interrogate the referential power of postmemory, considering its transcultural interplay with various forms, media, frames of reference, conceptual registers, and narrative structures.
This book is a tribute to the memory of Victor Zaslavsky (1937?2009), sociologist, ‚migr‚ from the Soviet Union, Canadian citizen, public intellectual, and keen observer of Eastern Europe.In seventeen essaysleading European, American and Russian scholars discuss the theory and the history of totalitarian society with a comparative approach. They revisit and reassess what Zaslavsky considered the most important project in the latter part of his life: the analysis of Eastern European - especially Soviet societies and their difficult ?transition? after the fall of communism in 1989?91. The variety of the contributions reflects the diversity of specialists in the volume, but also reveals Zaslavsky?s gift: he surrounded himself with talented people from many different fields and disciplines. In line with Zaslavsky?s work and scholarly method, the book promotes new theoretical and methodological approaches to the concept of totalitarianism for understanding Soviet and East European societies, and the study of fascist and communist regimes in general. ÿ