Die Italiener an der Ostfront, 1942-43

The myth that the Italian people and armed forces were ‘the good guys’ of the Axis alliance has had a long career both in Italy and abroad. The genocidal zeal of Italy's German ally might indeed make Fascist Italy's troops seem the ‘brava gente’ of patriotic post-1945 Italian historiography. Yet the collective amnesia surrounding Italian war crimes is now receding; since the 1990s a new generation of Italian historians has begun to explore Italian occupation policy in the Balkans and racial policy at home. Mussolini's two years of campaigning in Russia nevertheless still figure merely as the most salient instance of Italian victimhood: two-fifths of the 230,000 officers and men committed against Soviet Russia by late 1942 never returned. Thomas Schlemmer has added notably to our knowledge with an imaginatively researched and carefully assembled collection of documents, culled from Italian and German archives, that explore Italy's contribution to

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