Sardinia, July 1943

During the Wehrmacht’s short stay on the island, relations between the German and Italian troops and the populace were not marked by much conflict. However, the military units arriving on the island in early summer and largely housed in camps and barracks struggled to get used to the new environment—the rough climate, water scarcity, and malaria. The disease was widespread in the Campidano area, where the troops were concentrated to defend against a possible enemy landing. The photos of Robert Büschgens collected in this section show some aspects of the correspondent’s daily life. The images capture military units receiving newspapers, undergoing malaria prophylaxis, and moments of leisure and relaxation.

Due to concerns about an Allied landing on the Sardinian coast, certain beaches were fortified for military use. This was the case with Cagliari’s Poetto beach and its bathing facilities, the Lido and the Casotti. In the background we see the profile of the Sella del Diavolo, the promontory south of the city.

For German soldiers, Sardinia was an archaic and mysterious world - a world they only partly understood. Numerous photographs taken by PC soldiers depict scenes from civilian life. As with the landscape photography, the interest here was motivated by the photographer’s ‘touristic gaze’. In the concrete case of Robert Büschgens’ series of photos taken in the Campidano area, the focus is on the socioeconomic reality of farmers and farming. Farmers are shown doing work in the fields, or else in moments of rest, the families sitting before their houses. 

Robert Büschgens was not a professional photographer but rather a writer. Born in 1906, in 1931 he wrote the modestly successful play ‘Der Vagabund und das Mädchen’ together with the expressionist writer Reinhard Goering. Shortly before the war’s outbreak, he worked as one of the scriptwriters for Eduard von Borsody’s anti-American propaganda film “Sensationsprozeß Casilla”.

Büschgens’ photos express little distance from the portrayed farming people, rather revealing a certain curiosity. His propagandistic intentions are above all evident in his printed articles. In his text titled ‘Ernte auf Sardinien’ (Harvest in Sardinia), published on 31 July 1943 in the Breisgauer Nachrichten newspaper, he described his impressions of a primordial island: a place where modern technology heralded itself either benevolently with German war reporters’ cameras or in a deadly way through the attacks of Allied planes. In reality, the Allied air attacks in Sardinia mainly targeted military bases, harbours, and Wehrmacht encampments—not so much civilian infrastructure.