In our research, we have found many remarkable examples of personal diaries and correspondence from the war period, most of which are previously unpublished. They come primarily from archives in Germany and the United States, others were provided by private individuals, often children and grandchildren of soldiers who served in Italy. Among them are many testimonies that provide valuable literary insights into historical contexts and individual personalities. Worth mentioning are the vivid accounts of the final phase of the war in Italy in Heinrich Voigtel's diary as well as the personal diaries of high-ranking military officers, such as Field Marshal Wolfram von Richthofen, General Hermann Balck and the senior officers Hans Ulrich Schroeder and Josef Moll, who shed light on controversial aspects of the occupation and cooperation with the Republic of Salò from an insider's perspective. Still, others describe the war at the front and the partisan war from a German perspective, such as the diaries of battalion and regiment commanders like Richard Ernst, Georg Zellner, Hans Günther Seraphim and Carl Schulze. Even more numerous are the entries of non-commissioned officers and troop soldiers, such as those of August Lindner, who was drafted into a military command, and those of the young graduate of an artillery unit, Hans Püribauer.

The diaries are kept in numerous archives: the departments of the German Federal Archives in Freiburg and Koblenz respectively, several state archives, the Deutsches Tagebucharchiv (German Diary Archives) in Emmendingen and the Walter Kempowski Archive of the Akademie der Künste (Academy of Fine Arts) in Berlin.