Memoiren

Numerous former officers wrote their memoirs after the war, including Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, Ambassador Rudolf Rahn, and General Fridolin von Senger und Etterlin. These usually served as a retrospective justification for their conduct during the Nazi era and the Second World War. In addition, there were later memoirs of former officers of younger years. The descriptions of some well-known literary figures who processed their experiences as soldiers in Italy in the post-war period, mainly on the basis of their diaries, are of remarkable impressiveness.

Early publications of this kind include Gerhard Nebel's writings from 1949 and 1950. The art historian Udo von Alvensleben published his diary written in southern Italy in 1971. Hanns Cibulka, one of the GDR's formative poets, published his memoirs of his time in Sicily in 1989. Other literary works of this format exist by Alfred Petto, Hans Werner Richter, Franz Josef Schneider, Rolf Schroers and Hans-Jürgen Soehring. Today, these important written testimonies have largely been forgotten.

Particularly noteworthy at this point are the records of the conservative writer and Nazi opponent Rudolf Borchardt, which were published by his sons in 2023 and deal with his last months in Italy in 1944.

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