From National Indifference to National Commitment and Back. The Case of the Trentine POWS in Russia during the First World War

This chapter describes the vagaries of the Trentine (or Italian-speaking Tyrolean) POWs of the Austrian-Hungarian Army in Russia during the First World War. Relying on nearly 80 diaries and memoirs by rank-and-file soldiers, Belezza shows how a small minority of convinced Italian nationalists among the Trentine POWs, who became the backbone of the fascist regime in Trentino post-1918, imposed their nationalist reading of the war on the nationally indifferent majority of POWs.