The recruitment of manpower for Germany from Emilia during the two-year period 1943-1945 assumed a wide variety of forms. In the province of Modena, where in the previous five years the bilateral pacts signed between Italy and Germany had seen large numbers of individual workers or peasant families move beyond the Alps due to unemployment, this tradition of peasant emigration to the Reich positively affected, at least initially, public attitudes to the recruitment plans adopted by the Fascist authorities after 8 September 1943. The organisation of conscription, implemented through the mediation of the Fascist trade organisation (Fascist Provincial origanization of…
