ABSTRACT
United States historians often are confronted with South Tyrol region only in connection with Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler’s foreign policy and the planned resettlement of the South Tyroleans in 1939. The border area South Tyrol played an important role in German, Austrian, and Italian foreign policy ever since. The northern Italian, former Austrian territories of Trento, Bolzano and Belluno were to become Hitler’s “Operational Zone Alpine Forelands,” which played a crucial role in the Third Reich’s strategic policies towards the Austrian/northern Italian borderlands. The Operational Zone/South Tyrol region has emerged as a crucial case study for understanding Nazi Germany in general and its Italian policies in particular. Margareth Lun has written an extensive and in some aspects excellent text about South Tyrol in “the Operational Zone Alpine Forelands” from 1943 to 1945. Lun demonstrates clearly the importance and long-lasting heritage of the twenty months of German civil administration of the “Operational Zone Alpine Forelands".
