This study aims to analyze the reasons and the dynamics that brought the Cossacks to
collaborate with the Nazi Germany during the World War II and to understand what drove the
fighting troops and their civilian refugees to follow the German troops from the Don Region to
Ukraine, Poland, Italy and eventually to Austria.
Starting from the political and military context, this article analyses the formation of
the troops, the different phases of the Cossacks retreat in Poland, the allocation of the
military contingent and the civilian population that was following it in Friuli and Carnia,
the delivery of the Cossacks to the Soviet Union by the British at the end of the war.
In this work, for the first time, Italian publications and documents have been compared with the
Russian ones.
Then they have been consistently used to understand the complex phenomenon of the Cossacks
collaborating with the Nazi Germany.
