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>With few exceptions, German soldiers in all three military branches had an extremely negative view of Italians. Wehrmacht troops had difficulty understanding Italian behavior, which they perceived as tantamount to an unwillingness to fight. Their commentary was correspondingly dismissive. Italian behavior was a “tragedy.”646 “If only those blasted Italians…would do something,” one POW carped.647 Other telling excerpts from the protocols: “They have no self-confidence”;648 “They’re in a blue funk”;649 they “were a frightful lot!”650 “The dirty dogs,” groused another German soldier, “give themselves up if they have the slightest trouble!”651 “They’re so terribly soft,” concurred someone else.652 Militarily, Germany’s Italian allies were seen as useless. “You can only consider 130,000 Italians equal to about 10,000 Germans,” reckoned one POW.653 Another joked that every Italian tank carried with it a white flag,654 while someone else quipped that “if [our enemies] were only the Italians then the B.D.M. [the League of German Maidens] and the old peasants from the CHIEMSEE would be quite enough.”655 German soldiers mocked Benito Mussolini’s pretensions: “The Italians are supposed to be descended from the Romans, but the Romans would have achieved more with spears and shields than they have!”656 In short, German soldiers found that Italians “are the worst soldiers we have anywhere in EUROPE"
