Operation Zone of the Alpine Foothills
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The Operation Zone of the Alpine Foothills (German: Operationszone Alpenvorland; Italian: Zona d'operazione Prealpi) was a Nazi German puppet district in the Alpine foothills created in territory seized from Italy during World War II. It was administered as part of the Reichsgau of Tyrol-Vorarlberg.
The Operation Zone was established on 10 September 1943 by the occupying German Wehrmacht, as a countermove to the Allied Armistice with Italy proclaimed two days earlier following the Allied invasion of Italy. It comprised the provinces of South Tyrol, Trentino and Belluno. The Operation Zone of the Adriatic Littoral, comprising the provinces of Udine, Görz (Gorizia), Trieste, Pola, Fiume (Rijeka), Quarnero (Kvarner), and Laibach (Ljubljana), was established on the same day. Both operation zones formally belonged to the Italian Social Republic, which governed those areas of Italy administered from Salò at Lake Garda and not yet occupied by the Allies. The Italian influence was resisted and dismantled by the Germans, who decreed the restoration of the provincial borders of 1919, and forced the resignation of the ethnic Italian mayors who were replaced by German-speaking mayors recruited from the local population identified with the Third Reich (Optanten). In South Tyrol, the Italian names of streets and localities were replaced by German names, or former German names were restored. The effect was a rapid and draconian reversal of the stringent policy of Italianization which had been imposed on the region by the Italian government beginning in the early 1920s.
The Operation Zone was administered by High Commissioner Franz Hofer, who banned political parties and disenfranchised Italian administration in the region, replacing it with "suitable representatives of the German group of peoples."[citation needed] Military units in the region came under the Befehlshaber Operationszone Alpenvorland commanded by General der Infanterie Joachim Witthöft, a former divisional commander in the XXVII Corps of the Wehrmacht.
Primary enforcement of German regulations was performed by the Südtiroler Ordnungsdienst (SOD, the South Tyrol civil police), which had been recruited from the ADO (Arbeitsgemeinschaft der Optanten für Deutschland or Association of Those Choosing Germany). The SOD was also actively involved in the pursuit of the Jews and the well-known “Dableiber” (those who had chosen Italy when they were compelled to declare their allegiance), like Michael Gamper, Friedl Volgger, Rudolf Posch and Josef Ferrari. Many of the Dableiber were current or former Catholic priests and were persecuted by the Germans.
