During Operation Barbarossa—the official name of the Nazi military campaign in the Soviet Union—the Russian Cossack population, who had already sided with the Whites during the Russian Civil War, saw the Germans as liberators and decided to aid them by forming the Wehrmacht's 162nd Turkmen Division. After the war turned in the Soviets' favour and the German army was forced to withdraw from Russia, the Soviets forced the Cossacks to follow suit to avoid Stalin's particular vengeance. Thus was born one of the most grotesquely ironic experiments in Nazi ethnic engineering.

After the defeat at Stalingrad, the Wehrmacht continued to retreat further and further from Russian territory, and the promise to resettle the allied Cossack people in a territory where they could return to an everyday life remained unfulfilled. From Poland, they moved to Carinthia, and from Carinthia to the Julian Alps. It was here that they found the solution: a territory where the Slavic and Italian populations would have no right to complain about their new cohabitant. The vast Cossack masses arrived in Friuli in the autumn of 1943, disrupting the region's already complex social and ethnic landscape.

The 60,000 Friulians settled in the area at the time were astonished by these people so different from their own and began to call them simply "the Mongols." The Cossacks immediately felt at ease and divided the territories granted to them as if they were in their homeland. They divided the territories into districts called okrugi and, further, into villages called stanicy, bringing with them a lifestyle of war and land plundering in a constant search for food for their animals.

The native inhabitants were shocked and treated the newcomers as if they were despoiling the little that the war years had not yet taken from their mouths. The Cossacks committed sexual and other acts of violence against the population and devastated the countryside because of their 4,000 horses. The end of their stay, however, was only a matter of time—or, more precisely, years. Indeed, when the German army was forced to abandon Julian territory due to the imminent Nazi capitulation in 1945, the Cossacks were captured by the British and later handed over to the revenge-thirsty Soviets. Many of them, rather than return to their homeland, drowned themselves in the Drava River with their women and children; all the others disappeared into the Gulag labour camps in Siberia.