Massacre from Lake Maggiore

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Stumbling blocks in memory of the Meina massacre (2016)

The Lake Maggiore massacres were the first mass murders of Jews in Italy . In September 1943, murdered members of the 1st SS Panzer Division Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler 50 Jews on the Piedmontese side of Lake Maggiore , including 16 guests of the hotel Meina , the massacre of Meina . In addition, there were other murders of Jews in a spatial and temporal context, namely in September in Novara and in October in Intra , so that the number of victims is often given as 56 people. In 1968 the Osnabrück Regional Court convicted a total of five people for this crime; the Federal Court , however, lifted in 1970 the sentences imposed limitation on.

initial situation

In July 1943 it became increasingly uncertain for National Socialist Germany whether it could still count on Italy as an ally. After the Allied landing in Sicily , King Victor Emmanuel III replaced. Benito Mussolini as head of state through Marshal Badoglio ; Mussolini was arrested. In this situation of uncertainty, troops were transferred to Italy as a precaution. The 1st SS Panzer Grenadier Division “Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler” , an elite unit of the Waffen SS , was relocated from the Eastern Front to Northern Italy at the beginning of August 1943. When it became known on September 8, 1943 that the Badoglio government had signed the Cassibile armistice with the Allies, Wehrmacht and SS units occupied the whole country. They took control of the country and also disarmed the Italian soldiers. The 1st battalion of the 2nd regiment of the SS unit under the command of SS-Hauptsturmführer Hans Becker and his deputy, SS-Hauptsturmführer Heinz Roehwer, was transferred to the Novara province near the Relocated west bank of Lake Maggiore.

A number of Jewish families lived on Lake Maggiore at that time. Some had been resident there for a long time, others had withdrawn to this region near the Swiss border before the intensifying repression in fascist Italy, but also before the Allied bombing raids on Italian cities, and still others had been with the help of the Italian consulate from Thessaloniki (Greece ) fled from the persecution of the Jews there by the Germans. Most of them had Italian citizenship; prominent among them were Ettore Ovazza or the former managing director of the tire company Pirelli in London, Mario Luzzatto , others were citizens of Greece, Spain or Turkey.

procedure

Map with the locations of the massacre
Newspaper report from October 23, 1943 in the Libera Stampa , a bi-weekly organ of the Ticino department of the Social Democratic Party of Switzerland (SP) in Lugano , Switzerland

On September 15, 1943 members of the 3rd, 4th and 5th companies of the battalion arrested a number of civilians in a coordinated action in Meina , Arona , Baveno , Mergozzo and Orta San Giulio , whom they considered to be with the help of lists of the local authorities Identified people of Jewish descent. In Baveno, where the battalion headquarters and two companies were based, the arrests may have started on September 13th and continued until September 15th. The same thing happened in Stresa on September 16 and in Pian Nava on September 17 . In all cases, valuables and considerable sums of money were partly stolen and partly extorted. The SS people also committed other crimes; For example , one of the company commanders raped the wife of the caretaker of a villa during a carousing party, the owner of which was Jewish.

In Meina, members of the 4th Company detained 16 hotel guests as Jews in the Grand Hotel there , including members of three families between the ages of 12 and 76 who had fled Salonika. They also arrested the hotel owner's family of five, Jews of Turkish nationality. The number of Jews of different nationalities, different ages and different financial circumstances captured in the other towns was nine in Arona, three in Mergozzo, fourteen in Baveno, four in Stresa, two in Orta and two in Pian Nava. All of these are minimum numbers; possibly more people were affected.

Between September 19 and 22, 1943, a company commanders meeting of the battalion took place in Baveno under the direction of Hauptsturmführer Röhwer, who was in charge of the troop unit while his superior was on vacation. At this meeting, the decision was made to kill the captured Jews and to throw their corpses into Lake Maggiore. The company commanders passed this order on to their subordinates.

On the night of September 22nd to 23rd, a firing squad picked up four of the victims held in Meina in a truck on three trips and shot them all on a forest path. Another squad rowed the corpses out into the lake in boats and sank them after they had weighted them down with the help of wire through iron and rocks. Since at least three of them were floating on the lake the next day and being brought ashore, they could be seen by many residents. The following night the last four of the sixteen Jewish hotel guests were shot in the same way and their bodies removed. In Stresa, too, at least four and in Baveno at least two of the captured Jews were murdered in this way.

The Turkish consul , who was also living in Meina at the time of the raids , stood up for the family of the hotel owner in Meina, Alberto Behar . He argued that the Behars were Turkish citizens and therefore members of a neutral nation and threatened diplomatic entanglements. After the SS officers extorted a substantial sum of money from Behar and an attempt to kidnap him by SS men had failed, the Behar family was actually able to obtain a permit and ultimately escape to Switzerland. All other captured Jews are missing and probably also killed.

After a corpse was driven on the lakeshore of the Swiss part of Lake Maggiore and the anti-Semitic crimes were reported in the Swiss press, the international press became interested in the matter. The Germans therefore felt compelled to investigate the incidents, which was ordered by Theodor Wisch , commander of the 1st SS Panzer Division Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler. The investigation was conducted internally by the SS, as the Waffen SS was not subject to general military jurisdiction. The divisional judges, two SS Hauptsturmführer, came to Lake Maggiore at the end of September or October, interrogated members of the 3rd Company and are also said to have initiated proceedings against the company commanders. The investigation was inconclusive. No files were ever found. At the end of October, the SS unit was relocated to the Eastern Front again.

Legal prosecution and reminder of the crimes

Monument in Meina

In the Federal Republic of Germany , the prosecution of those responsible for the massacre did not begin until 1964. Caused by the impending statute of limitations for murder twenty years after the end of the Nazi regime , six arrest warrants against officers of the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler were put into effect in October. On January 8, 1968, the main hearing against five defendants, including the acting battalion commanders and two company commanders, opened; the sixth defendant had died during the investigation. Three were charged with murder , perpetrated in a cruel manner and with low motives, and racial hatred. After 59 days of trial, 130 witness interviews and the reading of a further 64 testimonies, the Osnabrück Regional Court pronounced three sentences of life imprisonment for the murder of 22 people and two sentences of three years for complicity in murder.

However, the 5th Criminal Senate of the Federal Court of Justice in Berlin overturned all judgments on March 17, 1970, as the offenses were statute-barred . He justified this as follows: It can usually be assumed that National Socialist crimes were only prosecuted after May 8, 1945 and therefore the statute of limitations was suspended until this date (see legal starting point in the statute of limitations debate ). In this special case, however, it cannot be ruled out that the matter is different; because in 1943 the division had initiated judicial investigations into the bodies floating in the lake. It cannot be proven that the proceedings at that time were suppressed or discontinued “for political, racial or religious reasons”. Therefore, the statute of limitations did not rest until 1945, but began to run in 1943. Since the statute of limitations for murder prior to 1969 was twenty years, it expired in October 1963, a year before the 1964 arrest warrants. The appellate body did not deal with the factual findings and legal assessments of the regional court . The Federal Prosecutor's Office stuck to its opinion that the crimes were not statute-barred, but could not get their way.

In Germany, therefore, none of the perpetrators has been legally convicted.

In the case of the Caiazzo massacre , on March 1, 1995, the Federal Court of Justice relied on the judgment of 1970 and declared this crime to be statute barred.

Further murders on Lake Maggiore: killing of the Ovazza family

On October 9 and 11, 1943, members of the 2nd company of the same battalion murdered the Italian Jew Ettore Ovazza and his entire family in their base, the girls' elementary school in Intra , and burned the bodies in the boiler room there. Company commander Meir was later acquitted in several legal proceedings in Austria for lack of evidence. He was able to live there unmolested as a teacher, most recently in a position as school director. In Italy, a trial against Meir was held in absentia in 1955, in which he was sentenced to life imprisonment, which was not applied because Austria did not extradite him. In Verbania the matter was soon forgotten. It was not until 1983 that a plaque in honor of the Ovazza family was hung in the former girls 'school, which is now the residents' registration office.

literature

Sources and historical works
  • Mauro Begozzi: Scomparsi nel nulla! La prima strage di ebrei in Italia sulle sponde del lago Maggiore (in German: Disappeared in nothing! The first massacre of Jews in Italy on the shores of Lake Maggiore ). In: Geschichte und Region - Storia e regione , 18th year, 2009, issue 1, Studienverlag Wien / Innsbruck / Bozen, pp. 81–96 (available in the internet archive: PDF; 373 kB ( memo from 23 September 2011 on the internet Archives )). Mauro Begozzi, historian, is the scientific director of the Istituto storico della Resistenza e della società contemporanea nel Novarese e nel Verbano Cusio Ossola “Piero Fornara” in Novara, Italy.
  • Justice and Nazi crimes . Collection of German criminal judgments for Nazi homicidal crimes , Volume XXX. K. G. Saur Verlag, Amsterdam / Munich 2004, ISBN 3-598-23821-5 , here: court decisions of the proceedings , serial no. 685.
  • Lutz Klinkhammer : Stragi naziste in Italia. La guerra contro i civili (1943-1944). Donzelli, Rome 1997; there in particular the chapter Eccidi sul lago Maggiore .
  • Giovanni Galli: 400 Nomi. L'archivio sulla deportazione novarese: un progetto in corsa ( Memento of February 2, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) . In: Sentieri della Ricerca , No. 6, 2008, pp. 21-62.
  • La strage dimenticata: Meina September 1943, il primo eccidio di ebrei in Italia - Con la testimonianza della superstite Becky Behar (Passio). Interlinea, Novara 2003, ISBN 88-8212-417-7 .
  • Francesca Elisabetta Mafrici: I procedimenti del tribunale militare contro militari tedeschi per reati commessi in Italia 1943–1945: La strage di Meina. Tesi di laurea, Università degli studi di Torino, Facoltà di scienze della formazione, 2000/2001.
  • Marco Nozza: Hotel Meina: La prima strage di ebrei in Italia. Mondadori, Milan 1993 (1st edition), ISBN 8-804-37577-9 . New edition 2008 by Il Saggiatore Tascabile.
  • Aldo Toscano: L'olocausto del lago Maggiore (September – October 1943). In: Bollettino storico della Provincia di Novara 84.1 (1993), pp. 3-98.
Fiction

Movie

  • Carlo Lizzani: Hotel Meina. Titania Produzioni et al., 2007.
  • Christian Walther: The Meina massacre. A political thriller and its true story. - Kulturplatz from April 11, 2007; Swiss television 1; cultural place. Broadcast on April 11, 2007.

See also

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The information in this section is essentially based on the most comprehensive document on the murders, namely the factual determination in the judgment of the Osnabrück Regional Court, in: Justiz und NS-Verbrechen , Volume XXX. Later research revealed some minor modifications, which are included with reference to the source.
  2. ↑ So at least Klinkhammer 1997, p. 60ff., And Galli 2008, p. 35 ff.
  3. ↑ The arrests in Pian Nava are described by Galli 2008, p. 39.
  4. ↑ See the photo with the newspaper report from October 23, 1943 in the "Libera Stampa", which was then published every two weeks, an organ of the Socialist Party Ticinese, the Ticino department of the Social Democratic Party of Switzerland (SP) in Lugano, Switzerland
  5. ↑ The file number: 17 Ks 3/67 for the proceedings before the Osnabrück Regional Court, 5 StR 218/69 for the proceedings before the Federal Court of Justice. See: Justice and Nazi Crimes , Volume XXX. See also Sven Felix Kellerhoff : 68 series: Five SS criminals are charged . In: Die Welt , January 7, 2008 ( online ); However, Kellerhoff is wrong about the reason for the statute of limitations, as the BGH judgment published in Justice and Nazi Crimes shows. Cf. also Giuliana Cardosi: La giustizia negata. Clara Pirani, nostra madre vittima delle leggi razziali . Varese 2005, p. 29 f. The names of the accused are given as Hans Friedrich Röhwer, Hans Krüger, Karl Schnelle, Oskar Schultz and Ludwig Leithe, cf. Mauro Begozzi: Scomparsi nel nulla! La prima strage di ebrei in Italia sulle sponde del lago Maggiore . In: Geschichte und Region - Storia e regione , 18th year, 2009, issue 1, pp. 81–95, here p. 89 ( PDF; 373 kB ( Memento from 23 September 2011 in the Internet Archive )).
  6. ↑ Cf. Kerstin Freudiger: The legal processing of Nazi crimes , Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen 2002, p. 132 ff .; see. BGH judgment of March 1, 1995, Az.StR 331/94 Rn. 28.
  7. ↑ Alexander Stille : Benevolence and Betrayal: Five Italian Jewish Families Under Fascism . London 1993, ISBN 0-09-922341-4 , p. 318.
  8. ↑ http://www.fctp.it/movie_item.php?id=217&type=1