Fivizzano massacre

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Georeferencing Map with all coordinates: OSM | WikiMap


The Fivizzano massacres took place between the beginning of May and mid-September 1944 in the districts of Sassalbo, Mommio, San Terenzo, Bardine di San Terenzo, Vinca and Tenerano, which belong to the Italian municipality of Fivizzano ( ⊙ ) in the province of Massa-Carrara ( Tuscany ). Around 400 residents were killed by units of the Waffen-SS , the Wehrmacht and the fascist paramilitary black brigades ( Brigate Nere ), including women and children. In 2009, a military court in Rome sentenced nine members of the military who were involved in the massacres16. SS Panzer Grenadier Division “Reichsführer SS” in absentia to life imprisonment, which Germany never extradited. In August 2019, the German Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier asked for forgiveness for the war crimes committed by Germans at a memorial event in Fivizzano.

massacre

In the course of the Second World War , strong Italian partisan organizations operated in the area of ​​the Apuan Alps from autumn 1943 until the expulsion of the Wehrmacht, which was defending the so-called Gotenlinie . These groups fought the German occupation forces by either destroying or severely damaging roads, bridges and railroad lines and the German supply routes with acts of sabotage. Various military units were deployed to “fight gangs”, as it was then called . In Fivizzano, the reconnaissance department of the 16th SS Panzer Grenadier Division "Reichsführer SS" under the leadership of SS-Sturmbannführer Walter Reder committed serious war crimes . Members of the division led by SS-Gruppenführer Max Simon had already been involved in war crimes in Italy before the events in Fivizzano and a little later also took part in the Marzabotto massacre . The German troops were partially supported by units of the fascist Black Brigades and other units of the puppet state Repubblica Sociale Italiana (RSI).

In the massacres listed below, only the largest are shown. Other civilians were also murdered in other parts of the municipality of Fivizzano. A total of around 400 residents were killed.

Mommio massacre

On May 4th and 5th, 1944, the first operation against partisans in the municipality of Fivizzano took place in the district of Mommio ( ⊙ ). The action was under the direction of Colonel Kurt Almers, commander of the fortress brigade 135. The reconnaissance department of the Parachute Panzer Division 1 Hermann Göring and units of the RSI including the Xª MAS , a total of around 2000 men, were also involved. After a brief firefight with partisans, the German and Italian units occupied Mommio. During the subsequent search of the place, material was found that the Allies had dropped with parachutes. As reprisals, 22 male residents, including 19 civilians, were shot and the place was set on fire. Some of the victims were also tortured for information.

Sassalbo massacre

On May 5, 1944, the population of Sassalbo ( ⊙ ) fled to the mountains because of acts of revenge, but 16 Italian men were captured and then shot in the town's piazza.

Bardine di San Terenzo massacre

Reder's reconnaissance department of the 16th SS Panzer Grenadier Division "Reichsführer SS" was relocated from the front on the Arno to the rear between Carrara and Marina di Carrara around mid-August 1944 . In a three-hour battle early in the morning of August 17th after the partisan attack on the bridge of Bardine di San Terenzo ( ⊙ ), a village in the municipality of Fivizzano, 16 German soldiers were killed, including the leader of the group, an SS Untersturmführer . This was the partisan operation with the most losses ever for this SS division. One of the partisans fell and two were injured. When the German soldiers were recovering their victims that afternoon, numerous houses in Bardine di San Terenzo were destroyed and two residents were shot. The residents fled the village because they suspected further acts of revenge.

Two days later, on August 19, 1944, the Feldgendarmerie came to the village in the presence of SS-Obersturmbannführer Helmut Looß and brought 53 civilians into the village who had been identified as supposed helpers of the partisans in the massacre of Sant'Anna di Stazzema . They were tied to the destroyed military trucks with barbed wire around their necks. They then shot the victims' legs and feet, so that they were slowly strangled to death by the barbed wire. This method was later used in other places, for example in Casalecchio near Bologna, Italy .

Massacre of Valla and San Terenzo Monti

On August 19, 1944, the 16th SS Panzer Reconnaissance Division circled the area around Bardine di San Terenzo further and combed it. In the process, they came across women, children and old people who had hidden outside the village. This group of 103 defenseless people was held for hours in a farm called Valla and then shot by SS men with a machine gun. A woman managed to escape and a 7-year-old girl survived because she pretended to be dead and thus avoided being shot in the neck. In the town of San Terenzo Monti, the parish priest was shot for allegedly collaborating with the partisans .

At the same time, Walter Reder was with officers in the village trattoria in San Terenzo Monti ( ⊙ ) for lunch. The innkeeper who had to serve the military did not yet know that at the same time his wife and five children were shot on Reder's orders.

Vinca massacre

The massacre from August 24th to 27th, 1944 in the village of Vinca ( ⊙ ) was carried out by the 16th SS tank reconnaissance unit, anti-aircraft and transport and SS and air force field division units. The militia of the Italian fascist "Black Brigades" from Carrara with 100 men under Colonel Giulio Lodovici were also involved in this massacre . The external reason was a partisan attack on a German military vehicle on August 18, 1944 on the road between Vinca and Monzone, in which an officer was killed. On August 21, 1944, the "anti-partisan campaign" in Vinca and other actions at the headquarters in Massa were discussed. There, SS-General Max Simon, who was responsible for this section, gave SS-Obersturmbannführer Helmut Looß the order to prepare for the actions. Looß was the head of the security service in the division, he worked out a detailed plan, not only examining the conditions of the territory, but also taking into account the results of espionage and information from fascist collaborators . On August 21, 1944, he briefed 20 officers at headquarters in the plan and their tasks. Walter Reder was commissioned with the implementation. Another meeting of the command officers took place in Carrara on August 23, 1944, led by Walter Reder, who was again given command by Max Simon.

In military terms, the action was referred to as a comb through action against partisans, which had the goal of leaving scorched earth behind. In reality it was a prepared massacre of civilians. The area of ​​operation was relatively large, so units of the rear division gave up troops. In addition to Reder's tank reconnaissance unit, soldiers from the tank and flak department, the field replacement battalion and the escort company were also involved. Furthermore, the Wehrmacht gave up soldiers from the 3rd High Mountain Infantry Battalion, the 40th Jäger Regiment and the 20th Air Force Field Division. The fascist Black Brigades of the regional Brigate Nere from Carrara were involved with hundreds of militiamen in the action. A total of about 1500 to 2000 men were employed in a large quarry area of ​​Carrara marble, which is criss-crossed by tunnels, gorges and caves. The area was difficult to access.

On August 24, 1944 at 9:00 am, the first German company entered the village of Vinca, carried out the first shootings and destroyed numerous buildings. The other units "cleaned up" the village area together with the Brigate Nere. The Brigate Nere acted particularly cruelly. They killed women, children and the elderly without consideration. 29 children and women were killed above Vinca, 14 in Vallo di Vinca, seven in Foce di Vinca and one woman and five children in Aquabomba. The historian Carlo Gentile explains the cruelty of the Brigate Nere by the fact that the territory of Vinca and Monzone was firmly in the hands of the left, with even one of the few military units on the left defending itself against the Italian fascists with bomb attacks. Gentile also assumes that there must have been fights with the partisans, because in the course of the actions a pioneer and an SS sergeant major lost their lives. The destruction was extremely extensive: 600 individual farms and 17 villages, including the “main camp Vinca”, were destroyed. In addition to Vinca, the villages "Guardine, Gronda, Redicesi, Resceto, Colonnata , Bedizzano, Miseglia, Viano, Soliera, Monzone Alto, Monzone Basso and Equi Terme" were destroyed. After the massacre ended on August 27, 1944, the army reported 1635 arrested Italians who had been transferred to work in Germany. At the end of August 1944, the total number of those murdered was 174 people, mostly old people, women and children.

Tenerife massacre

On September 13, 1944, 16 people were killed in another partisan action in the Tenerife district ( ⊙ ). After the attempt to form a group of partisans had failed, members of the 16th SS Panzer Reconnaissance Division killed 16 family members, including five children, from two farms in Tenerife and then set the bodies on fire.

Work-up

Prosecution

The massacres were hushed up for a long time during the Cold War and hardly prosecuted by the responsible legal authorities in Italy and Germany. If there were convictions shortly after the end of the war, the pronounced judgments were usually greatly mitigated in retrospect. After the files on the massacres were found in the so-called closet of shame in Italy in 1994, it was not until 2009 that a verdict was reached on nine German military personnel directly involved in the massacres of Fivizzano. The judgments pronounced at the time were never carried out because Germany did not extradite (see below in the text).

  • SS General Max Simon, the division commander of the 16th SS Panzer Grenadier Division "Reichsführer SS", was sentenced to death in 1947 by a British military court in Padua for several massacres. The sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, but Simon was released in 1954.
  • In 1950, eleven members of the Black Brigades were sentenced to life imprisonment by an Italian military court in Perugia, among other things for participating in the Vinca massacre , but the sentences were subsequently softened.
  • Walter Reder was sentenced to life imprisonment by the military tribunal in Bologna in 1951 and released in 1985. The parole originally ordered by the Bari Military Court was converted into an amnesty by the Craxi government after various parties in Austria asked for leniency in the matter.
  • On June 26, 2009, a military court in Rome sentenced nine members of the 16th SS Panzer Reconnaissance Division in absentia to life imprisonment for multiple particularly serious murders after they were rediscovered in the "Shame Cabinet". The convicts had to bear the legal costs and pay compensation to the civil co-plaintiffs. Germany never extradited the convicts.
  • In 2011, the military court in Verona sentenced four former members of the Parachute Panzer Division 1 Hermann Göring to life imprisonment for the war crimes committed in Mommio . In 2012, the Rome Military Tribunal acquitted the three surviving accused, whereupon the Supreme Court of Cassation reopened the case in 2014 and brought charges against the two surviving accused.
  • Helmut Looß, the strategic planner of the gruesome massacre, was never charged. From 1945 until his retirement in 1975 he was a teacher in Bremen.

Remembrance and aftermath

In the Vinca cemetery there is a memorial stone made of Carrara marble , and on the level above the cemetery there is a sculpture reminiscent of a Gisant , which shows a mother with child on a sarcophagus . Next to the memorial stone there are plaques with the names of the murdered. In the piazza in Vinca there is a memorial stone that commemorates the massacre.

The 2018 film Il nome del padre ( In the name of the father ) deals with a drama that emerges when a Bavarian lawyer discovers that his father was involved in the massacres of San Terenzo Monti and Vinca . The German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier asked in Italy in 2019 for forgiveness for the war crimes committed by Germans.

"I ask you for forgiveness for the crimes that Germans have committed here. I stand in front of you today as the German Federal President and feel nothing but shame about what Germans have done to you," he said in August 2019 at a memorial event in Fivizzano.

literature

  • Friedrich Andrae: Also against women and children: the war of the German armed forces against the civilian population in Italy 1943–1945 . Piper, Munich 1995, ISBN 3-492-03698-8 .
  • Carlo Gentile: Political Soldiers. The 16th SS Panzer Grenadier Division "Reichsführer-SS" in Italy in 1944. In: Sources and research from Italian archives and libraries. 81, 2001, pp. 529-561.
  • Carlo Gentile: Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS in Partisan War: Italy 1943–1945. Schöningh, Paderborn 2012, ISBN 978-3-506-76520-8 . (Cologne, Univ., Diss., 2008.)
  • Lutz Klinkhammer : Stragi naziste in Italia. Donzelli, Roma 1997, ISBN 88-7989-339-4 .
  • Luigi Leonardi: La strage nazifascista di Vinca. 24 agosto 1944. Mursia, Milan 2015, ISBN 978-88-425-5158-4 .
  • Gerhard Schreiber : German war crimes in Italy - perpetrators, victims, prosecution. Beck, Munich 1996, ISBN 3-406-39268-7 .

See also

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier asked for forgiveness in Italy for the war crimes committed by Germans. from August 25, 2019, on Spiegel Online. Retrieved August 25, 2019.
  2. ↑ a b c d e Marianne Wienemann: Late judgments for the forgotten massacre in Fivizzano 1944 , on resistance. Retrieved August 26, 2019.
  3. ↑ a b Episodio di Mommio Fivizzano 04–05 May 1944. In: straginazifasciste.it. Retrieved August 26, 2019 (Italian).
  4. ↑ a b Le stragi nazifasciste del 1944 in the Comune di Fivizzano. In: comune.fivizzano.ms.it. Retrieved August 26, 2019 (Italian).
  5. ↑ Franco Guistolisi: L'Armadio della vergonga (Italian), on carnialliberal1994. Retrieved August 26, 2019.
  6. ^ Carlo Gentile: Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS in Partisan War: Italy 1943–1945 . Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh, Paderborn 2012, ISBN 978-3-506-76520-8 . P. 227
  7. ^ A b Carlo Gentile: Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS in Partisan War: Italy 1943–1945 . Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh, Paderborn 2012, ISBN 978-3-506-76520-8 . P. 228
  8. ^ Carlo Gentile: Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS in Partisan War: Italy 1943–1945 . Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh, Paderborn 2012, ISBN 978-3-506-76520-8 . P. 226
  9. ↑ Looß, Helmut (1910–1986) on Memorial Sites Europe 1939–1945 . Retrieved August 28, 2019.
  10. ↑ a b c Gianluca Fulvetti , Marco Conti: Vinca Fivizzano 24-27.08.1944 (Massa-Carrara - Toscana) (Italian), on Atlante delle Stragi Naziste e Fasciste in Italia. Retrieved August 26, 2019.
  11. ^ Carlo Gentile: Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS in Partisan War: Italy 1943–1945 . Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh, Paderborn 2012, ISBN 978-3-506-76520-8 . P. 229
  12. ^ Carlo Gentile: Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS in Partisan War: Italy 1943–1945 . Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh, Paderborn 2012, ISBN 978-3-506-76520-8 . P. 230
  13. ^ Carlo Gentile: Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS in Partisan War: Italy 1943–1945 . Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh, Paderborn 2012, ISBN 978-3-506-76520-8 . P. 231
  14. ^ Carlo Gentile: Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS in Partisan War: Italy 1943–1945 . Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh, Paderborn 2012, ISBN 978-3-506-76520-8 . P. 232
  15. ^ Carlo Gentile: Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS in Partisan War: Italy 1943–1945 . Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh, Paderborn 2012, ISBN 978-3-506-76520-8 . P. 230
  16. ↑ Tenerife. Retrieved August 26, 2019 (Italian).
  17. ↑ VINCA FIVIZZANO August 24-27, 1944 . Atlante della Strage Naziste et Fasciste in Italia, accessed August 27, 2019.
  18. ↑ Elke Fröhlich: The challenge of the individual: Stories about resistance and persecution . Oldenbourg 1983, ISBN 3-486-42411-4 , p. 256.
  19. ↑ È morto il carnefice di Marzabotto. In: ricerca.repubblica.it. May 3, 1991, accessed August 27, 2019 (Italian).
  20. ^ Hans-Jürgen-Schlamp: Crimes of the Wehrmacht in Italy. 165 murders per day , from December 19, 2012, on Spiegel Online . Retrieved August 25, 2019.
  21. ^ Ernst Klee: The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich . Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2003, ISBN 3-10-039309-0 , p. 379.
  22. ↑ Vinca , on Memorials Europe. Retrieved August 25, 2019.
  23. ↑ Il nome del padre (English), on imdb. Retrieved August 26, 2019.