Closet of shame

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Palazzo Cesi - Seat of the General Military Prosecutor's Office (Uffici giudiziari militari superiori)

In the so-called closet of shame (Italian: Armadio della vergogna ) files on German war crimes in Italy during the Second World War were "temporarily archived" between 1960 and 1994 . The cabinet was in Palazzo Cesi , the seat of the General Military Advocacy in Rome . The rediscovery of the files in 1994 resulted in a series of lawsuits. A journalist for the weekly newspaper L'Espresso first used the term closet of shame .

history

After the Cassibile armistice between Italy and the Allies in September 1943, German troops committed numerous war crimes against their former allies. These included mass executions such as on the Greek island of Kefalonia , the mistreatment and exploitation of Italian soldiers as so-called military internees , the deportation and murder of Italian Jews in the extermination camps in the east, and massacres of other civilians, for example in the Ardeatine caves and in Sant'Anna di Stazzema and Marzabotto .

Following demands, in particular from organizations of the Italian resistance , the Foreign Ministry of the government under Ivanoe Bonomi investigated the massacres perpetrated by German troops in Italy from November 1944. In the summer of 1945 the idea of having war crimes prosecuted by the Italian military justice took hold. Accordingly, the existing documents were handed over to the Military Prosecutor General in August 1945. The Allies had reservations about leaving Italy to convict war crimes; Great Britain in particular continued to see the country as a defeated nation. In 1947 and 1948, British military courts sentenced those responsible for the massacre in the Ardeatine Caves as well as high-ranking German officers, including Albert Kesselring , the commander in chief of the German troops in Italy . The death sentences imposed were not carried out; by 1952 all convicts were released early.

According to an investigation by the Italian military justice system in 1999, there were 13 trials with 25 defendants for German war crimes between 1947 and 1965. After the founding of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1949, the severity of criminal prosecution decreased; there was an increasing number of acquittals and considerable reductions in sentences, so that in 1952, Herbert Kappler and Walter Reder, only two convicts were in custody. Compared to countries like France and Denmark, the number of trials in Italy was extremely low, for four reasons are given:

  • Immediately after the end of the war, Italian authorities hesitated to apply to the Allies to transfer war criminals, many of whom were still interned in Italy at the time.
  • Italian authorities saw the danger of a “boomerang effect” as early as 1946 and feared that the demand for the transfer of German war criminals could result in the demand for Italian war criminals to be transferred to Yugoslavia, for example.
  • In 1947 the Allies changed their attitude and only rarely transferred alleged German war criminals to Italy.
  • After the Federal Republic of Germany was founded in 1949, German-Italian relations changed; in particular the government under Alcide De Gasperi sought close relations with the Federal Republic. In 1956, the Italian Foreign Minister Gaetano Martino and the Defense Minister Paolo Emilio Taviani blocked an extradition request from a military tribunal to Germany in order to avoid any impact on the German debate on rearmament .

In 1960, by order of the then general military prosecutor, Enrico Santacroce, around 2000 bundles of files on National Socialist war crimes in Italy were "archived" in the so-called closet of shame . It was a sealed brown wooden cupboard that was kept with the door to a wall and specially secured with an iron grille in Palazzo Cesi, the seat of the General Military Prosecution in Rome near Piazza Navona , until 1994 . Between 1965 and 1968, around 1,300 files were handed over to public prosecutors. These were proceedings against unknown persons with which no charge could be brought. About 20 files went to the Federal Republic. 695 dossiers, in which the names of 415 alleged war criminals were named, remained “archived”. During the time when the files were "archived" in the cabinet of shame , there were only a few war crimes trials in Italy, such as a trial against Josef Oberhauser and Dietrich Allers for the murders in the Risiera di San Sabba concentration camp in 1979 and a trial against Wolfgang Lehnigk in 1994 -Emden because of the Caiazzo massacre . Oberhauser and Lehnigk were sentenced to life imprisonment in their absence, Allers died shortly after the trial began.

The military prosecutor Antonino Intelisano, who was responsible for the Rome district and did not belong to the general authority, discovered the files by accident while he was investigating the case of SS officer Erich Priebke in 1994 . When requesting files from the attorney general's office, a judicial officer opened the forgotten cupboard and discovered heaps of yellowed documents, which were then sent to the local public prosecutor's offices without informing the public. The military prosecutor in Rome, Intelisano, was assigned 129 cases, 214 cases went to La Spezia and 108 cases to Verona .

In 1998, following the conclusion of the Military Tribunal's investigation, the archiving was deemed unlawful . The Italian parliament set up a committee of inquiry, which in February 2006 was unable to agree on a joint final report. The majority report, approved by the center-right parties, could not identify any political motives for delaying the trial and explained the "archiving" of the files with "negligence and superficiality" by those responsible in the military justice system. The minority report of the center-left parties could not prove any individual involvement of politicians, complained about the low willingness of various authorities to cooperate and called for all documents on war crimes to be made publicly available.

Processes after 1994
Between September 29 and October 1, 1944, units of the 16th SS Panzer Grenadier Division "Reichsführer SS" and the German Wehrmacht destroyed the entire region and killed over 770 civilians, according to some sources up to 1,836 people, mainly old men , Women and children.
In Germany, however, this judgment has no practical significance, so that none of the defendants have yet to serve a sentence. This would require a conviction in a German court, which, however, is unlikely due to the German legal situation.

Film adaptations

The Italian documentary The Violin from Cervarolo about the massacre of Italian civilians by German troops in the Reggian Apennines in spring 1944 takes up the background story of the “closet of shame” in its depiction of the trial in Verona .

literature

  • Filippo Focardi: The calculation of the »boomerang«. Politics and legal issues in dealing with German war crimes in Italy. In: Norbert Frei : Transnational politics of the past. How to deal with German war criminals in Europe after the Second World War. Wallstein, Göttingen 2006, ISBN 978-3-89244-940-9 , pp. 536-566.
  • Christiane Kohl: The sky was bright blue. About the raging of the Wehrmacht in Italy. Reportage tape. Picus, Vienna 2004, ISBN 978-3-85452-484-7 .

Web links

See also

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Focardi, Calculus of the "Boomerang" , pp. 536f.
  2. ↑ Focardi, Calculus of the "Boomerang," pp. 539-545.
  3. ^ Focardi, Calculus of the "Boomerang" , pp. 548f.
  4. ^ Focardi, Calculus of the "Boomerang" , pp. 547, 552.
  5. ^ Focardi, Calculus of the "Boomerang" , pp. 549–552.
  6. ↑ a b Focardi, Calculus of the "Boomerang" , p. 560.
  7. ↑ a b Georg Bönisch, Carsten Holm, Hans-Jürgen Schlam: closet of shame . In: Der Spiegel . No. 17 , 2001, p. 56-58 ( online ). An internal investigation by the Italian military judicial authorities was available to the authors of the mirror article.
  8. ^ Focardi, Calculus of the "Boomerang" , p. 562.
  9. ^ Focardi, Calculus of the "Boomerang" , p. 561.
  10. ↑ Report from the library of the Bolzano City Archives by Carla Giacomozzi, Guido Salvini on the “Shame Cabinet”: 1960–1994 “Shame Cabinet” at www.gemeinde.bozen.it.
  11. ↑ Wolfgang Most: The cabinet in the Palazzo Cesi - Late wave of lawsuits against former German soldiers in Italy ( Memento from November 26, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) at www.resistenza.de.
  12. ^ Focardi, Calculus of the "Boomerang" , p. 563.
  13. ↑ a b c Frankfurter Rundschau : Arrest warrants against ex-SS men applied for , June 26, 2007
  14. ↑ http://www.broschuere.resistenza.de/material/broschuere_santanna_web.pdf The massacre of Sant'Anna di Stazzema on August 12, 1944. Material collection 1 for a nationwide campaign to bring charges in Germany , p. 26.