Caiazzo massacre

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The Caiazzo massacre was a war crime committed by the German Wehrmacht , in which 22 defenseless people - men, women and children - were murdered. The war crime took place during the Second World War on October 13, 1943 at Monte Carmignano near Caiazzo north of Naples . In a criminal trial which, with 15 victims, concerned only part of the crime, the following findings were made by the Koblenz Regional Court against Lieutenant Wolfgang Lehnigk-Emden (1922-2006), who was charged with the murder of 15 people and was 20 years old at the time :

Starting position

“In order to stop the further advance of the Allied troops, the German army command had decided to first set up a battle line north of the Volturno River . The defendant was deployed with his regiment on the Volturno near the city of Caiazzo. As a company officer, he was platoon leader of the 1st platoon of a company of the 1st Battalion in the 29th Panzer Grenadier Regiment of the 3rd Panzer Grenadier Division . The defendant's unit belonged to the 10th Army and to the area of ​​command of Field Marshal Kesselring as Commander in Chief South, later Southwest.

On September 14, 1943, the German commanders asked the population of Caiazzo to surrender all weapons. Civilians were used to work to fortify the German positions. At the beginning of October 1943 Caiazzo was forcibly evacuated. The inhabitants sought refuge in farmhouses in the area and in the woods. Among the people evacuated from Caiazzo were the families P. and M., who had moved to Monte Carmignano to live with the families A. and D. in two farmhouses. On October 13, 1943, the royal Italian government declared war on the German Reich . On that day the defendant's company set up its command post on Monte Carmignano near Caiazzo in a farm. After dark the company commander temporarily left the unit and transferred command to the defendant.

First escalations

A rumor had surfaced in the company that flashing signals with a lamp in the direction of the US lines had been given from a farmhouse below the company command post. The defendant went with Sergeants S. and G. to the farmhouse below for clarification. There they met men and women from the P. and M. families who had found accommodation there after the evacuation. The defendant and his companion arrested all four men present and brought them to the company command post. The group was also followed by three women who wanted to get the men released. At the company command post, the defendant ordered the four men and three women to be shot because he was convinced that they were the ones who had used light signals to reveal the location of the German positions to the nearby US troops. The arrested persons were not heard before the execution because there was no interpreter and none of the German soldiers spoke Italian. All seven people were then shot immediately in front of the company command post with the participation of the defendant and Sergeants S. and G. ”(The prosecution had legally classified this incident as a statute-barred manslaughter. The subject of the indictment was the following second incident).

The further course

“After the first shooting, the defendant and S. and G. went to the company command post, where there were other German soldiers. There was a general discussion on how to get rid of the bodies. The defendant finally pointed out that there were other people in the house below. When the four men were arrested, he discovered that numerous women and children were still in the house. The defendant now decided to kill these people too. He explained to the others that they should also be shot. The defendant said: 'We will now go downstairs and finish off the others, let's take hand grenades with us.' The defendant then went back to the farmhouse with S. and G. There he and his two companions killed 15 people using hand grenades, submachine guns, rifles and pistols, five of them women and ten children between the ages of 4 and 14 years. The victims of the crime belonged to the families D., P., A. and S. The killings took place inside the farmhouse. People who tried to escape were shot dead in front of the house and in its immediate vicinity. One of the victims was five months pregnant.

The defendant and his companions then returned to the company command post. Some of the soldiers present were very angry about the defendant's behavior. The witness M. had said to his comrades that what was happening down there was a shame for the German armed forces. However, the soldiers did not dare to call the accused as a superior officer. In particular, the incidents were not reported to the superior department.

Due to Allied attacks in the context of the Battle of Volturno, the German position in which the defendant was found had to be given up that same evening. After the German troops had withdrawn, the bodies were discovered in the two farmhouses on the morning of October 14, 1943. On October 16, 1943, the area was occupied by US troops. The Italian witnesses reported the massacre. The defendant and his unit were taken prisoner by the US on November 4 or 5, 1943. A US officers commission of the military secret service under the then US officer Hans Habe initiated an investigation. I interrogated Lehnigk-Emden and confessed to murdering the women and children. Lehnigk-Emden managed to escape from US custody a little later. ”The interrogation files were handed over to the Italian government. But the Italian government did nothing. 26 years after the fact, Simon Wiesenthal filed a complaint. However, the Munich public prosecutor dropped the proceedings in the spring of 1970 because the alleged perpetrators could not be found. An American-Italian hobby historian continued to investigate in the late 1980s and in 1988 filed a complaint with the competent court in Santa Maria Capua Vetere . This enabled the main culprits to be identified. The main perpetrator, Lehnigk-Emden, was taken into custody in Germany in 1992. Until then, Lehnigk-Emden had lived unchallenged as an architect and SPD councilor in Ochtendung . He even received a small war victim pension.

The process

The Federal Court of Justice confirmed the discontinuation of the proceedings against the alleged main offender due to the statute of limitations , but made it clear within the cost decision that it considered the crime to be proven.

See also

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Catalog of the German National Library: Lehnigk-Emden, Wolfgang
  2. ↑ Hans Habe: I introduce myself - my life story. Desch, Munich 1954, p. 453.
  3. ^ Kerstin Freudiger: The legal processing of Nazi crimes. Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen 2002, ISBN 3-16-147687-5 . P. 30 ff.
  4. ^ Judgment of the BGH of March 1, 1995, Az. 2 StR 331/94, NJW 1995, 1297.

Coordinates: 41 ° 10 ′ 22.8 "  N , 14 ° 23 ′ 16.4"  E