by John Keahey
For understanding this way of thinking, a friend recommended Hitler’s Army by Omer Bartov. Many of the soldiers present at Sant’Anna and other northern Italian massacres had first served on the Russian Front. Bartov writes that such soldiers, who had served in the heady days of the unstoppable Blitzkrieg, suddenly were faced in Russia with the reality that the German army was not invincible. The army, he wrote,
accepted Hitler’s view that this was an all-or-nothing struggle for survival, a “war of ideologies” which demanded total spiritual commitment, and thus tried to compensate for the loss of its technological superiority by intensifying the troops’ political indoctrination. This in turn opened the way for an ever-greater brutalization of the soldiers.
This mode of thought, exacerbated by their experiences on the Russian front, made it easy for the German soldiers to use terror against innocent men, women, and children. German military leadership saw it as a way to maintain discipline by giving its soldiers emotional release from the stress of combat.
Nearly all of the German soldiers—as well as Eastern European conscripts and some Italian Fascists wearing German uniforms—who were present at Sant’Anna have passed on, either in subsequent battles or from old age. Only two high-ranking officers, one an Austrian, were charged specifically with civilian killings committed during the German occupation of Italy.
The British, during a 1947 military tribunal in Padua, tried Maj. Gen. Max Simon, head of the Sixteenth SS-Panzergrenadier (mechanized infantry) Division that participated in the events at Sant’Anna, found him guilty, and sentenced him to death. He claimed he did not know anything about what happened there. As the war faded in the memories of European leaders eager to make Germany a full partner in a new Europe, Simon was pardoned and released in 1954. He died in Germany seven years later at age sixty-two.
In 1951 Maj. Walter Reder, an Austrian, was acquitted of what happened in Sant’Anna—prosecutors could not prove he was there. As commander of a reconnaissance battalion in Simon’s division, Reder maintained that during the August 12 massacre, he was in an area along the coast, somewhere between Pietrasanta and Marina di Carrara.
Writer Paolo Pezzino, who offers the most detailed accounting written in English about the event, agrees that Reder and his regiment of young Alsatian men likely were not there. Later evidence showed another regiment of the SS division was in Sant’Anna.
However, Reder was found guilty in an Italian court in Bologna of slaughters elsewhere. As devastating as the event at Sant’Anna was, with at least 560 killed, the biggest massacre in Italy took place over several days in September 1944, in villages around Monte Sole in the Emilia-Romagna region that adjoins Tuscany on the east. There, as we have seen, an estimated nearly 800 partisans and innocent civilians were killed, and whole villages and farms burned to the ground.
Like Simon, Reder was sentenced to death for Monte Sole, but that punishment was commuted to life imprisonment. He served time in the Italian military jail in Gaeta, Italy, a small coastal town north of Naples.
Many in the German-speaking world, who believed that such actions by victors and vanquished alike have been part of warfare since ancient times, were critical of Reder’s sentence. They asserted he was simply a scapegoat for various massacres. Remarkably, some even asserted that the Monte Sole massacre, which followed the August Sant’Anna event and lasted through most of September 1944, never took place.
In the mid-1960s, Reder appealed to the citizens of Marzabotto, a major village on Monte Sole, expressing regret for his role in that series of reprisals and asking them to support his bid for a pardon. Understandably, they refused. Then, in 1985, as memories faded and the number of survivors dwindled, his appeals worked. He was pardoned and, six years later, died in Austria at age seventy-six. According to some reports, he publicly proclaimed, while safely ensconced in his native Austria, that, despite what he said in his two appeals, he really had no remorse for his role in these horrors.
The man who bore ultimate responsibility for incitement to kill Italian civilians, German Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death in 1947. His sentence was commuted to life in prison, but he was released in 1952 on grounds of ill health and died in 1960 at age seventy-four.
For decades, it appeared that no one would ever have to answer for the slaughter at Sant’Anna. Then, in 1995, a government employee found a long-forgotten storage cabinet with its cupboard doors turned toward a wall in a room of the Palazzo Cesi-Gaddi in Rome. In it the employee found an archive of nearly seven hundred files detailing war crimes committed against Italian civilians during Nazi occupation.
It appears that Italian government officials had long before decided to bury these records deep in a dusty archive. They needed the new West Germany as a bulwark against the rising threat of the Soviet Union and wanted to spare the country any embarrassment over Nazi war crimes that occurred fifty years earlier. I suppose we must be grateful that whoever originally handled the documents had saved them, perhaps with the hope that someday the reports might be revealed.
Those documents from what has become known as the armadio della vergogna, or “closet of shame,” revealed the names of several men who participated in the events in Sant’Anna. Modern Germany typically does not extradite its citizens for trials in other countries. So in 2005, ten of those men were tried in absentia in Italy. They were found guilty on June 22 at trial in La Spezia, a coastal port just a few dozen miles northwest of Sant’Anna, and given life sentences. The punishments were never enforced. Those alive today remain free in Germany.
Prosecutors in Stuttgart, Germany, however, began their own inquiries during that 2005 trial. They launched a nearly decade-long investigation into the roles of seventeen former SS soldiers who were part of the unit that participated in the Sant’Anna massacre. On October 1, 2012, the Associated Press reported that prosecutors were shutting down their investigation. The report got scant attention outside of Europe, but in Tuscany it was overwhelming news.
Essentially, no charges would be brought against the eight men out of the original seventeen who were still alive. The evidence, prosecutors said, was “not sufficient.” They may have been part of the unit that carried out the slaughter but, prosecutors averred, there was nothing in the record that pointed to what they, as individuals and low-ranking soldiers, may have done.
Again, there appears to be no justice for the still-living Sant’Anna survivors, now in their late seventies and eighties, or their families. An e-mail from a young friend in Pietrasanta, who alerted me to the German prosecutors’ decision, was full of anger. Once again, she said, justice was being denied.
One of the survivors I had interviewed, Enrico Pieri, echoed my friend’s feelings. He told a reporter from the Florence edition of La Repubblica dated October 1: “I cannot believe that they have decided that such a thing is not possible. It is an offense to all 560 victims and among them innocent women and children; we cannot accept such a verdict.” Survivor Cesira Pardini told the same newspaper: “It is not right. All this is a decision that has no logic.”
Michele Silicani, the mayor of Stazzema, which includes Sant’Anna within its political boundaries, termed the decision one of “scandalous judgment” that has undone years of judicial cooperation between Italians and Germans to bring justice to survivors and their families. “Now this work is demolished,” the mayor said in the Repubblica article.
A German prosecutor quoted in the Florence newspaper said the prosecution “has done everything possible to clarify the responsibilities [of soldiers involved in the massacre]. Even here we feel the weight of our responsibility.”
Then, in April 2013, the German media reported that authorities might reopen the investigation into those former Nazi soldiers and their roles in Sant’Anna. The news came out “following a study by German-Italian historian Carlo Gentile, who has unearthed some weaknesses in the work that was carried out by German prosecutors,” according to an April 12 r
eport in the Italian news agency ANSA. But this effort was for naught. The following month, the attorney general of Stuttgart rejected reopening the investigation.
There have been times when German officials attempted to rectify the Nazi history of atrocities that took place in the peninsula. In April 2002, then–German President Johannes Rau (1999–2004) went to the Monte Sole town of Marzabotto and formally apologized for the massacre along the mountain’s flanks, much like when he apologized, in February 2000, to the Israeli Parliament for the Holocaust. “I bow to the dead,” he told the Italians in 2004. Still, no German leader has ever apologized for Sant’Anna. There would be so many survivors and descendants in too many places, not only in Italy but throughout German-occupied Europe, that deserve such apologies.
In Italy’s Sorrow: A Year of War, 1944–1945, James Holland puts the Italian campaign in a chilling perspective—one that underscores the brutality of war no matter who becomes the victor or the vanquished:
It was unquestionably true that more Italians were being killed by Allied bombing, shellfire, and strafing than were being slaughtered by the Germans; but impersonal deaths as a result of inaccurate fire or mistaken identity can never be viewed in the same light as lining people up against a wall and shooting them in cold blood.
During my time in Pietrasanta, through the spring and summer of 2012, I worried about how I was going to get back to Sant’Anna on Sunday, August 12, for the survivors’ annual commemoration of the tragic events of 1944. The bus usually runs between Pietrasanta and Sant’Anna only on Saturdays, and I knew cars would be unable to drive there because there wasn’t enough room for parking for an event of that magnitude. There was no mention at tourist offices or in event brochures of special buses or any other means to transport participants there.
I considered hiking uphill from Valdicastello, along the narrow mule track the Germans had used sixty-eight years earlier. My wife was visiting, and I wasn’t sure she would agree with that plan. But then a friend at the place where I ate lunch every day told me a man named Enrico had come by looking for me. We called Enrico Pieri, the survivor I had interviewed two months earlier, and he said that a special bus would leave Pietrasanta at seven thirty on Sunday morning, the twelfth. That bus is where Siria Pardini and I reconnected.
I was particularly interested in this commemoration because, for the first time in anyone’s memory, it would be marked by a speech by a high-ranking German: Martin Schulz, president of the European Parliament. Survivors and descendants alike were curious about what he had to say.
Schulz’s speech was launched from the steps of the monument high atop the hill overlooking Sant’Anna and the Ligurian coast. There were at least two thousand Italians present from all over Tuscany. The day was overwhelmingly hot and there was no shade or water offered on this Tuscan hilltop. Some of the elderly survivors sat in wheelchairs, while others, like Enrico, stood stoically throughout. I glanced at Enrico frequently. His expression never changed; his straight-ahead look was of someone facing sixty-eight-year-old memories. Young people, lined along the crest of the hilltop, held long poles hung with the colorful flags of their various villages and towns. It was a lively, congested scene, but no one complained.
Schulz was greeted warmly, and his talk was powerful. As an EU official, Schulz could not speak for Germany and therefore had no apology to offer. But he spoke, through an interpreter, from his heart as a German. I have made minor changes to clarify errors in the translation to English. He said, in part:
Early 1944 Sant’Anna di Stazzema was a pleasant place, a village where the children were happily playing in the yards … and roaming through the narrow streets. A place where girls went to draw water at the fountain of the village and the boys were grazing their flocks on the surrounding hills. [It was] a poor community that welcomed in her womb refugees with whom she shared her meager food. Yes, Sant’Anna di Stazzema was a peaceful village.
Until August 12, 1944: On that day the war showed its most brutal [side]. This paradise became hell. On that day, sixty-eight years ago, was perpetrated a massacre of unprecedented brutality.…
Now I introduce myself to you as a German, deeply shocked by the inhumanity of the massacre perpetrated here in the name of my people. Today I want to commemorate the victims of the massacre. Never forget. Keep the memories alive. Ensure that never again in Europe inhuman ideologies and criminal regimes return to show their hideous grin.
This is the task that we must pass on to the generations that will follow us. It is your merit, the merit of the survivors of Sant’Anna di Stazzema, [that has] kept alive the memory of the victims of the massacre. The monument-ossuary to the martyrs of Sant’Anna di Stazzema became thus a symbol of forgiveness.
Schulz’s talk was periodically broken by spontaneous applause. It is a new Europe, after all. Former enemies are now allies, tied together by a common currency and with individual interests dependent on the stability of one another. Men like Enrico—who had told me he no longer hates Germans, because together all are Europeans—and women like Siria and her sisters, despite being survivors of an unspeakable horror, recognize these ties.
I saw Enrico afterward and asked him about the speech. He could only shrug his shoulders and give a sad smile, his eyes alone betraying immense grief. The memories continue.
* * *
No matter how well I reside in the present, I can’t help but look through the lens of history when I travel throughout Italy, Sicily, and Sardinia. Walking among the stones of Selinunte, that ancient Greek ruin in southwestern Sicily, I imagined the magnificence of the city that once stood here nearly three thousand years ago. I saw myself in the midst of great crowds of toga-clad citizens gathered in the various temples that dot the huge space, now one of the world’s largest archaeological sites with nothing but tumbled stone and a couple of partially reconstructed temples.
In Rome, I once spent ten days in the Forum with a detailed guidebook, trying to divine the jumble of monuments, arches, and piles of stone, and place them in the context of a thousand years of Roman history.
It is not surprising then that, as I wander narrow streets of western Tuscany villages that are buried deep in the foothills of imposing mountains, walk along Ligurian and Tyrrhenian beaches, or drive the narrow, twisty roads, I imagine the impact of history’s most vicious war ever to be fought here.
My discovery of Sant’Anna and learning about its past triggered those thoughts. The need to understand it all grew even stronger when, during my second visit to the village, I stood on the platform of the crypt that contains the bones of hundreds of its victims. Looking far out over a beautiful section of Tuscany’s wild west, I could take in the sweep of coastline, from Pisa in the south to Portovenere in the north. It was along that coast where for centuries pilgrims walked, with heads bowed, toward Rome; where armies marched and fought; where soldiers and innocents died in violence and in sickness; and now where people live in peace and with magnificent views of a historic sea in well-scrubbed small towns and in the midst of vineyards and olive groves.
Sant’Anna survivor Enrico Pieri told me during one of my visits that as a child, in the days before the events of August 12, 1944, he and friends would stand on this same hillside, look toward Pisa and wonder, with the innocence of youth soon to be lost forever, when the Americans would come and drive out the Germans.
* * *
That took a long time—too long for the innocents living here.
On July 19, 1944, three weeks before the Sant’Anna massacre, the American Army, fresh from the June 5 liberation of Rome, had taken over the heavily bombed port city of Livorno, just a few dozen miles southwest of Pisa, and listed on most military maps of the time by the British name “Leghorn.” From there, it was a quick push to the south bank of the Arno River, where American forces arrived on July 23.
This movement northward along the Italian peninsula had begun nearly a year earlier, when the Allies, on September 9, 1943, conducted a major amphib
ious assault at Salerno, south of Naples. That fabled city had fallen to the Allies on October 1, and the British Eighth Army began its move northward along the peninsula’s east coast. The U.S. Fifth Army moved along the west coast. The two armies also protected each other’s flanks in joint operations up the middle, along the slopes and through the valleys of the Apennine Mountains.
Rome had fallen to the Allies on June 5, 1944, following landings south of the Eternal City, along twelve miles of beaches north and south of Anzio and Nettuno. The impact of that effort, known as the Battle for Rome, was staggering. It cost nearly fifty-five thousand Allied casualties and twenty thousand German casualties.
Once past Rome and into Tuscany and its port city of Livorno, the Fifth Army sat for nearly a month. American and English commanders debated whether to abandon the Italian campaign and move Fifth Army troops to France for the push into Germany from the west. That would leave the British Eighth Army and other Allied units in place to stop any German effort to head south again and retake Livorno.
Ultimately, however, the plan for a major shift to France was abandoned. A few units that had participated mightily in the Italian campaigns, from Sicily to Rome, were moved to Marseilles, but most of the Fifth Army remained along the Arno. In fact, as the Italian conflict progressed, at times some Allied units were shifted from France back into northern Italy, where the war would continue along various fronts and across the Gothic Line into the Po Valley between Milan and Venice.
Allied Army divisions representing various nationalities eventually headed north up Italy’s center and east coast, liberating such major targets as Florence and, after a long winter, eventually Bologna. By spring 1945, they broke into the Po Valley. At that point, the war in the European theater was almost over. The German Army in northern Italy surrendered on May 2. Germany itself surrendered in Reims, France, on May 7, with the official end of the war early the next day. Ten days earlier Benito Mussolini and his mistress Clara Petacci had been executed by Italian partisans as the couple attempted to escape into Switzerland, with the hope of flying to Franco’s Spain.