Anatomy of a Massacre

How the SS Got Away with War Crimes in Italy

Christian Jennings

• Publisher: The History Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780750995191
• eBook ISBN: 9780750997041
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Italian History
• Index: History

At dawn on 12 August 1944, German SS troops arrived in the Tuscan mountain village of Sant'Anna di Stazzema. On arrival, they proceeded to murder up to 560 Italian civilians in the olive groves and chestnut woods of the small hamlet. The victims were women, the elderly, and more than eighty children. One was a baby barely three weeks old.

It was the most high-profile massacre committed by the Germans in Italy – and yet, despite three separate war crimes investigations, the Sant'Anna killers escaped justice.

Sixty years later, ten of the SS men who were at Sant'Anna were sentenced to life imprisonment in absentia by Italian courts, but they died free.

Anatomy of a Massacre tells the full story of what happened at Sant'Anna di Stazzema – from Tuscany to Rome and Germany – and tries to answer the question: why were the survivors denied justice?

1

ITALY SURRENDERS

In the early hours of the morning of 10 June 1943, Luftwaffe signals interception stations across the Adriatic, Aegean and eastern Mediterranean began to pick up an abnormally high volume of American and British radio traffic. The German air force had assigned responsibility for this sector of the European front to the 352nd Signals Intelligence Regiment, one of eight such units in the Luftwaffe’s Chiffrestelle, or cryptanalytical department.¹ To help them intercept Allied VHF signals traffic from North Africa and the Mediterranean, the regiment had installed listening posts on the islands of Crete, Rhodes and Kos, as well as on the Loutsa plateau north-west of Athens. The Luftwaffe intercept teams saw immediately that many of the signals they were picking up that night, transmitted by the Allies in Morse code, began with the same two letters of the alphabet. In turn, these were set in two groups of five letters each. The German air force men knew that the first letters of a coded message, known as the ‘indicator’, designated the intended recipient of the signal. They were also well aware that an indicator made up of two repeated letters and two five-letter groups meant the messages were being encoded on the American M-209 Hagelin encryption device. The men on the islands and on the high, windswept Loutsa plateau wasted no time. Details of the signals were transmitted to Luftwaffe intelligence headquarters in Athens, and thence to decryption stations at Potsdam and Berlin. Operation Husky, the Allied invasion of Sicily, had just begun. The first signals were coming in from units of the American 82nd Airborne Division, transmitted just after landing on their parachute drop zones.

The United States armed forces had developed the M-209 in answer to the Enigma machine used by the Germans. Named after its Swedish inventor, Boris Hagelin, the M-209 was a lightweight, man-portable device that weighed only 7lb, was versatile and easy to use, meaning US airborne troops could parachute with it. Message encryption was based upon six adjustable rotary wheels inside the machine, each of which contained a different number of letters of the alphabet, from seventeen to twenty-six. When the operator pressed the different letters on the keyboard that he needed to compose the ‘plain text’ of a message, a corresponding number of alternative letters would be selected by the device from the six rotor wheels, each of which turned every time a letter on the keyboard was pressed. This arrangement gave 101 million possible permutations of letters that could form the plain text of an original message.

Some 140,000 M-209s were made, and American infantry and artillery units in North Africa began to use it in action in late 1942. Cryptanalysts from the Wehrmacht High Command’s code-breaking agency broke into their first M-209 messages in early spring 1943. German army units in Tunisia had overrun the headquarters of an American infantry company, and captured parts of signals books containing lists of daily, weekly and monthly settings for the units’ encryption devices. Radio operators had tried to burn these books, but had only partially succeeded. Despite this intelligence compromise, for weeks afterwards the Americans did not change the M-209 code settings used by each unit in the same division. This gave German cryptanalysts from the Luftwaffe and Wehrmacht High Command time to decode and compare thousands of messages sent by them.

During the invasion of Sicily, the Germans then captured more Hagelin codebooks, this time completely intact. This meant that for three vital weeks they could read American radio traffic at exactly the same time as Field Marshal Kesselring was withdrawing his troops across the island to the Straits of Messina. From here they could evacuate safely to the Italian mainland. It also meant the Germans could intercept messages sent between the Americans, British and Italians. The Luftwaffe had a unique advantage in this as they had been intercepting, decrypting and reading signals sent by the Italian navy, army and air force since 1941. The Italian and Allied messages deciphered and read in Potsdam and Berlin also confirmed the Germans’ worst fears about their allies: the Italians were trying to negotiate a surrender with the British and the Americans.

Before the Allies were ashore in Sicily, they had begun to negotiate a secret armistice with the Italian King, Victor Emmanuel III, Prime Minister Pietro Badoglio, and senior Fascist officials. The latter were exhausted by Mussolini’s autocratic twenty-year rule. It had bankrupted the country, reduced hundreds of thousands of its inhabitants to near-starvation, forced a murderous, terrifying allegiance with the Third Reich, and sent divisions of its finest troops off to die in wars in Russia, Africa and Greece. Il Bel Paese was on its knees, Italians wanted peace, and Fascism’s hollow promises that it would reward them with the glory of a lost empire were exactly that. Empty. So on 25 July, Mussolini was deposed at a meeting of the Grand Council of Fascism in Rome: control of the Italian armed forces, he was told, would be handed over to the king and prime minister. Police officers arrested Il Duce after the meeting. Then 200 carabinieri, paramilitary policemen loyal to the royal family, took the deposed dictator and his mistress Clara Petacci first to the small Mediterranean island of Ponza, off Naples, then to an isolated villa on La Maddalena, off the north-east coast of Sardinia. But the Germans managed to sneak an Italian-speaking German agent on to the island, and then flew over it in a Heinkel 111 taking photographs, searching for their ally. So the carabinieri hurriedly moved Mussolini to the Hotel Campo Imperatore, a skiing resort in the Apennines that was built high on the plateau of the Gran Sasso mountain.

During August, Italian and British generals and diplomats met in secret in Lisbon, hammering out the terms of the proposed armistice. By the end of the month they had reached an agreement, and both parties in the talks sent telegrams and signals to this effect back to London and Rome from what they assumed were the secure signals systems of their respective Lisbon embassies. German cryptanalysts from Department-Z of their Foreign Service – shortened to Pers-Z – intercepted and read some of both. The Allies and the Italians then met formally to discuss the terms of the armistice in the village of Cassibile, outside Syracuse.

Much of the negotiation between the Italians and the British was, however, handled in secret, without the Germans’ knowledge. A British agent from the Special Operations Executive had parachuted into Lake Como, outside Milan, in July. Lieutenant Cecil Richard Mallaby was equipped with a rubber raft, and his plan was to paddle ashore, link up with Italian resistance groups, and co-ordinate sabotage operations with them. The RAF would parachute explosives, weapons and signalling equipment to him once he had landed and made contact with partisan units. However, his parachute jump over Lake Como coincided with a British bombing raid on Milan. Refugees were pouring northwards en route to safety in Como, the lights of buildings on the side of the lake all lit up. ‘Dick’ Mallaby floated down towards the water in full view of Italian soldiers. Captured immediately, the young, bilingual officer, who had grown up in Tuscany, was handed over to officers of the SIM, the Servizio Informazione Militare. They, in turn, assumed that his arrival over Lake Como was part of a wider, more cunning plan. They believed he was there to help co-ordinate the terms of the forthcoming armistice with Italy. Being loyal to the king and the prime minister, and opposed to Mussolini, the SIM officers who captured him took him straight to Rome. They provided him with an Italian signals expert and wireless set, and directed him to contact his British superiors, who were simultaneously negotiating with the Italians on Sicily. Mallaby did. Using a series of signal settings code-named ‘Monkey’, he relayed transmissions backwards and forwards between Rome and Cassibile.

Both sides put their signatures on the armistice on 3 September. However, the Germans had also managed to intercept messages sent by the Americans during the negotiations. Seeing that their duplicitous allies had made a secret deal with the Allies without consulting Berlin, Hitler and his generals were livid. But they moved fast. They were most afraid that Italy’s capitulation and the disintegration of its armed forces would mean that the Allies could now occupy Italy without facing significant resistance.

The Germans were saved by British diplomatic dithering. Their Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, had been an undersecretary at the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office during the Abyssinian crisis in 1935; Mussolini had consistently belittled and patronised him during conferences, meetings and in interviews, describing him on one occasion as ‘the best-dressed fool in Europe’. Eden was a man who bore a grudge, and he wanted nothing less than a full and unconditional surrender from the Italians. So as the armistice was being signed under the Sicilian sun, the Germans seized the moment. They launched Operation Achse, and dispatched nine extra divisions straight down to Italy as fast as possible; units based in southern France, Austria, Yugoslavia and Hungary. One of these was the 16th SS Panzergrenadier Division, which had been refitting, and on anti-partisan operations in Hungary and Slovenia. Their objective was to reinforce German troops already in Italy, seize tactical and strategic control of the country, and disarm the Italian armed forces.

At half-past six on the evening of 8 September 1943, American General Dwight D. Eisenhower made an announcement on Allied Forces Radio; just over an hour later Italian Field Marshal Pietro Badoglio broadcast an almost identical one. The news spread like an electrical current across the country: Italy had signed an armistice with the Allies. Immediately after his broadcast, both Badoglio and King Victor Emmanuel fled by car north-east from Rome to the port of Pescara, where they boarded a destroyer that took them southwards again to the port of Bari, on the eastern Adriatic. Their flight from Rome left chaos behind it. In the resultant power vacuum, a group of anti-Fascist political organisations immediately met in secret. Outside, on the streets of the centre of the capital, German paratroopers and armoured units accompanied by Italian soldiers loyal to Mussolini fought scrappy, running battles with Italians in turn loyal to their king and to the Allies.

The anti-Fascists immediately announced the formation of the Committee of National Liberation, or Comitato di Liberazione Nazionale, known as the CLN. It was made up of the Italian Communist and Socialist parties, the Catholic Christian Democrats, as well as the Liberal and Labour groupings, and smaller parties like the liberal Action Party. Out of this, three main partisan groups were formed: the communist Garibaldi brigades, the socialist Matteotti brigades, and the Justice and Liberty units from the Action Party. At dawn on the 9th, they released an unequivocal first communiqué:

It’s necessary to act immediately and as widely and decisively as possible, because only if the Italian People actively contribute to push out Germans from Italy and to defeat Nazism and Fascism, it will be really able [sic] to get independence and freedom. We cannot and must not passively expect freedom from the British and the Americans.²

South of the island of Capri, the Germans had sighted thirty-six American and British troopships at 4 p.m. on the afternoon of the 8th, two hours before Eisenhower’s broadcast. They could see this was an invasion force headed for the Italian mainland at Salerno, so they hurriedly disarmed the Italian army units guarding the beaches outside the town and took over their positions. When Operation Avalanche – the landings at Salerno – began, the Germans were waiting. In the capital, Italian units who had remained loyal to the king, and the Allies, surrounded key buildings and occupied the main roads leading into Rome. That evening, paratroopers of the American 82nd Airborne Division were already embarked in their C-47 Skytrain troop carriers, waiting on Sicilian air bases for the order to take off. Operation Giant II was the code name for a highly risky airborne strike that would see the 82nd parachute on to three Italian airfields north-west of Rome, link up with loyal Italian units, and march on the capital. The signal to launch the operation depended on the decision of the American Brigadier General Maxwell D. Taylor, who had sneaked into Rome through enemy lines along with Italian partisans, his mission to assess the viability of the operation. He discovered that not only were the Italians unlikely to guarantee the support necessary, but in and outside the city the Germans had deployed two full Panzergrenadier divisions, along with 150 tanks. The paratroopers of the 82nd would have been massacred. Maxwell Taylor sent a signal saying the operation was impossible. The Allies stayed put.

Then, in thirty-six hours of hot, confused, contradictory fighting along Rome’s cobbled boulevards, under the umbrella pine trees that lined its roads, German tanks and fighting experience won the day. The Italian army contingent in the city surrendered, and its two commanding officers, Raffaele Cadorna and Colonel Lanza di Montezemolo, went into hiding with the partisans. The CLN proclaimed itself the new, anti-Fascist coalition, partisan operations against the Germans and Italian Fascists exploded, and the country fissured down the political and military middle. German divisions poured in from France, Austria and Yugoslavia.

In Tuscany, one of the first battles after the announcement of the armistice took place in the small port of Piombino, which sits opposite the island of Elba. It characterised the chaotic, fluid nature of the fighting after Italy’s surrender, involving every faction of its armed forces and civilian population. On 10 September, a group of German torpedo boats tried to enter the harbour in Piombino; the Italian port authorities, convinced they were trying to occupy the town, prevented them approaching. The local Italian army commander – a Fascist – then countermanded this order given by the naval commander – a royalist sympathiser – and the E-boats docked. Civilians, backed by small partisan groups, tried to prevent the German sailors from leaving the jetties; Italian tanks manned by Fascist supporters opened fire on them, until a group of junior army and navy officers united the civilians, soldiers, sailors and port workers against the Germans and the Fascist senior officers. Pitched battle broke out. Italian tanks and artillery sank or damaged nineteen German vessels, while the armed groups of civilians, sailors, soldiers and partisans killed 120 Germans, wounded 150 and took 200 prisoners. Two Italian sailors, a corporal working in the customs post and a civilian were the only Italian casualties. On 12 September, German infantry and naval units retook Piombino, and the mixed groups of Italian defenders, military and civilian, naval and partisan, fled into the hills above the port. And so was formed the first Tuscan partisan group.

Around them across the whole of Italy, the situation was equally confused and contradictory. German soldiers were arriving from the north by road and air and sea; the 16th SS Division was among them. Italian Fascists loyal to Mussolini were heading north. On 11 September, the Germans declared martial law in all areas of the country occupied by their forces. German measures for Bandenbekampfung, or anti-partisan activity, had originally been covered in a general directive from Hitler in 1942, primarily referring to operations on the Eastern Front. It described the fight against partisans as nothing to do with soldierly gallantry or the principles of the Geneva Convention. All troops, said the Führer, should use all means, without restriction, to ensure success, and it stated specifically that, ‘No German employed against partisans will be held accountable for his actions in the fighting against them or their followers, either by disciplinary action or by Court Martial.’³

The German commander in Italy, Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, would update these directives with orders of his own, mainly from May to July 1944, specifically related to anti-partisan warfare in Italy. Initially, responsibility for the latter was assigned to the SS and police units who operated in rear areas behind the German front line, but increasingly whichever German unit of the Wehrmacht or SS was deployed in any particular area oversaw anti-partisan operations. The first large-scale killings of civilians took place within days of the German arrival in Italy, and involved a unit from the Waffen-SS.

The Killings at Boves and on Lake Maggiore

One of the first German units to arrive in northern Italy was the 1st SS Panzer Division, whose official title was the Liebstandarte SS Adolf Hitler. It drew its name from its original role providing troops to be Hitler’s bodyguards. When Operation Achse began, and German troops poured into Italy to disarm the Italian armed forces, the SS division had just been transferred from Russia to Hungary. By 19 September, one of its battalions had advanced all the way across north-western Italy, arriving in the town of Cuneo. The city is situated in the foothills of the Alps, near the French border. The SS men were trying to intercept groups of Italian soldiers returning to their country from the Italian-occupied zone of south-eastern France; the Germans were afraid they would try and join partisan groups already operating in the border area. The battalion from the Liebstandarte was commanded by SS-Sturmbannführer Joachim Peiper, a highly decorated panzer commander who had previously served as one of Himmler’s personal adjutants. He then won notoriety on the Eastern Front as a capable but sometimes over-aggressive combat leader, one whose men earned a reputation for killing civilians and Red Army prisoners. Peiper’s unit was nicknamed ‘the Blowtorch Battalion’ by other SS officers for its record in burning villages and shooting their inhabitants. It shows the levels of excesses reportedly carried out by Peiper’s unit that other SS units, themselves no strangers to atrocities, would coin this nickname. Outside Cuneo, it wasn’t just returning Italian soldiers they were looking for – they were also tracking an estimated 1,000 Italian Jews returning home across the border from France. This was an unorthodox practice, frowned upon by the SS divisional commander, who stressed that operations to detain and deport Italian Jews, and seize their property, assets and valuables, were to remain the operational preserve of the SD and the German security police. German units at that point were also under strict orders not to attack Italian civilians, or deploy any form of violence against them: Hitler still had firm hopes that the Italian civilian population, if not the army, could somehow be persuaded to be sympathetic to and co-operative with their new German occupiers. What was to happen in Boves firmly destroyed any chance this policy had of proving effective.

On 19 September, a company of soldiers from the Liebstandarte intervened to try and rescue two of their colleagues. They had been captured by Italian soldiers and partisans in the small town of Boves, which sits on the southern outskirts of Cuneo. In the botched rescue attempt, the Italians killed a German soldier and wounded several others: Peiper surrounded the town, and threatened to burn it down and kill all of its inhabitants unless the German prisoners were released. The Italians complied. Two negotiators, the parish priest and a local businessman, managed to get the German soldiers released, and to get the body of the German soldier returned to his comrades. But in return for respecting their side of the bargain, Peiper’s men poured petrol over the two Italian men and set them on fire. The SS commander then gave orders to open fire on the small town and its inhabit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• Maps
• The Rank Structure of the Waffen-SS
• Prologue
• 1 Italy Surrenders
• 2 Reprisals
• 3 Partisans
• 4 The SS Division
• 5 The Children of Sant’Anna di Stazzema
• 6 A Trail of Massacres
• 7 The Americans Investigate
• 8 On the Plateau at Monte Sole
• 9 Getting Away with Murder
• 10 Victors’ Justice
• 11 The First War Crimes Trials
• 12 Amnesty in the New Italy
• 13 The Trial of Walter Reder
• 14 SS Men in the New Germany
• 15 The Cupboard of Shame
• 16 The Trials
• 17 Voices of the SS
• 18 German Apologies and Reconciliation
• 19 Tuscany Today
• 20 Epilogue
• Afterword
• Bibliography
• Notes