At a memorial ceremony in the Italian town, the presidents of Italy and Germany warned of growing nationalism. And they reminded us of the massacre, the German SS troops had committed 75 years ago.
What to see in the villages around the picturesque town of Fivizzano, in 1944, took place, is hardly known. In the lovely villages of Northern Tuscany, the soft-sounding name – Mommio, San Terenze, Curtain di San Terenzo, Vinca took place in 1944, several massacres of civilians. About 400 people – mostly elderly, women, and children – were murdered.
75 years later, hundreds of residents from the Region gathered on the Piazza Garibaldi in Fivizzano, to meet with the President Sergio mattarella and Frank-Walter Steinmeier. As the German head of state gave his speech in Italian, all could understand his plea for forgiveness.
Forgotten Atrocities
The Region of the Apuan Alps was in 1944 on several occasions the scene of German war crimes. Italy, until 1943, the ally of Nazi Germany – was occupied after the collapse of the fascist regime and in part by the German Wehrmacht. Especially in the North of the country resistance was formed. Often the German units of the Italian partisans were attacked.
In retaliation, the Germans committed several massacres of civilians. Ironically, in Tuscany, is today a yearning region of many German, raged the German troops with particular cruelty.
Reported to the Federal President of the Nazi atrocities: Andrea Quartieri
Two Survivors, Frank-Walter Steinmeier met in Fivizzano personally. Luisa Chinca was five years old when she lost her mother, four aunts and a Cousin. Andrea Quartieri was killed 13, as in Vinca, his grandparents and several Cousins. “I stand before you as a German Federal President, and feel only shame for what we did to German you,” said Steinmeier then, on the main square.
The Italian President Mattarella recalled, however, the involvement of the fascist Italian “black shirts”-associations which fought on the side of the German troops and the partisans. He got a spontaneous applause. “It is good that we remember together on this dark Chapter,” said an elderly gentleman, who followed the President-Talk on the court.
Impunity
The insightful words of Steinmeier was heard in Fivizzano attentively. It had taken far too long, the Federal President, until you recalled in Germany, “the German crimes against humanity in Italy”. “Germany has not lived up to its responsibilities,” he said, and stressed: “This is a responsibility that knows no end.”
Thus, the Federal President also referred to what is in the collective Remember, in Italy, to painful present: the failure of the legal investigation of the German crimes in Italy. Although many of those Responsible were known, barely had to reckon with the consequences.
Revealed with Steinmeier, together with a memorial plaque: Sergio Mattarella (l)
An exception is Walter Reder, the commander of the 16. Panzer Grenadier division of the Waffen-SS. After the war, he was extradited from Austria to Italy and sentenced in 1951 to Life. As he was released after more than 30 years, he showed no remorse. Helmut Looß, another high officer who lived unpunished after the war, in Bremen and worked as a teacher.
As the mid-1990s, previously unknown documents about the massacre in the Tuscany appeared, launched the Italian and the German prosecutors a number of new investigations against former members of the SS. A bilateral Commission of historians was set up in 2008. Finally, some of those Responsible were sentenced in Italy in absentia to life in prison. Germany is not provided, however.
Too late for punishment
Moreover, the Stuttgart public Prosecutor after ten years of investigation, all of the procedures. The applicable case law prevented at the time of the punishment of the hand of the Nazi killing machine minions. “Most of the prosecutors saw no reason to initiate proceedings and to lead,” says the German-Italian historian Carlo Gentile, who was a member of the bilateral Commission of historians attached.
In 2011, the legal situation changed. In the “Demjanjuk trial,” condemned the district court of Munich, the former guard of the concentration camp Sobibór for aiding and abetting the murder of more than 28,000 people, without even a single participation in actions had to be demonstrated in practical terms. “The turning point came too late,” says Gentile, because most of the perpetrators were now dead.
Was convicted by the regional court of Munich as a Nazi criminal John Demjanjuk (archive photo from 2011)
This core, in Italy, of all places, in the case of the Massa, many SS men were identified. There young soldiers, many of whom previously to the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising had been involved and there were formed were used predominantly – as the historian explained.
The long road to reconciliation
One who had been involved in the massacres in the North of Italy, was the father of Udo Sürer. The lawyer from Lindau accompanied the Federal President on the trip to Fivizzano. Sürer worked the story of his father, the units that served in the SS, and returned after his death to the places of the action, to talk to people. For his commitment to him Fivizzano in 2005, has appointed a citizen of honour. “It came as a surprise,” says Sürer today. “Since then, I come here regularly, I feel at home here”.
Steinmeier visited already several times, largely unknown places that are for the atrocities of the Germans in the Second world war. In 2017, he was in the Paneriai memorial in Vilnius, where mass shootings took place in 2018 in the former, mass extermination site of Maly Trostenets near Minsk, and in the former KZ Chaidari in Athens. On 1. September will be Steinmeier in the Polish Wieluń, where early on the Morning of 1.9.1939 German bombs in the first civilians killed.