With my wife Rosalba and the military attorney general Marco De Paolis on Sunday 12 August I went up to Sant’Anna di Stazzema, the hilltop village in Versilia where on 12 August 1944 – exactly eighty years ago – one of the cruelest massacres of innocent civilians took place at the hands of Nazi soldiers, the SS of the XVIth Panzerdivision Reichsfuehrer “Heinrich Himmler”.
Over 450 innocent civilians – the figure is uncertain, there were less than 400 identified victims – were cruelly massacred by rifle shots, machine gun fire, and hand grenades, men, women and children (the youngest, Anna Pardini, was just 20 days old) burned alive by flamethrowers like wild animals.
To my great indignation I discovered that no representative of the Meloni Government had attended the commemoration. No one, absolutely no one, apart from the prefect of Lucca, Mrs. Scaduto, present out of institutional duty.
I was ashamed of the absent Government but I was not surprised. I expected it. With what face a Government openly of the far right and a party full of nostalgics of fascism in its leadership (not to mention the base) would have shown up to commemorate that massacre whose origin has never been in doubt, I say this to avoid any hairy misunderstandings.
In the church square of the hamlet of Sant’Anna, that morning 80 years ago, 140 people, including the elderly, the elderly and children, along with the parish priest of the hamlet of Farnocchia, Don Innocenzo Lazzeri, were killed by bursts of machine gun fire from the soldiers of the Third Company commanded by Lieutenant Gerhard Sommer.
Their bodies were set on fire lit with wood from the church pews and then hastily buried in the illusion of covering up the massacre. A modus operandi that eerily recalls the massacre underway in the Gaza Strip at the hands of the Israeli army that hunts down Hamas murderers without caring about killing thousands of innocent Palestinian civilians.
In their horrendous ethnic cleansing operation, the SS soldiers were assisted by fascists from Versilia who, at night, climbed up the slopes of the steep hills with them, showing the uniformed executioners the way through the woods.
None of these people were ever identified and therefore not even punished. Ten former soldiers guilty of the massacre were instead tried and sentenced to life imprisonment in 2004 by the military tribunal of La Spezia, a sentence confirmed in 2009 by the Court of Cassation and unfortunately not recognized by the German judiciary of Stuttgart, which in 2012 established that it had not been possible to ascertain individual responsibilities in the massacre. This is not the case.
Thanks to the historian Carlo Gentile and the German journalist Udo Gumpel, the story of Sant’Anna was brought to the attention of the world. The then military prosecutor of La Spezia, Marco De Paolis (today at the head of the military judiciary) by meticulously consulting the German military archives with the help of the bilingual carabinieri unit led by Colonel d’Elia, found the names of the soldiers present in Sant’Anna that distant morning.
By questioning the few survivors of the massacre and their relatives, De Paolis managed to identify those materially responsible for the carnage and bring them to trial.
It was an extraordinary political-historical-judicial affair that in some way redeemed the shame of the closet of shame, in which almost 700 files relating to the Nazi-Fascist massacres committed in Italy during the German occupation had been knowingly hidden in the name of renewed friendship with the new Germany and above all to prevent the crimes committed by the Italian soldiers of the Royal Army from being prosecuted in the Balkans, where even the Italian soldiers were guilty of brutal cruelty against civilian populations outside the war.
Belatedly, but with absolute legal certainty, justice was done to the victims of Sant’Anna di Stazzema, to the few survivors and to their loved ones. None of the condemned soldiers knew prison (Germany does not grant the extradition of its citizens and today they are all disappeared).
The operation to exterminate civilians in Sant’Anna had been decided to terrorize the population of that remote location where, moreover, many families from the Versilia coast had found refuge, convinced that they had taken shelter from the German roundups.
No presence of partisans had been reported in the area for several days and yet that massacre was carried out to the end and without scruples.
The President of the Republic, Sergio Mattarella, did well in his message to recall the complicity of the fascists in supporting and aiding the Nazis in carrying out the massacre of civilians in the various hamlets of the municipality of Stazzema.
On the other hand, the Government did badly not to send any official representative, not even a second-rank undersecretary, to the commemoration held today in front of a few thousand people. It is yet another proof, if ever there was any need, of the will of the Meloni executive to draw the veil of oblivion over the most tragic season of the Italian twentieth century and through the silence imposed on the republican institutions, to try to rehabilitate the infamous actions of the fascists of the Republic of Salò, servants and accomplices of the Nazi executioners.
It is estimated that the Nazi-Fascists massacred approximately 25,000 civilians during the 20 months of military occupation of Northern Italy.
At the end of September, there will be a commemoration of the eightieth anniversary of the Marzabotto Monte Sole (Bologna) massacre, in which the soldiers of Major Walter Reder (convicted in 1951) killed almost 800 residents of that area of the Bologna Apennines.
Prosecutor De Paolis had also instituted the trial in La Spezia against some of the soldiers responsible for this massacre (and in truth many others), obtaining their conviction.
The ceremony for Marzabotto will be attended by the President of the Italian Republic, Sergio Mattarella, and the President of the Federal Republic of Germany, Franz-Walter Steinmaier. I am curious to find out what Giorgia Meloni will come up with to officially desert that commemoration as well.
If she ever decided to intervene – which I would exclude – with what courage would she or whoever represents her speak in defense of the values of the Resistance, the Republic and the Constitution, execrating the crimes committed by fascists and Nazis?
In politics, one can disguise oneself by hiding one’s authentic feelings, ideas and inclinations, however in the long run what one truly is inside, in the depths of one’s convictions, is destined to come to the surface. Inexorably.
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