• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1161 0

“We are poor wretches, poor beings left to the mercy of events, without homeland, without law or sense of honour,” wrote Lt. Pedro Ferreira of the Italian forces in Yugoslavia, where many of his comrades were shot by the Germans after the armistice. “Italians, after this shame, can never again lift up their heads and speak of honour. Are we betrayed or betrayers? What fate will be in store for us when we have changed our flag three times in two days?” Kesselring ruled Italy with a ruthlessness vividly documented in his order of 17 June 1944: “The fight against the partisans must be conducted with all means at our disposal and with utmost severity. I will protect any commander who exceeds our usual restraint in the choice and severity of the methods he adopts against partisans. In this connection the principle holds good that a mistake in the choice of methods in executing one’s orders is better than failure or neglect to act.” He added on 1 July: “Wherever there is evidence of considerable numbers of partisan groups a proportion of the male population will be shot.”

The most notorious massacre of innocents was carried out at Hitler’s behest, with Kesselring’s endorsement, under the direction of Rome’s Gestapo chief, Lt. Col. Herbert Kappler. On 23 March 1944, partisans attacked a marching column of the Bozen Police Regiment in the Via Rasella. Gunfire and explosives killed 33 Germans and wounded 68, while 10 civilians were also killed. In reprisal, Hitler demanded the deaths of 10 Italians for each German. Next afternoon, 335 prisoners were taken from the Regina Coeli prison to the Ardeatine Caves. They were a random miscellany of actors, lawyers, doctors, shopkeepers, cabinetmakers, an opera singer and a priest. Some were communists, and 75 were Jews. Two hundred of them had been seized in the streets near the Via Rasella following the partisan attack, though none was involved in it. In batches of five they were led into the caves and executed, the bodies left where they fell. Though the Germans used explosives to close the shaft in a halfhearted attempt to conceal the massacre, this was rendered ineffectual by the stench that soon seeped forth. The caves became a place of pilgrimage and tears.

Elide Ruggeri was one of a handful of survivors of another massacre, in the churchyard at Marzabotto, a picturesque little town at the foot of the Apennines, where in September 1944 Waffen SS troops exacted a terrible revenge on the civilian population for local partisan activities. “All the children were killed in their mothers’ arms,” she later recounted. Though herself badly hit, she lay motionless under the dead. “Above and beside me were the bodies of my cousins and of my mother, whose stomach had been ripped open. I lay motionless all that night, through the next day and the night following, in rain and a sea of blood. I almost stopped breathing.” At dawn on the second day, Ruggeri and four other wounded women crawled out from beneath the heaped corpses. Of her own family, 5 had been killed. In all, 147 people died at the church, including the priests who had been officiating when the SS arrived; 28 families were wiped out. At nearby Casolari a further 282 victims perished, including 38 children and 2 nuns. The final local civilian toll was 1,830, and moved Mussolini to make a vain protest to Hitler. It is bizarre that Kesselring, under whose orders the SS acted, was reprieved from execution at Nuremberg.

If the Allied invaders never matched such horrors, they were parties to lesser crimes against humanity: French colonial troops, especially, committed large-scale atrocities. “Whenever they take a town or a village, a wholesale rape of the population takes place,” wrote a British NCO, Norman Lewis:

Recently all females in the villages of Patricia, Pofi, Supino and Morolo were violated. In Lenola … fifty women were raped, but—as these were not enough to go round—children and even old men were violated. It is reported to be normal for two Moroccans to assault a woman simultaneously, one having normal intercourse while the