14

Alienating the Italian Population: The Massacre at Marzabotto

Late September 1944

Knowing that the attack on the Gothic Line was imminent, Kesselring wanted his best units to be rested. So Max Simon’s 16th SS had been taken out of the line on August 8, vacating its barracks in Pisa and heading northwest. The men were given a month to rest and refit. On the night of August 11–12, the day before the killings in the mountains at Sant’Anna di Stazzema, SS Major Walter Reder and his reconnaissance battalion arrived in the town of Carrara along with the rest of his division. The SS stationed their men in the seaside Tuscan town, in its marina, and in the outlying towns of Ruosina, Isola di Carrara, and Seravezza, which lay in the shadow of the marble quarries on the surrounding mountains. Its senior officers took over the ocher-colored old Villa Barsanti in a suburb. On August 19, the reconnaissance unit killed fifty-four prisoners in the reprisal at San Terenzo Monte. When the Allies attacked Rimini on August 25, the whole division was put on standby but stayed put behind the line. All through the Battle of Rimini they waited. In front of them on the west coast of Italy, the Nisei, then the Buffalo Soldiers, the South Africans, and the Brazilians were in combat, fighting hard to push up the Tuscan coast. Before the Japanese Americans were taken out of the line in August, the SS men had been in combat against the Nisei of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team around St. Vincente and Cecina in southern Tuscany.

The Japanese Americans had proved a tenacious and evasive enemy. The Reichsführer-SS were used to the Red Army’s way of fighting, of human wave assaults preceded by rolling artillery barrages, then mortar bombardments, then a line, three deep, of often drunk infantrymen charging at them. The 442nd used a more tactically adept three-pronged assault technique. The 3.5-inch bazooka team would be with the Garand riflemen in the middle of the squad: the moment they came under fire, one or more rockets would be fired at the enemy location supported by rifle fire. Then, as the Browning Automatic Rifle and possibly a .30 Browning belt-fed machine gun fired from the left or right flank, the riflemen would crawl, run, duck, dive, or race to the side of the target, if a machine-gun nest, or to the front or back, if a house. Then grenades were thrown in. With this attacking technique, out of a ten-man section, only five or six men were on their feet and visible at any one time.

As their officers’ plans changed with the speed of the campaign around them, the German soldiers thrived on reports from their scouts—exaggerated gossip and hearsay from Fascist Italian soldiers, rumors from prisoners and other units that had been in the line before them, and briefings from their superiors. Italian partisans will skin you alive if you’re caught; Canadians and New Zealanders are hard as nails and sometimes don’t take prisoners; Moroccan mountain troops will rape you like they did the Italian men, women, and children around Cassino. You can hear Americans in the dark because they all chew gum; Italian peasant women want sex all the time and African-American soldiers are here to degrade Western civilization. The British are honorable and brave, the Indians little monkeys with big knives who kill for fun. And cut your head off afterward. Many of these prejudices and rumors made for easy anti-Allied propaganda. One Italian poster showed a black American soldier in a slouch hat with his arm draped around a marble statue, “looting” the country’s artistic heritage. And then the Japanese arrived. The first rumors about them spread after they arrived in Naples, from Italian spies. To begin with, the Germans thought that Japanese soldiers who had been captured in the Pacific were being drafted into American units. Then, when they realized that the number of Japanese soldiers surrendering in the Pacific wouldn’t fill a rifle company, they changed tack. By the time the 442nd RCT arrived on the line in June, the Germans learned that these were Americans of Japanese ancestry. The handful of prisoners they took confirmed this.

The Italians and the Russians were the subject of more accurate and informed prejudice, in many cases based upon the personal experiences of Reder and the men from the Reichsführer-SS. Like many of his fellow officers, Reder was aware of Mussolini’s well-known critique in 1934 of the Third Reich’s position on race: “Thirty centuries of history allow us to look with supreme pity on certain doctrines which are preached beyond the Alps by the descendants of those who were illiterate when Rome had Caesar, Virgil and Augustus.”1

In military practice, Reder, like many SS and Wehrmacht colleagues, thought the Italian Fascist military hierarchy untrustworthy and unreliable at best. Fascist troops loyal to Mussolini were eager to participate in rastrellamente actions and torture prisoners, but when it came to real combat? Reder would far rather have Turkomans or Cossacks. You knew where you stood with them. And as for the Russians themselves, nothing Walter Reder had experienced in twenty-one months of continuous combat in their country made him think they were anything other than brainwashed, powerless sheep with deadly, destructive leaders. Good fighters, yes. But Bolshevism, he thought, was simply against the natural order of things. Russians? It was like the Italian Fascist propaganda poster popular that year across northern Italy, which showed a long, slow train of railway cars curling through a frozen, blighted forest landscape somewhere in the east. The bodies of women and children lie tossed into the snow by the tracks. On the top of the last railway wagon sits a Russian guard, in helmet and greatcoat, clutching a rifle. Except he is a grinning skeleton. The caption? “Russians bring death.” And on this matter, SS-Hauptsturmführer Walter Reder, his superiors, and several of the Allied leaders were going to see eye to eye far more than they could have imagined.

But finally, in his lexicon of opinion and prejudice, Reder did have a soft spot for the Spaniards, whom he saw as glorified Mexican bandits, fighting a just and valid civil war against communism and republicanism. On the front outside Leningrad, and in the fighting around Kharkov, Reder’s battle cry when leading his men into action against Russian trenches had been, “Caramba, carajo, ein whisky!” (Let’s go, fuck it, a whiskey.)2

The moment Field Marshal Kesselring realized the attacks on Rimini constituted the main assault on the Gothic Line, he moved as fast as he could to protect his front and to destroy any partisan threats behind him. At the beginning of September, knowing that an attack on Bologna could be imminent, he issued orders to Gruppenführer Max Simon. Overlooking the city was an enormous massif that dominated approach roads to it. Italian Fascist spies told the Germans it was the base of the partisan brigade Stella Rossa. If Allied troops pushing north from Florence to Bologna with artillery could occupy Monte Sole with the help of the partisans, the Germans would lose control of the high ground overlooking the central fulcrum of the Gothic Line defenses. They had to take towns and villages on the mountain from partisan control, and hold them.

So on September 26, General Max Simon summoned Major Walter Reder to the headquarters of the Reichsführer-SS division in the town of Reggio Emilia.3 He briefed him and other regimental commanders. The one-armed officer had never heard of the Monte Sole area, the Red Star Brigade, or its leader who used the nom de guerre Lupo, “Wolf.” Simon was succinct: there were partisans and their support network to be destroyed, and Hauptsturmführer Reder’s unit, Aufklärungsabeitlung 16, Reconnaissance Battalion 16, was given the task of doing it. He returned to Carrara by road and gathered his company and platoon commanders together. They would sweep up two sides of the mountain from the south and west, taking control of each village they moved through. At the top of the huge mountain was a hamlet called Marzabotto.

*   *   *

Dawn on September 29 arrived around six in the morning, a gray, mountain day of mist and drizzle. The dry heat of the Italian summer was already a memory, and the muddy, rainy autumn skies offered the SS unit better protection against Allied air attack. Nevertheless, from operational necessity and habit, they cut branches from the orange, pine, and olive trees growing at the side of the roads around Carrara to lay on top of their vehicles as camouflage; large bundles of dry hay and straw were put on the half-tracks and trucks. Men kept their eyes peeled at the sky, watchful for prowling Spitfires, Kittyhawks, and Mustang fighters from the Allied Desert Air Force, based in Corsica and on airstrips south of Florence.

The drive to their attack position took an hour. The SS started up the lower slopes of Monte Sole, and around ten o’clock, as the first troops attacked partisan positions in the lower villages, General Simon arrived to see how the operation was going. The SS had already captured twelve prisoners, and Max Simon wanted to know what they would reveal under interrogation. German casualties, Reder noted, were high for an operation against partisans: the SS had taken 40 wounded and 24 killed in four hours. This was not an operation against a few partisans and their village folk; the Red Star was putting up a stiff fight. By the middle of the afternoon, Reder sent his second in command, a captain, farther up the muddy tracks and pitted, broken road to where his combat platoons were fighting halfway up the hillside. The captain returned with part of a partisan’s uniform, an epaulette bearing a red star. The Germans showed it to a partisan prisoner, who identified it as belonging to Lupo. The SS were convinced they had killed the guerrillas’ leader.

The fighting continued through the night, as the partisans moved farther up the mountain and the SS, using mortars and half-tracked armored vehicles mounted with machine guns and 20mm cannon, tried to encircle them. The Reichsführer-SS took more casualties. As they advanced, they realized they were up against a full brigade of partisans, 1,500–2,000 strong. The SOE and OSS had sent couriers instructing them to mass on the Monte Sole plateau so they could support the American drive toward Bologna through the valleys below them.

On the morning of September 30, Reder received orders to move some of his men southeast to the town of Lagaro, where Americans were pushing through on the road to Bologna. He left his second in command on Monte Sole, along with more junior officers who were commanding platoons and companies as they spread through the hamlets and villages that marched up the slopes. The men moved through the cover of oak and scrub pines, and then toward the top of the mountain, where the tree line vanished and they were exposed to the full force of the wind and elements. In front of them, at the top, was the scattered “collective” village of Marzabotto. Around it were two separate municipal areas, Grizzana Morandi and Monzuno, each containing a number of scattered houses and hamlets. These included Caprara, Casaglia, and Cerpiana.

The lines of SS men moved up the mountain in a typical antipartisan rastrellamento. Monte Sole is big—almost fifty square miles of slope, wooded thickets, barns, and squat, stone houses set around small fields and patches of crops. The operation took five days. Rations and fresh units of men arrived from Carrara. The SS slept in the barns and houses they occupied, while their fellow soldiers kept guard. After four years of war, this was a normal operation to them. Every position was cleared of partisans—the Germans killed almost all of them, took a select few prisoners, while those who escaped alive scattered farther toward the top of the Monte Solo massif. From its windy, chill summit, the spires and rooftops of Bologna were visible. For the partisans and civilians who made it to the summit by the day of September 3, there was nowhere else to run. They joined the terrified population of the hamlet of Casaglia di Monte Sole who took refuge in the church of Santa Maria Assunta and knelt in the few rows of wooden pews. The village priest, Don Ubaldo Marchioni, and three older people led them in prayer. Then the SS arrived.

They broke down the stout wooden door of the church and opened fire with MP 40 machine pistols and threw in grenades. A belt-fed machine gun then fired through the church doorway. To the left of and behind the church was the cemetery, where more villagers had gathered. The German soldiers grabbed another priest, Father Giovanni Fornasini, and cut off his head. MG-42 machine guns, firing long, high-speed bursts of 7.92mm rounds, raked the terrified, crowd huddled in the cemetery. The bullets smacked into the villagers, who were blown backward on top of each other. There was a lot of blood. Nearly 200 people died there. Another 550 were killed in the three neighboring villages, including Marzabotto itself, 250 of them children, and 5 Catholic priests. A conflicting version says that only 50 people were killed in Marzabotto itself, and that the majority of the dead in the villages of Caprara, Casaglia, and Cerpiana were partisans.4

Sturmbannführer Reder tallied up the deaths of 728 “bandits” in his after-action report. The survivors and partisan groups that arrived on the mountain in the following days and weeks said that up to 1,835 people died, but this included all the armed partisans killed in the five-day rastrellamento. This number of dead fighters was estimated as high as 720. Both the Fascist authorities in Bologna and their loyal local newspaper, Il Resto del Carlino, downplayed the number of civilian deaths and exaggerated the body count of the partisans who had reportedly been killed. The Catholic Church, partisans in Bologna, and every antifascist civilian within miles poured gasoline on the flames of rumor until the figure of 3,000 dead was being passed around.

Reder himself reported that he arrived back in the village of Cerpiano on Monte Sole only on the night of October 4–5, after driving from combat positions near the road to Bologna where Americans were advancing. He said he got to Monte Sole at 5:00 A.M. Only then did he realize that all of the houses and the church had been burned in Casaglia. The five-day rastrellamento was a military operation, he said, not a reprisal. He knew by this stage that reprisals served as nothing more than recruitment operations for the partisans and were of no tactical or strategic value at all. He’d spent long enough in Russia to learn that, and Marzabotto had been a military action where civilians had died as well. In areas out of Fascist control and influence, the Italian civilian population was now foursquare united behind the Allies and the partisans. The alienation reinforced by Sant’Anna di Stazzema was now cemented. But Reder said that for his men, the operation had been a matter of war and combat, where death is natural. And as for the deaths on the mountainside, he thought they were simply the rotten fruits of war.5

And the days when his ultimate commander, Field Marshal Kesselring, could balance the finer subtleties between a reprisal and a military operation were gone. In March 1944, when partisans blew up SS soldiers in Via Rasella, Obersturmführer Herbert Kappler and the general in charge of the German army in Rome had sat up all night drinking brandy and telephoning each other every hour to make sure they got the numbers right on the execution lists. Six months later, Rome had fallen, the Germans were retreating, and Kesselring didn’t care whether the killings on Monte Sole massif were a reprisal or a military operation. He had a crumbling front line to hold.6

And it was now, as the weather turned dramatically from summer to autumn, that his choice of defensive positions and subsequent control of the terrain became so important. The decision by Lieutenant General Oliver Leese not to exploit the attack on the Fortunato Ridge in the early days of Operation Olive had been a completely unexpected bonus, allowing his troops to escape west. The Allies’ overoptimism about an early end to the fighting in northern Italy turned to ashes when exposed to Leese’s inability to grasp the tactical and strategic moment, which was then compounded by his underestimation of the effects of flooding and heavy rain on the flatlands of the Po valley. Not having pushed forward nearly as fast as expected, the Allies were now victims of the weather for the second winter running, up against Germans in strong defensive positions. Kesselring knew that if he could hold Bologna until the snow came to the Apennines, the war in Italy would last at least until the early spring of 1945. He knew now that the Allies couldn’t invade the Balkans, but he was also aware that there were three cards on the table stacked against him. First, the partisans were getting better armed, better organized, and more numerous by the day. There were 100,000 of them now. It was of immense concern to the Allies which faction was in the political ascendant—Communists, Liberals, Christian Democrats—but Kesselring cared not a fig. To him they were all just armed Italians who wanted to kill his men and push his armies out of Italy.

Second, Kesselring had expected the Allied armies to be more weakened by the unnecessary transfer to France of seven of their more experienced divisions. Yet the most unexpected units in his opponent’s ranks were in some cases running rings around his men. The Indians, Poles, and Canadians he had known would fight like determined, steely-eyed gladiators—that was the kind of soldiers they were. But he was getting reports about black Americans, Japanese, and Brazilians going head-to-head with the SS and panzergrenadiers and winning the day. Surprised by the attack on Rimini, he had moved forces from the center to reinforce it, which meant that now he was having to try to pull them back to hold the line in front of Bologna. And meanwhile, up the west coast slogged this determined force made up of men he’d never dreamed of encountering in action. He could only thank the gods hourly for the terrain and the weather.

The third factor was totally beyond his control. It was now the beginning of October. The British, Canadian, and American advance across northwest Europe had slowed. Their lines of supply were overstretched, and the ammunition for soldiers in trenches in central Holland and the gas for tanks thirty miles from the German border still had to be trucked from the Normandy beachheads. Operation Market Garden, Montgomery’s airborne extravaganza designed to cross the Lower Rhine with a carpet of paratroopers and flank into northern Germany by October, had just failed. The Russians were crossing Poland and entering Romania, and Kesselring could almost intuit what the Allies were thinking. They’d first want to rid Italy of Mussolini and his followers and make sure a powerful partisan grouping came to the fore, one they backed politically. In practice Kesselring knew this meant any party except the Communists. Then they’d want to keep Marshal Tito’s partisans off Italian soil, and use Yugoslavia as a buffer between Italy and the Russians. They would much rather sue for peace and do a deal with the Germans than allow the Soviets any closer into Europe. This meant that the longer Kesselring could hold the Allies on the Gothic Line, the stronger a position the Germans would be in when it came time to hammer out a peace settlement with the British and Americans. Field Marshal Kesselring could feel the postwar wind coming—but all this, he knew, would have to wait for spring. With the weather and terrain on his side, and Oliver Leese’s armor bogged in up to its tank tracks in the mud of the soggy Po valley, he was going to make the Allies fight. And winter was coming.