The story of what happened to the main German characters in this book is the story of postwar justice for Nazi Germany. While the Nuremberg trials were dealing with the higher echelons of the National Socialist apparatus, the middle- and lower-ranking Nazis escaped, were spared trial, changed sides, were imprisoned or, in many cases, just disappeared. In late February and early March 1945, the 16th Panzergrenadier Division, the Reichsführer-SS, moved from northern Italy into Hungary. Together with the rest of the unit, SS-Major Walter Reder surrendered to British forces near Klagenfurt. As a senior SS officer, he was arrested but was released soon after because of his wartime wounds. However, he was rearrested by the Americans in Salzburg and held in an internment camp. He was then handed over again to the British. In May 1948, he was extradited to Italy. An Italian military court in Bologna sentenced him to life imprisonment in 1951 for the massacre at Marzabotto, and he was sent to the fortress prison of Gaeta, on the coast north of Naples. One of his former colleagues, an SS officer named Ernst-Günther Krätschmer, launched what he called Gaeta-Hilfe (Gaeta Help) in 1957. He and five other SS men championed Reder’s cause, and 285,000 letters by soldiers from thirty-five countries were sent to the Italian government urging Reder’s release. Reder expressed “profound repentance” in a December 1984 letter to the citizens of Marzabotto. The current citizens and survivors of the massacre voted 237 to 1 against freeing Reder. (The one person was never identified.) But Reder was released from prison on January 24, 1985, and promptly flew back to Vienna. He was received at Schwechat airport by the minister of defense of Austria and immediately retracted his apology. He stated explicitly that he had pronounced “such words of apology solely to exploit a political opportunity.” He died in Vienna in 1991, at age seventy-six, and is buried in Gmünden.
SS-Obergruppenführer Karl Wolff was arrested on May 13, 1945, in Schöneberg, and put on trial at Nuremberg. He gave evidence against former colleagues and then spent time in a British prison in Minden: he was released in 1947, but the German government had earlier sentenced him to a prison term. He served this under house arrest, and then received five years for his membership in the SS: this was cut to four, and he was duly released. He then lived with his family in Starnberg and worked in public relations. There were repeated allegations that as a result of Operation Sunrise, he had been recruited to work for the OSS and then the CIA. In 1962, new evidence appeared in the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Israel showing that Wolff had organized the deportation of Italian Jews in 1944. He was arrested again in Germany. Convicted in 1964, he was sentenced to fifteen years on three main charges: the deportation of 300,000 Jews to Treblinka, the deportation of Italian Jews to Auschwitz, and the killings of Italian partisans. He was released in 1969 due to poor health, and the Germans restored his full civil rights in 1971. He died in 1984, age eighty-four, in Rosenheim.
SS-Gruppenführer Max Simon, commanding the 16th SS Division, surrendered to the Americans in May 1945. He was sentenced to death by the British for the massacre at Marzabotto, and this was later commuted to life imprisonment. He was pardoned in 1954, released from prison, and died in 1961, at age sixty-two.
SS-Obersturmbannführer Herbert Kappler tried to take refuge in the Vatican as the Allies closed in on Rome, but was arrested by the British in 1945. In 1947, he was sentenced to life imprisonment at Gaeta. He married his nurse in a prison wedding in 1972, and in 1975 was moved to a military hospital in Rome. He had cancer. In 1978, his wife smuggled him out of prison in a suitcase, and he escaped to Germany, where he died in 1978, age seventy.
SS-Lieutenant Guido Zimmer escaped arrest, and the OSS hired him to investigate postwar Nazi resistance movements. He then became the secretary for former Fascist Luigi Parrilli and applied for Italian citizenship. He was never arrested or prosecuted.
In June 2005, an Italian military court in La Spezia sentenced, in absentia, ten SS men involved in the massacres at Sant’Anna di Stazzema to life imprisonment and ordered them to pay compensation of €100 million to the survivors and relatives of the victims. A further seven accused were acquitted. All of the accused live in Germany and almost certainly will not be extradited to Italy. In April 2004, as the trial of those responsible for the massacre in Sant’Anna opened in La Spezia, the Frankfurter Rundschau wrote, “It is not only in Germany that the wheels of justice grind slowly, in Italy also the prosecution of countless massacres of the civilian population by German troops in the final phase of the Second World War has largely petered out. In the early 1950s, when memories were still fresh and many of the culprits—German soldiers and Italian Fascists—could still be apprehended, many of the files were closed.” In August 2006, Kontrast magazine reported on eighty-two-year-old Karl Gropler, who was involved in the massacre in Sant’Anna di Stazzema and had lived undisturbed for decades in Wollin, a village in Brandenburg. Since early 2005, SS-Lieutenant Gerhard Sommer, also sentenced by the court in La Spezia for his participation in the Sant’Anna di Stazzema massacre, has reportedly lived in an old people’s home in Hamburg. The public prosecutor’s office refuses to continue to level charges against the war criminals in this case as well, despite contradictory accounts of a German regional prosecutor’s office opening an new investigation into Sommer’s case in 2015. In 2002, Gerhard Sommer appeared on German TV and said, “I have an absolutely clear conscience.” As of December 2015, Sommer was reportedly still alive.