Massacre of the Acqui - Scooner size campaign for Chain of Command - Part 7 (Closing Narrative)

7.0 Closing Narrative

7.0.1 The battle Ends

After several days of fighting, the better equipped and trained German forces snuffed out all resistance on the island. By 11am on 22 September 1943, following Gandin’s orders, the last Italians surrendered, having run out of ammunition and taken 1 315 casualties. German sources put their casualties at around 300.

After the Italian surrender, Adolf Hitler had issued an order allowing Germans to summarily execute any Italian officer who resisted ‘for treason’, and on 18 September, the German High Command issued an order stating that ‘because of the perfidious and treacherous behaviour on Cephalonia, no prisoners are to be taken’.

Starting on 21 September, Gebirgsjager soldiers began executing their Italian prisoners in groups of four to ten. The German soldiers first killed the surrendering Italians, where they stood, and using machine guns. When a group of German soldiers from Bavaria objected to this practice, they were threatened with summary execution as well.

The Germans then marched the remaining soldiers to the San Teodoro town hall and began executing the prisoners eight at a time. General Gandin, along with 137 of his senior officers were summarily court-martialled and executed on 24 September 1943, their bodies being discarded at sea, tied to and weighed down by large barrels.

One of the best accounts of the massacre was from Padre Romualdo Formato, one of the seven chaplains attached to the Acqui Division. Formato later wrote that:

“…during the massacre, the Italian officers started to cry, pray and sing. Many were shouting the names of their mothers, wives and children…three officers hugged and stated that they were comrades while alive and now in death they would go together to paradise, while others were digging through the grass as if trying to escape. In one place…‘the Germans went around loudly offering medical help to those wounded. When about 20 men crawled forward, a machine-gun salvo finished them off. Officers also gave [me] their belongings to take with him and give to their families back in Italy. The Germans, however, confiscated the items and…[I] could no longer account for the exact number of the officers kill[ed]”

As the execution of the Italian officers continued, a German officer came to reprieve Italians who could prove they were from South Tyrol, a disputed region of Italy which was annexed to Germany on 9 September. Seeing an opportunity, Formato begged the German officer to stop the killings and save the few remaining officers. Within 30 minutes, after reporting to his commanding officer, the German officer returned stating that the execution of Italian officers would stop. When the executions stopped, only 37 officers remained. With the killings ceasing, Formato recounted that the situation remained unstable. At first the Germans congratulated the remaining Italians for surviving and offered them cigarettes.

After this reprieve, the Germans forced twenty Italian Sailors to load the bodies of the dead officers on rafts and take them out to sea. The Germans then blew up the rafts with the Italian sailors on board.

Another source during the massacres, from Alfred Richter, an Austrian (the majority of the 1^st Gebirgjager Division were Austrians (which was part of Germany since the Anschluss of 1938)) who participated in the executions, recounted: ‘a Italian soldier, who used to sing at local taverns on the island during the occupation, was forced to sing while his comrades were being executed. According to Richter:

“the Italian soldiers were killed after surrendering to the soldiers of the 98th Regiment. He described that the bodies were then thrown into heaps, all shot in the head. Soldiers of the 98th Regiment started removing the boots from the corpses for their own use. Richter mentioned that groups of Italians were taken into quarries and walled gardens near the village of Frangata and executed by machine gun fire. The killing lasted for two hours, during which time the sound of the shooting and the screams of the victims could be heard inside the homes of the village.”

By 28 September 1943, around 5 000 men had been executed. Bodies were cremated in massive wood pyres, which made the air of the island thick with the smell of burning flesh, or moved to ships where they were buried at sea. According the Amos Pampaloni, a captain with the 33^rd Artillery Regiment of the Acqui Division and one of the survivors stated that some of the executions were undertaken in plain sight of the Greek population at Argostoli Harbour where these bodies were left to rot. Bodies were also left to rot in the streets of Argostoli to the point where they began to decompose driving out many inhabitants from the stench alone. The Germans refused to allow the Italians to bury their dead.

An additional three thousand prisoners drowned when ships transporting them to POW camps were sunk in the Adriatic Sea. This loss of POW’s were similar to the ones from the Italian Dodecanese garrisons which were a result of German policy as Hitler instructed local German commanders to forgo ‘all safety precautions’ during the transportation of prisoners, ‘regardless of losses’. The few soldiers who survived were assisted to escape by or joined the Greek Partisans.

 

7.0.1 Aftermath

The events on Cephalonia were repeated, to a lesser extent on the Island of Corfu and on the Docecanese Islands later in September 1943. The German retribution was swift in both cases with the bodies being loaded onto a ship and disposed at sea in accordance with Hitler’s directives.

In October 1943, with Benito Mussolini returned to power in the Salo Republic in Northern Italy, he was incensed when he found out about the executions, but by the time had very little power.

Major Harald von Hirschfeld, commanding officer of the 1^st Gebirgsjager Division, was never tried for his role in the massacre as he died fighting in Poland in 1945. After the war, von Hirschfeld’s superior, General Hubert Lanz, stood at the Nuremberg Trials for his part in the massacre of Italian troops in Greece, as well as the massacre of Greek civilians at Kommeno on 16 August 1943. At the trial Lanz lied in court stating that:

• he refused to obey Hitler’s orders
• the execution of 5000 Italians was a number fabricated to hide the fact from German High Command that Hitler’s orders were disobeyed
• A dozen officers were shot with the rest of the Acqui Division being transported to southern Greece.

Lanz’s defence emphasised that there was no evidence the Italian Headquarters in Brindisi had ever instructed Gandin to resist the Germans. The defence also cited orders received by Gandin that he and Veccherelli had been transferred to German command. Therefore, according to the logic of the defence, Gandin and his men were either mutineers or partisans and did not qualify as POW status under the rules of war.

The court had doubts as to who issued what orders and therefore Lanz was only charged with the death of Gandin and the officers. For reasons unknown, possibly from the highly unfavourable terms the country received at armistice, the Italians never presented any evidence of the massacre at the Nuremberg Trials.

General Lanz received 4 years in prison (released early) for his role in the massacres. Lanz’s light sentence was the result of a Nuremberg court receiving false evidence that the massacre might have even taken place, despite Padre Formato publishing a book of events one year before the trial.

Lt Colonel Barge was not tried for any crimes as he left the island shortly before the arrival of Major von Hirschfeld and the massacres. Barge was subsequently decorated with the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross for his services in Crete.