Sant'Anna di Stazzema massacre
| Sant'Anna di Stazzema massacre | |
|---|---|
 The National Park of Peace memorial |
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| Location | Sant'Anna di Stazzema, Italy |
| Date | August 12, 1944 |
| Target | Civilian villagers and refugees |
| Deaths | About 560 |
| Perpetrator(s) | 16th SS Division Reichsführer-SS |
The Sant'Anna di Stazzema massacre was a Nazi German atrocity in the village of Sant'Anna di Stazzema, Italy, in the course of an operation against the Italian resistance movement in 1944, during the Italian Campaign of World War II.
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[edit] Facts
On the morning of August 12, 1944, the 2nd Battalion of SS-Panzergrenadier-Regiment 35 of 16th SS Panzergrenadier Division Reichsführer-SS, commanded by SS-Hauptsturmführer Anton Galler, entered Sant'Anna and rounded up hundreds of local villagers and refugees, locking them up in several barns and stables. The civilians (mostly women, children and older men, as the able-bodied men of the village fled into the woods) were then killed in groups with machine guns in the open air and with hand grenades in basements; the soldiers then set fire to the corpses. The victims included some 110 children (the youngest one, Anna Pardini, was only 20 days old). Also killed were eight pregnant women. The livestock were also killed and the whole village burned. All this took three hours. [1]
[edit] Memorial
At the 16th-century village church in Sant'Anna the soldiers shot the priest Fiore Menguzzo (awarded the medal valor civile posthumously, in 1999) at point-blank range and then used machine guns to kill more than 100 people gathered in this place. The soldiers then used the church pews for a bonfire to dispose of the bodies.[2] After the war, the church was rebuilt; the Charnel house-Monument and the Historical Museum of Resistance were both built nearby. Stations of the Cross illustrate scenes from the massacre along the trail from the church to the main memorial site of the National Park of Peace, founded in 2000.
[edit] Trial
Beside the divisional commander Max Simon, no one was prosecuted for this massacre until July 2004, when a trial against ten former Waffen-SS officers and NCOs living in Germany commenced before a military court in La Spezia, Italy. On June 22, 2005, the court found the accused guilty of participation in the killings, and sentenced them in absentia to life imprisonment:[3] Werner Bruss (b. 1920, former SS-Unterscharführer), Alfred Concina (b. 1919, former SS-Unterscharführer), Ludwig Goering (b. 1923, former SS-Rottenführer who confessed he killed twenty women[4]), Karl Gropler (b. 1923, former SS-Unterscharführer), Georg Rauch (b. 1921, former SS-Untersturmführer), Horst Richter (b. 1921, former SS-Unterscharführer), Alfred Schoneberg (b. 1921, former SS-Unterscharführer), Heinrich Schendel (b. 1922, former SS-Unterscharführer'), Gerhard Sommer, (b. 1921, former SS-Untersturmführer), and Ludwig Heinrich Sonntag (b. 1924, former SS-Unterscharführer).
[edit] In popular culture
The massacre inspired Miracle at St. Anna, a novel by James McBride and a film by Spike Lee.
[edit] References
- ^ SS Massacre: A conspiracy of silence is broken, The Guardian, 2 July 2004
- ^ Tiny Town Lost in Tides of History, The New York Times, April 18, 2004
- ^ 10 former Nazis convicted of Tuscan massacre, The Guardian, 23 June 2005
- ^ 'Haunted' SS veteran stands trial for massacre of the innocents in village, The Telegraph, 01 Jul 2004
[edit] See also
[edit] References
[edit] Further reading
- US NARA, Record Group 153, Judge Advocate General, War Crimes Branch, Cases filed 1944–1949, Location: 270/1/25/3-4, Entry 143, Box 527, Case 16–62 (Santa Anna).
- National Archives and Records Administration, RG 238, Office of the Chief of Counsel for War Crimes, Location: 190/10/34/25, Entry 2, Box 10, Case 16–62 (Santa Anna).
- Claudia Buratti/Giovanni Cipollini, Vite bruciate. La strage di Sant’Anna di Stazzema 1944–2005, Rome, 2006.
- Carlo Gentile, Politische Soldaten. Die 16. SS-Panzer-Grenadier-Division „Reichsführer-SS“ in Italien 1944, in: Quellen und Forschungen aus italienischen Archiven und Bibliotheken, 81, 2001, pp. 529–561.
- Carlo Gentile, Sant’Anna di Stazzema, in: Gerd R. Ueberschär (ed.), Orte des Grauens. Verbrechen im Zweiten Weltkrieg, Darmstadt, 2003, pp. 231–236.
- Carlo Gentile, Le SS di Sant’Anna di Stazzema: azioni, motivazioni e profilo di una unità nazista, in: Marco Palla (ed.), Tra storia e memoria. 12 agosto 1944: la strage di Sant’Anna di Stazzema, Rome, 2003, pp. 86–117.
[edit] External links
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Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Sant'Anna di Stazzema |
- The National Park of Peace of Sant’Anna di Stazzema
- "A Day of Shame" for Germany, Deutsche Welle, 12.08.2004
Coordinates: 43°58′27″N 10°16′25″E / 43.97417°N 10.27361°E
