Sant'Anna di Stazzema massacre

The Sant'Anna di Stazzema massacre was a Nazi German atrocity in the hill village of Sant'Anna di Stazzema in Tuscany, Italy, in the course of an operation against the Italian resistance movement during the Italian Campaign of World War II. On 12 August 1944, about 560 local villagers and refugees were murdered and their bodies burnt in a scorched earth policy action by the German occupation forces of the Waffen-SS.

Massacre


On the morning of 12 August 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. The soldiers rounded up hundreds of local villagers and refugees and locked them up in several barns and stables before executing them in groups by shooting them with machine guns or by herding them into basements and other enclosed spaces and tossing in hand grenades. They then set the corpses on fire. At the 16th-century village church, the priest Fiore Menguzzo (awarded the medal valor civile posthumously in 1999) was shot at point-blank range, and machine guns were then turned on some 100 people gathered there. The soldiers used the church's pews for a bonfire to dispose of the bodies. The victims of the killings included at least 107 children (the youngest of whom, Anna Pardini, was only 20 days old), as well as eight pregnant women (one of whom, Evelina Berretti, had her stomach cut with a bayonet and her baby pulled out and killed separately). The livestock were also killed and the whole village was burnt down. This devastation took three hours; the soldiers then sat down outside the village and ate lunch.

Aftermath


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—the National Park of Peace, founded in 2000. The massacre inspired the novel Miracle at St. Anna by James McBride, and a film of the same name by Spike Lee.

Apart from 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 was held before a military court in La Spezia, Italy. On 22 June 2005, the court found the accused guilty of participation in the killings and sentenced them in absentia to life imprisonment: Werner Bruss (b. 1920, former SS-Unterscharführer), Alfred Concina (b. 1919, former SS-Unterscharführer), Ludwig Goering (b. 1923, former SS-Rottenführer who confessed to killing twenty women), 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). However, extradition requests from Italy were rejected by Germany. In 2012, German prosecutors shelved their investigation of 17 unnamed former SS soldiers (eight of whom were still living) who were part of the unit involved in the massacre because of a lack of evidence. The statement said: "Belonging to a Waffen-SS unit that was deployed to Sant'Anna di Stazzema cannot replace the need to prove individual guilt. Rather, for every defendant it must be proven that he took part in the massacre, and in which form." The mayor of the village, Michele Silicani (who was 10 when the raid occurred), called the verdict "a scandal" and said he would urge Italy's justice minister to lobby Germany to reopen the case. German Deputy Foreign Minister Michael Georg Link commented that "while respecting the independence of the German justice system," it was not possible "to ignore that such a decision causes deep dismay and renewed suffering to Italians, not just survivors and relatives of the victims."