Caiazzo

The Albanese farmstead, where 15 people, mostly women and children, were killed. In total, 22 people died in the massacre of Caiazzo. © Udo Gümpel

13 October 1943 , San Giovanni e Paolo, district in the Caiazzo commune (Caserta province, Campan)

On the evening of October 13, 1943, during an American attack, Leutnant Wolfgang Lehnigk-Emden of the 3rd Panzergrenadier Division believed he saw light signals coming from a nearby farmhouse. Along with two sergeants, he went to investigate, apprehending four men and a 14-year-old boy. Two women followed the group back to the company command post, where Lehnigk-Emden had all the detainees summarily executed upon arrival.

Shortly after, Lehnigk-Emden and the sergeants returned to the farmhouse. They threw grenades inside and then shot the survivors - six women and nine children and teenagers in total. That same night, the German troops withdrew northward from the area.

The next day, American forces advanced into Caiazzo and discovered the bloodbath.

Back to overview of massacres

Involved Unit

Grenadier Regiment 29 (motorized)

Commander

3. Panzer-Grenadier-Division

Culprits

Leutnant Wolfgang Lehnigk-Emden

Victims

Investigations and processes

1943: First reports of the massacre submitted by the Anglo-American Psychological Warfare Branch; first American investigation.

1969-1970: Investigation by the Munich prosecutor’s office ends with termination of the proceedings.

Jan. 1994: Koblenz regional court finds Wolfgang Lehnigk-Emden responsible, but punishment is suspended under German statute of limitations.

Oct. 1994: the Santa Maria Capua Vetere assize court sentences Wolfgang Lehnigk-Emden and Kurt Schuster in absentia to life in prison.

Armed forces

Wehrmacht

German troops traversing the Volturno area. © BArch, Bild 101I-305-0654-15 / phot. Funke

The massacre

The 1943 violent German withdrawal

Starting in the spring of 1943, southern Italy was a battle zone, subject to daily heavy attacks by Allied air forces. The landing of Allied troops on 9 Sept. 1943 was followed by hard fighting with varied outcomes. A German counteroffensive that initially seemed promising failed after a few days, so that in mid-Sept. the Wehrmacht began to leave Italy’s south. After defeat in the Battle of Salerno, withdrawal began with the intention of offering enough resistance to delay the Allied advance.

Along the lines of withdrawal, the Wehrmacht leadership directed the systematic destruction of both military objects and the entire civilian infrastructure. Many civilians were deported into forced labour. As a reaction, in many places, resistance broke out and was bloodily suppressed by the Wehrmacht. The brutal measures of suppression and reprisal between late Sept. and late Nov. took the lives of over 1,600 civilians. Naples and the region around the present-day Caserta province were especially hard hit. Units of the XIV Panzer Corps moved through these areas; three Wehrmacht divisions – the “Hermann Göring” Panzer Division and the 3rd and 15th Panzergrenadier Divisions were chiefly responsible for the killings.
The fighting between German and American units along the Volturno River

In the first days of Oct. 1943, German units took up positions along the northern bank of the Volturno River. On the night of 12-13 Oct., American troops began to attack. The artillery fire, initially aimed at the forward posts on the Volturno, shifted in the following hours to the streets north of the river. Finally, it centred on the slopes of the hills high above the river, since German artillery spotters and command posts were presumed to be located there. At dawn, two American battalions began to cross the Volturno. Progress was slow, as until around noon the troops were held up by mines and machine gun fire. They could only leave their narrow bridgehead on the river in the afternoon and move up the hills to take Caiazzo.

The American troops interrogated the German soldiers who had been involved in the massacre. In the process, the tension within the German unit, determining the behaviour of the individual soldiers, became apparent. The soldier Wilhelm May, a direct witness, gave a detailed account of what had happened.

A bridge across the Volturno river, destroyed in combat. © BArch, Bild 101I-305-0658-02 / Richard Opitz
German soldiers checking the documents of civilians. © BArch, Bild 101I-305-0674-04 / Fot. Schmidt
The positions of Grenadier regiment 29 at the time of the massacre of Caiazzo. © BArch, RH 20-10/67K

The 29th Grenadier Regiment of the 3rd Panzergrenadier Division

The 29^th Grenadier Regiment (motorized), part of the 3^rd Panzergrenadier Division, was responsible for the section of the front near Caiazzo. It was under the command of Oberst Herbert Moeller, whose headquarters were five kilometres north of the village. The Ist and IIIrd battalions were deployed around Caiazzo.

The headquarters of the Ist Battalion under Major von Schultzendorff were located close to Caiazzo. The 3^rd Company under Oberleutnant Raschke was located in a farmhouse of the Massella family on the slope of Monte Carmignano, three kilometres south of the village.

In their first encounter with the Americans, the German troops had already been subject to massive nightly artillery fire. Rumours of clashes between soldiers and civilians further increased the mental pressure. When interrogated, some soldiers captured by American troops reported that in crossing through Caiazzo, the battalion’s 2^nd Company had been attacked by residents, shooting ‘out of all the windows’; the local populace, they indicated, had taken some soldiers prisoner and injured them.

As in many other such cases on the front, the dynamic behind the massacre involved the German troops standing under considerable mental pressure. This becomes clear in the interrogation of individual captured soldiers after the massacre. Gefreiter Wilhelm May, a direct witness to what had transpired, offered a detailed account, asserting he wished to help separate the guilty from those who were not.
The massacre in the farmhouses of Caiazzo

According to May, on 13 Oct., Leutnant Wolfgang Lehnigk-Emden, leader of the first platoon of the 3^rd company of the 29^th Grenadier Regiment (motorized), reported to his company commander, Oberleutnant Raschke, that when night arrived, light signals from the nearby Albanese family farm could be seen. Accompanied by two non-commissioned officers, the Leutnant went to investigate; at the farm he detained four men and a 14-year-old boy and brought them to the command post. Two women followed the troops from fear for the fate of the men.

According to May, Lehnigk-Emden intended to kill the men although there was no evidence for his accusations. According to another source in the unit (cited by Lutz Klinkhammer), Feldwebel Gnass had laid a trap for the Italians by posing as a British soldier and asking for information about German positions. The civilians, this account went, had pointed to a nearby building where the German command was located. This was considered an act of betrayal justifying their killing.

The massacre took place in two phases. The persons removed from the Albanese farmhouse were shot to death near the company’s command post. May testified that a Feldwebel and some non-commissioned officers and soldiers were against the civilians’ killing but did not try to stop it. He indicated that Oberleutnant Raschke likewise distanced himself from what was about to occur and abandoned the imminent crime scene.

The victims were hastily buried in a pit not far from the building. May expressed dismay that the non-commissioned officers had pressured the soldiers to hurry although not all the victims were in fact dead. Leutnant Lehnigk-Emden then went over to the Albanese farm for a second time, after announcing that ‘there are other people there we need to kill’. He was accompanied by a group of soldiers including, again, Schuster und Gnass. They threw hand grenades into the farmhouse and shot the survivors to death. Six women and nine children and teenagers were killed in this way. That same night, the German soldiers abandoned their positions, leaving the area behind. The next day American troops advanced to Caiazzo and discovered the massacre.

In the days following the massacre, reports about it and the responsibility of Leutnant Wolfgang Lehnigk-Emden spread among the American soldiers. The war correspondent William H. Stoneman, who accompanied the troops to Caiazzo, was one of the first to take an interest in the case, writing an article about it in the Chicago Daily News on 18 Oct. 1943.

Investigations and trials

Interrogation by the Psychological Warfare Branch and first American investigations

The legal handling of the Caiazzo case proved complicated. In the aftermath of the massacre, reports about it implicating the responsibility of Leutnant Wolfgang Lehnigk-Emden spread among the American soldiers. War correspondent William H. Stoneman, accompanying the troops into Caiazzo, took an early interest in the case and wrote an article about it in the Chicago Daily News on 18 Oct. 1943.

The author Hans Habe-Békessy (known as Hans Habe), serving in the Anglo-American Psychological Warfare Branch – a unit tasked with interrogating captured German soldiers – also collected information on the case very early on and reported it to his superiors. Lehnigk-Emden was captured weeks later on 4 Nov. 1943 during the fighting for Venafro, then transferred to the Aversa POW camp and interrogated the next day. The investigation continued in a second POW camp, located in Algiers, where Lehnigk-Emden and other captured soldiers had been temporarily moved. However, since all of the massacre’s victims were Italians, the Allied forces did not consider themselves responsible and discontinued the investigation.
Newspaper articles on the massacre

The Caiazzo massacre was one of the first Allied troops discovered as they advanced through southern Italy. It thus drew the attention of war correspondents accompanying the American 5^th Army. The event’s early discovery also suited it for war propaganda. One of the most well-known articles that appeared was by William H. Stoneman, in the Chicago Daily News of 18 and 25 Oct. 1943. Stoneman described the Caiazzo massacre as the first following the armistice for which there was concrete evidence. Another article, appearing in the New York Times on 19 Oct. 1943, was written by journalist Herbert L. Matthews. Caiazzo, he reported, now had an ‘unhappy little niche in Germany's chamber of horrors.’ ‘It is', he continued, ‘one of the Nazi atrocity cases that are only too authentic’.
Sluggish Cold War period investigations

In Aug. 1945, Lehnigk-Emden returned to Germany. A year later, his name was placed on the CROWCASS list of the United Nations Commission for the Investigation of War Crimes. At the time, William Stoneman was active at the United Nations. At his request, the dossier with the American investigative results was forwarded to the Italian government. However, the Italians did not pursue the case in the postwar period.
German prosecutors’ investigations in the 1970

More than two decades later, in 1969, Simon Wiesenthal asked the Ludwigsburg Central Office for information about the former Leutnant. But in his inquiry, Lehnigk-Emden’s name was mistakenly spelled ‘Lemick-Emden’, so that the Munich prosecutor’s office, which had been assigned the investigation, closed the case on 6 March 1970 because the suspect’s identity could not be determined. A year later, the Munich office also closed investigations against unknown persons involving various acts of homicide taking place in the Caserta province between the first half of Sept. and first half of Aug. 1943: it had been impossible to identify either the individual perpetrators or the participating German units.
Resumption of investigation in the late 1980s

In 1988, the Italian American Joseph Agnone handed the Santa Maria Capua Vetere prosecutor’s office documents on the Caiazzo massacre that he had found in the National Archives, Washington. Following the German authorities’ receipt of an arrest warrant, Lehnigk-Emden was found in Germany and placed in pretrial detention.

In 1994, the Higher Regional Court in Koblenz opened trial proceedings against him, as did the court in Santa Maria Capua Vetere. Notably, at this point the circumstances of the crime were not being legally addressed; the sole question standing at the centre of the Koblenz court was that of the German statute of limitations.

The complex legal situation regarding Germany's statute of limitations for wartime crimes compelled the Koblenz court to solicit expert opinions.

Expert assessments of the Lehnigk-Emden case

The complex legal situation regarding Germany's statute of limitations for wartime crimes compelled the Koblenz court to solicit expert opinions. They appointed two German historians, Gerhard Schreiber and Lutz Klinkhammer, along with Alfred de Zayas, an American expert in international law and legal history. Their task was to determine if the Wehrmacht would have prosecuted the Caiazzo killings at the time under their jurisdiction, had the crimes been known. If no prosecution would have occurred despite awareness, the statute of limitations could potentially be interrupted.

Schreiber and Klinkhammer argued prosecution was unlikely since the massacre happened during anti-partisan action. They cited German military guidelines in force during the occupation of Italy, together with an examination of documents of German military courts in Italy for the 1943-45 period, finding no evidence of criminal prosecution of soldiers on account of such excesses when fighting partisans.

De Zayas, in contrast, opined that even the Nazi authorities would have prosecuted the level of excessive violence seen in Caiazzo.

Protocol of the interrogation of Wolfgang Lehnigk-Emden in American war captivity. Lehnigk-Emden recounts the events of the evening, when the massacre of Caiazzo took place. © Archiv der Militärgeneralstaatsanwaltschaft in Rom

The Koblenz court categorized the murder of women and children as first-degree murder under German law.

The 1994 Koblenz court judgement

In its 18 January 1994 ruling, the Koblenz court treated the Caiazzo killings as two separate events. It classified the initial command post executions as homicide (Totschlag), which was subject to the statute of limitations. However, it categorized the subsequent murder of women and children as first-degree murder (Mord) under German law. In assessing whether this portion was also statute-limited, the court followed de Zayas' opinion, in line with the presumption of innocence principle. As a result, the court ruled the statute had not been interrupted, the murders were limited, and the accused were no longer prosecutable.

The court in Santa Maria Capua Vetere came to the opposite conclusion. On 25 October 1994, it convicted Lehnigk-Emden and one former non-commissioned officer in absentia, sentencing both to life imprisonment. A third defendant had died in the interim.

The Koblenz prosecutor's office appealed the initial judgement, bringing the case before the German Federal Court of Justice in 1995. To clarify the statute of limitations question, the court enlisted a new expert - a retired Bundeswehr general who had served in the 3rd Panzergrenadier Division just weeks after the Caiazzo massacre. Aligning with de Zayas' view, the general felt that based on his ‘own experience’, the division leadership would have prosecuted the accused under German military law had they known of the killings. However, there are no documented cases historically where this actually occurred.

Regardless, the Federal Court upheld the Koblenz judgement entirely, including the determination that the statute of limitations on the classified murder portion had taken effect, foreclosing prosecution.

In the foreground the now ruinous Massella farmstead, then headquarters of the 3rd Kompanie of Grenadier regiment 29. In the background the ruins of the Albanese farmstead, where women and children were killed during the massacre. © Udo Gümpel

Erinnerung

Memory of the massacre

The first public commemoration of the Caiazzo massacre occurred in 1963. In 1968, a memorial was erected in the local cemetery; it contains a text that the philosopher Benedetto Croce wrote in Nov. 1943 at William Stoneman’s request.

Since 1996, Caiazzo and Ochtendung, where Wolfgang Lehnigk-Emden lived and worked as an architect after the war, have been sister cities. Citizen’s associations were founded in both places to support cultural exchange between Italy and Germany and to keep the memory of the massacre alive. The Ochtendung municipality donated a commemorative stele to Caiazzo, unveiled on one of the town’s central squares on 15 April 2001. The ceremony, was attended by German and Italian representatives, including the German consul in Naples. Additionally the Premio nazionale di Storia Associazione Monte Carmignano per l'Europa. Memoria e riconciliazione (‘National History-Prize of the Monte Carmignano Association for Europa. Memory and Reconciliation’) was launched in 2020 to commemorate the massacre’s victims. Recipients so far include Udo Gümpel (2020), Lutz Klinkhammer, and Carlo Gentile (2022).

Sources

Documentation of the Allied investigation, including transcripts of the interrogation of German soldiers, are kept in the U.S. National Archives, Washington (US NARA, Record Group 153: Records of the Office of the Judge Advocate General, War Crimes Branch, Entry 143, Box 544-545; US NARA, Record Group 407: Records of the Adjutant General’s Office, 105- 2.13, Fifth Army, G-2 Reports, Interrogation Reports 1943-1945, Box: 2216) and in the British National Archives, London (Kew), WO 204 War Office: Allied Forces, Mediterranean Theatre: Military Headquarters Papers, WO 204/2235B, Massacre at Caiazzo, Italy).

The research-documents of local historian Giuseppe Capobianco are kept in the Caserta state archive (fondo Capobianco, busta 286, fascicolo 2616, Il Massacro di Caiazzo. Appunti manoscritti). Documents tied to the German prosecutor’s office investigation are kept in Koblenz (Landeshauptarchiv Koblenz, 101 Js 35779/90 NSG jug) and in the Federal archives in Ludwigsburg (Aktenzeichen: V 302 AR 284/92).

Only a small number of documents are kept in the Freiburg military archive of the German Federal Archives, most of these reports on military action and commands of division headquarters: BArch, RH 26-3/12: Anlagen zum Kriegstagebuch Nr. 4 der 3^.Panzer-Grenadier-Division; RH 26-3/13K, with maps concerning the fighting for Caiazzo.

Literature

Hans Bader, Caiazzo, in: Betrifft JUSTIZ, 43/1995, Michelstadt, Neuthor, pp. 121-125.

Giovanni Cerchia, La Seconda guerra mondiale nel Mezzogiorno. Resistenze, stragi e memoria, Mailand, Luni editrice, 2019, pp. 493-503.

Kerstin Freudiger, Die juristische Aufarbeitung von NS-Verbrechen, Tübingen, Mohr Siebeck, 2002, pp. 130-138.

Lutz Klinkhammer, Stragi naziste in Italia. La guerra contro i civili (1943-1944), 2nd expanded edn., Rome, Donzelli, 2006, pp. 43-53.

Gerhard Schreiber, Deutsche Kriegsverbrecher in Italien. Täter, Opfer, Strafverfolgung, Munich, C.H. Beck, 1996, pp. 93, 138, 141-145, 148f.

Authorship and translation

Autor: Carlo Gentile

Translated from German by: Joel Golb

2023

Text: CC BY NC SA 4.0

Caiazzo

The massacre

The 1943 violent German withdrawal

The fighting between German and American units along the Volturno River

The 29th Grenadier Regiment of the 3rd Panzergrenadier Division

The massacre in the farmhouses of Caiazzo

Investigations and trials

Interrogation by the Psychological Warfare Branch and first American investigations

Newspaper articles on the massacre

Sluggish Cold War period investigations

German prosecutors’ investigations in the 1970

Resumption of investigation in the late 1980s

The complex legal situation regarding Germany's statute of limitations for wartime crimes compelled the Koblenz court to solicit expert opinions.

Expert assessments of the Lehnigk-Emden case

The Koblenz court categorized the murder of women and children as first-degree murder under German law.

The 1994 Koblenz court judgement

Erinnerung

Memory of the massacre

Information on data protection

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