Cavriglia

Back to overview of massacres

Involved Unit

Guard Company LXXVI. Panzer corps; Alarm Company ‘Vesuv’; Parachute Panzer Pioneer Battalion ‘Hermann Göring’

Commander

Generalkommando LXXVI. Panzer corps, Parachute Panzer Division ‘Hermann Göring’

Culprits

Hauptmann Heinz Barz

Victims

173 (figures from the Cavriglia commune: 93 victims in Meleto, 74 in Castelnuovo dei Sabbioni, 4 in the village of San Martino and 2 in the village of Massa dei Sabbioni).

Investigations and processes

Sept. 1944 - June 1945: Investigations of the English SIB

1999: Investigations of the La Spezia military court – terminated the following year because of the deaths of the suspects.

2004-2012: Investigations of the Dortmund prosecutor’s office

Armed forces

Wehrmacht

The massacres

• The massacre of Meleto

  At the time of the massacre roughly 600 persons, including many refugees, were living in Meleto, a village in the Cavriglia commune. In the early morning, soldiers of the ‘Hermann Göring’ division entered and surrounded the village. They then began to search it in small groups. All male residents were pulled from their houses and brought to the main square; in a short time circa 100 men had been rounded up there. Among them was the village priest, Don Giovanni Fondelli, who in view of the pending atrocity issued absolution to all the men. 

  As with the previous massacres in Civitella and San Pancrazio, in Meleto women and children were violently expelled from the village. Some time later the men were divided into four groups, brought to farmyards near the village and mowed down there with machine-gun fire. Their corpses were then set on fire. The German soldiers murdered 93 men in Meleto.

• The massacre of Castelnuovo dei Sabbioni

  Castelnuovo dei Sabbioni was a village with circa 800 residents on the edge of a large lignite dump in the Valdarno valley. The men living there were mainly miners or otherwise employed by the local mining company. 

  Early in the morning of 4 July, the troops encircled Castelnuovo and systematically searched the houses. They divided the men they found into two groups, holding one group in the main square, the other in the lower part of the village. The first group included the village priest, Don Ferrante Bagiardi. Women and children were told to leave the village, but some did not comply. A long waiting period followed, during which the circa 60 men in the main square were guarded by soldiers. The priest had futilely tried to intercede for the seized men with the German commanders; when he realized that their mass killing was imminent, he issued Communion. Immediately afterward, at an officer’s command the machine-gun killing began. A few of the men were able to flee. Then a second, smaller group was brought to the square and suffered the same fate. 

  The group kept in the village’s lower part were stopped on the way to the square and ordered, without any explanation, to return to their houses and stay there. Since, in distinction to other massacres, some women and children had remained in the village, some of them became witnesses to the executions. The corpses of the murdered men were covered with furniture and other combustible material and set on fire. 

  In total, the soldiers killed 74 men in Castelnuovo dei Sabbioni. An additional 6 men were killed in the adjacent villages of San Martino and Massa dei Sabbioni. The victims’ ages ranged from 15 to 88.

• Postwar investigations

  In September 1944, the British SIB began to collect evidence and witness accounts of the massacres. However, those directly responsible for them remained largely unknown and for decades there were no further inquiries into the mass crime.  

  Then, in June 1994, in connection with the international conference ‘In Memory. Per una memoria europea dei crimini nazisti’ in Arezzo, the historian Carlo Gentile was officially commissioned by the Cavriglia commune to identify those members of the ‘Hermann Göring’ division responsible for the mass killing. To do so, he consulted documents in Allied and German archives. 

  In May 1999, the military prosecutor in La Spezia initiated proceedings against former German non-commissioned officer Rudolf Groner, who at the time of the events had belonged to the 3^rd Supply Company of the ‘Hermann Göring’ division. Since Groner had already died in the 1980s in Spanish Málaga, the proceedings were quickly ended.

  Investigations initiated by the Dortmund prosecutor’s office in 2004 were terminated inconclusively on 19 July 2012

Memory