Cervarolo and Civago

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Involved Unit

Parachute Panzer Reconnaissance Battalion ‘Hermann Göring’, Gendarmerie Company ‘Emilia’

Commander

Parachute Panzer Division ‘Hermann Göring’

Culprits

Rittmeister Kurt-Christian von Loeben, under command of Parachute Panzer Reconnaissance Battalion ‘Hermann Göring’

Victims

24 in Cervarolo, 4 in Civago

Investigations and processes

2004-2015: Investigation by the Dortmund prosecutor’s office.

2010-2011: Verona military court sentences former Oberleutnant Fritz Olberg and former Feldwebel Karl Stark to life in prison. 

2015: The sentence is legally valid

Armed forces

Wehrmacht

The massacres

• The German reprisal-operation

  Two days after the massacre at Monchio, the reconnaissance battalion resumed its activities in the area of Villa Minozzo, since larger partisan groups were based there. The Reggio Emilia territorial Platzkommandantur had a mixed-nationality Jagdkommando, consisting of 8 German soldiers, 19 German and French legionnaires from the Nazi Party motor corps (the NSKK), and 30 Italian RSI soldiers. The patrol was ambushed and suffered heavy casualties. After the LXXV Army Corps called for reinforcements, the reconnaissance battalion’s 3rd Company moved in; Rittmeister von Loeben now handed command over to Hauptmann Richard Heimann, who had already led the troops in Monchio. But evidently as a reaction to the Monte Santa Giulia operation, the partisan groups had nearly fully disbanded and hidden their weapons.  

  The reprisal operation began although it was clear the partisans had left the area; on that day fighting took place at a great distance and without losses on the German side.

  From reports on the course of the operations, it is clear that representatives of the Italian secret police and militia had declared the villages of Cervarolo and Civago to be a ‘permanent base for bandits’. Hauptmann Heimann surmised that ‘some of the bandits’ would stay there masked ‘as harmless civilians’. In the early morning hours of 20 March, he ordered the 3^rd Company to attack both places with the help of the fascist militia, to kill all men there of fighting age, and to burn down the houses. The troops followed the orders they had been given.

• The attack on Cervarolo and Civago

  While both villages were surrounded by GNR guard posts, German soldiers entered the houses. They forced the men – their ages ranged between 17 and 84 – outside and assembled them in the area before a farm, then made them wait there for hours. This group included the local priest, Don Battista Pigozzi, who had been denounced as a partisan supporter and was now abused and humiliated with particular brutality. Other soldiers raped several young women. Along with the Germans, there were some French NSKK members deployed at the site; apparently some of them tried to render the civilians’ fate less harsh, and to hide some of the younger men.  After the houses were plundered, they were set on fire.

  Meanwhile, some soldiers had moved to the nearby village of Civago. They killed two shepherds on the street and two more in their houses, which were then likewise plundered and set on fire. The column then returned to Cervarolo, from where the women and children were expelled with little more than the clothes on their backs. Towards evening, the soldiers finally shot the 24 men who had been kept at the farmyard.

• Criticism from headquarters

  The brutality of this ‘anti-partisan operation’ was met with disapproval in LXXV Army Corps headquarters. When on 22 March von Loeben’s report was presented to the chief of staff, Oberst Horst Kraehe, and the responsible Ic-officer, Hauptmann Alexander zu Dohna-Schlobitten, both men doubted the credibility of the described events. That the reconnaissance battalion had taken no prisoners or booty seemed improbable. The unit had evidently not intended to deliver their plundered goods to the responsible authorities. What was at issue here was thus plundering that had been hidden from the military leadership. When Dohna inquired about the reconnaissance battalion at division headquarters, he was simply told that ‘all bandits have been put to death’, the plunder burnt up ‘in the torched villages’. 

  The German military commands in Parma and Bologna likewise criticised the division’s conduct. In the end Dohna succeeded in having a paragraph he wrote on ‘fighting bandits’ incorporated into the corps’ order of the day, in order to avoid such encroachments in the future:

  The main rule is annihilation [Vernichtung] of all bandits encountered with weapons at hand. If possible, however, individual persons of this sort are to be initially captured and interrogated, since they often can offer important evidence. b) Suspicious civilians are to be held and handed to the responsible authorities after interrogation. c) Houses are only to be burnt down when armed bandits are encountered there. Consequently, the need for destruction [Vernichtung] of entire villages is extremely rare. Experience indicates that such measures lead to the remaining portion of the populace going over to the bandits and are thus to be avoided. Unjust punishments shake trust by the populace and create new gangs.

Investigations and trials

Memory