Massacre at Civitella, Cornia and San Pancrazio

In total, during the massacres of Civitella in Val die Chiana, Cornia and San Pancrazio, more than 200 people lost their lives. © Udo Gümpel

29 June 1944 , Civitella in Val di Chiana, Cornia, San Pancrazio (Arezzo, Tuscany)

In the summer of 1944 in the Arezzo province, German troops, especially from the 'Hermann Göring' Panzer Division, killed 744 people, predominantly civilians, under the pretext of anti-partisan operations. Several of the most bloody episodes occurred on June 29th in the villages of Civitella, Cornia, and San Pancrazio, located between the Val di Chiana and Val d'Ambra valleys, which were considered partisan strongholds.

In the postwar period, investigations into the massacres dragged on for decades without resolution. Finally, in 2006, a single perpetrator would be convicted for his role in the killings.

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Involved Unit

Military Police Detachment b 1000; Alarm Company ‘Vesuv’; Alarm Company ‘Pauke’; ‘Hermann Göring’ military band

Commander

Parachute Panzer-Division ‘Hermann Göring’

Culprits

Schutzpolizei Hauptmann Heinz Barz; Oberleutnant Siegfried Böttcher

Victims

204: 98 in Civitella, 32 in Cornia, 16 in Gebbia and 58 in San Pancrazio

Investigations and processes

June 1945: Investigation of the SIB.

1948-1950: Proceedings of the Florence military court against Wilhelm Schmalz, later (12 July 1950) exonerated by the Rome military court.

1998-: New investigations in Italy (La Spezia) and Germany (Dortmund and Stuttgart).

2006: Termination of Stuttgart proceedings on account of death of accused person.

2006: Trial in La Spezia, confirmation of the sentence passed by appeals court in 2007; confirmation by court of cassation in 2008.

15 May 2019: Termination of Dortmund proceedings.

Additional crime scenes

Civitella in Val di Chiana
Cornia
San Pancrazio

Armed forces

Wehrmacht

The massacre

The situation in the Arezzo area, late June 1944

In the summer of 1944 in the Arrezzo province, German troops killed 774 persons, mainly civilians, on grounds of ‘anti-bandit’ action. Of these 451 persons were victims were killed through mass executions carried out between late June and mid-July 1944 by the ‘Hermann Göring’ Panzer Division in its area of operations.

The mass killings in late June 1944 occurred in Val di Chiana, in the village of Cornia, and in San Pancrazio, a village in the Bucine commune. The affected area is located in the hilly region between the Chiana and Ambra valleys, approximately 12 to 15 kilometres southwest of Arezzo, where Wehrmacht troops aimed to halt the Allied advance in early July.

In this area, the ‘Banda Renzino’ was active: a small partisan group led by a former Italian paratrooper lieutenant. Throughout July, the previously hardly noticeable activity of this group had expanded by the disarming of police stations, along with attacks on fascists and – sporadically – German soldiers and vehicles along the Monte San Savino road to Bucine, a key route for the ‘Hermann Göring’ division.
The partisan activity and the reaction of the ‘Hermann Göring’ division

For the Wehrmacht headquarters, the localities of Civitella, Cornia, and San Pancrazio took on importance following a series of clashes between partisans and German soldiers. On 18 June 1944, partisans attacked a group of withdrawing German paratroopers and spending the night in a farmhouse on the edge of Civitella. Two soldiers were killed on the spot; a third, gravely wounded, died soon after. A fourth soldier could hide and escape with the help of residents. Furthermore, on 21 June, not far from the village of Cornia on the road between Monte San Savino and Bucine, a non-commissioned officer in the military-police unit of the ‘Hermann Göring’ Division was attacked and wounded. Two other soldiers were abducted by the partisans. In response, on 23 June the Germans attacked the partisans’ nearby headquarters in Villa Montaltuzzo. In the course of this action, they lost one soldier but freed the two imprisoned men. A farmer was arrested and later hanged at the entrance to Monte San Savino, where the headquarters of the military police were located.

However, German reports did not specify the actual locations of Verniana and Montaltuzzo where these engagements occurred, instead referring to San Pancrazio village approximately eight kilometers away with little known partisan presence. Imprecise reporting may have implicated San Pancrazio in the later ‘Hermann Göring’ division actions.
German documents and ‘Operation Silkworm’

The massacre took place during a series of operations aimed at neutralizing the partisan presence in the division’s rear area. The action began some days before 29 June with reconnaissance and clashes with partisans and ended in July in Valdarno. Precise context remains extremely difficult since nearly all relevant German documents have been lost. This may have been an operation coded Seidenraupe – ‘silkworm’ – mentioned in a Wehrmacht document without precise geographical information. That source states an operation from June 22nd to July 8th, 1944 killed 391 people - similar to the late June-early July massacre toll.

Beyond hypothetical links, two elements seemingly motivated German actions: securing rear areas and headquarters against partisans and punishing locals in an area where German forces had suffered partisan losses.

No original documents have survived. For this reason, we cannot know whether the LXXVI Panzer Corps or the ‘Hermann Göring’ Division was responsible for the action. It was led by Hauptmann Heinz Barz, head of the division’s military-police unit.

Participants in the Civitella action

On 29 June 1944, German troops moved against the villages of Civitella, Cornia and San Pancrazio. No original documents have survived. For this reason, we cannot know whether the LXXVI Panzer Corps or the ‘Hermann Göring’ Division was responsible for the action. The person who led it was Hauptmann Heinz Barz, head of the division’s military-police unit. He had command over a tactical group composed of the roughly 70 men from his battalion and members of the supply unit. This was made up of Alarm Company ‘Vesuv’ (ca. 100 men), itself consisting of members of the supply battalions, and Alarm Company ‘Pauke’ (an additional 100 men), which included soldiers of the III^rd group of Panzer Regiment ‘Hermann Göring’. The Military Police Company was also reinforced by elements of the ‘Herman Göring’ military band. In total, it appears there were circa 350 men. The military police battalions and alarm units were under the command of the Ib-officer, Major Werner Grün, responsible for logistical support. As usual in the German command structure, the deployment orders came from an Ic-officer, in this case, possibly Hauptmann Gustav Humbert or his predecessor, Hauptmann Hans Jürgen Soehring.

In view of the size of the operational area, other units probably participated in the action; but the documents we have are insufficient to identify them. There were rumours of parachutist participation among German witnesses, but this is not confirmed by extant Wehrmacht documents.
The actions on 29 June 1944

The actions began on the morning of 29 June. At daybreak motorized German troops reached and surrounded Civitella in Val di Chiana and San Pancrazio. They blocked the road near Cornia. This was certainly coordinated by a single command and executed with great determination and brutality.

According to information in the Atlante delle Stragi Naziste e Fasciste in Italia, in both Civitella and Cornia 130 persons were killed, in San Pancrazio 58. The victims in Civitella and San Pancrazio were mainly adult men; in Cornia the soldiers also killed many women and children. Some of those seized on 29 June were killed during the following days after being interrogated, while others were transported to a collecting point for forced labourers in Florence.

In one of the indictments in the postwar Nuremberg proceedings, Civitella in Val di Chiana was introduced as an example of the violence perpetrated by German soldiers in Italy, together with the massacre in Rome’s Fosse Ardeatine.

Investigations and trials

Early British investigations and citation at Nuremberg

The juridical processing of the Civitella massacre would be prolonged and complex. It already began during the war and only ended in the early 2000s.

In the days following the massacre, members of the British Special Investigation Branch (SIB) carried out initial investigations, collecting witness testimony now kept in the British National Archives. A series of suspects in the Civitella killings were placed on the CROWCASS list. These included the Ib-officer Werner Grün.

In one of the indictments in the postwar Nuremberg proceedings, Civitella in Val di Chiana was introduced as an example of the violence perpetrated by German soldiers in Italy, together with the massacre in Rome’s Fosse Ardeatine. In 1947, the trial of former Feldmarschall Albert Kesselring opened in Venice. Kesselring, who had been the commander-in-chief of German forces in Italy, now stood accused of executing measures of repression and retaliation against the Italian civil populace. One of the counts against him was responsibility for massacres by the ‘Hermann Göring’ Division and especially the Civitella massacre.
The 1948 trial of former General Wilhelm Schmalz

As former commander of the ‘Hermann Göring’ Division, Wilhelm Schmalz was the first person to be accused in the framework of massacres perpetrated by the division: those in Civitella, Cornia, San Pancrazio, Cavriglia and Bucine. In 1948, he was extradited to Italy and put on trial before the Florence military court that same year. Two years later, on 12 July 1950, the territorial military court in Rome freed him because, the court ruled, he had ‘not committed the deed’.
1956 investigations of the Düsseldorf prosecutor’s office

In 1956, the German consulate in Genoa sent an inquiry to the German Foreign Office in Bonn regarding the murder of the writer Giovanni Cau and his wife, the Swedish artist Helga Elmqvist. The German occupiers had accused the two of collaborating with partisans; during the killings in Gebbia, a district in Civitella, they had been taken prisoner and held in the headquarters of the military police, ‘Hermann Göring’ Division, in Monte San Savino. After the Germans left the area, there was no trace of the couple.

In 1950, their corpses were found in unmarked graves in Gebbia. In 1956, Helga Elmqvist's elderly mother asked the German consulate for compensation or a contribution towards the education of the couple's three orphans. The consulate rejected the request for compensation, but held out the prospect of an investigation by the German judiciary. The Düsseldorf public prosecutor's office was entrusted with the investigation to identify the perpetrators. Two former officers who had served in the area of Monte San Savino in 1944 were located and interrogated.

Both claimed to have known nothing about the fate of the couple and to have left the area long before the massacre on 29 June. However, the latter was not true, as it is proven that their unit remained in the area until at least 30 June 1944. The investigation stalled and was closed in December 1957. It is not known whether Helga Elmqvist's mother ultimately received the help she needed to support her grandchildren.
New proceedings by the Stuttgart prosecutor in the 1980s

There were no further investigations until the mid-1980s, when based on CROWCASS lists the prosecutor’s office in Stuttgart initiated a series of proceedings against numerous men for participating in the massacres in Italy, including the Civitella massacre. But the proceedings were only seen through superficially, led nowhere, and were terminated in Feb. 1993.

The names of possible perpetrators emerged in the framework of historical research; other persons were identified for the first time, including Heinz Barz, Siegfried Böttcher and many other commissioned officers and non-coms in the “Hermann Göring” Panzer Division.

Historical documents and the identification of the perpetrators

The conference "In Memory. Per una memoria europea dei crimini nazisti" took place between 22 and 24 June 1994. This represented the first truly international conference for historical research on the massacres in Italy perpetrated by members of the Waffen-SS and Wehrmacht. The conference’s focus was on the massacres of Aretino and, especially, Civitella.

Several years later, new research by the historian Carlo Gentile, commissioned by the communes of Bucine, Cavriglia, Civitella in Val di Chiana, and Stia, led to identification of those responsible for the massacres perpetrated by the ‘Hermann Göring’ Division in Tuscany. The men involved included Heinz Barz, Siegfried Böttcher, and many other officers and non-coms in the division. The research aimed to collect the information needed to initiate criminal proceedings. Senator Guido Calvi (PDS/L‘Ulivo) was entrusted with supervising the legal proceedings, but initiating them proved complicated. In 1998, Calvi’s office filed charges with the Arezzo prosecutor’s office, which, however, declared itself not competent. The criminal complaint was then forwarded to the La Spezia military prosecutor, which opened the first investigation into ca. 30 former officers of the ‘Hermann Göring’ Division and the LXXVI Panzer Corps. One of the men was Heinz Barz, whose name had already appeared in investigations initiated immediately after the war but who had not been identified until 1998. In this first investigative round, it emerged that many of the persons under suspicion had either died or could not be found; Barz would die in 2000.
Responses to Christiane Kohl’s Villa Paradiso

In 2002, Christiane Kohl, a German journalist and the Italy-correspondent of the prominent Süddeutsche Zeitung daily, published Villa Paradiso: Als der Krieg in die Toskana kam (‘Villa Paradiso: When the War Came to Tuscany’). The Civitella massacre formed the backdrop to this journalistic report, based on archival research and interviews with German and Italian witnesses. In December 2002, the book was presented in Berlin in the presence of German justice minister Brigitte Zypries and the Italian ambassador to Germany, Silvio Fagiolo. Shortly afterward, the Dortmund prosecutor’s office opened proceedings against former Major Werner Grün and other members of the ‘Hermann Göring’ Division.
Proceedings in La Spezia, Dortmund and Stuttgart

In 2002, criminal proceeding no. 62/02 began in La Spezia. The suspects were Werner Grün, Karl Stolleisen, Max Josef Milde, Wilfried Matthes, and Siegfried Böttcher, all residing in Germany. After a long delay, the trial of Böttcher, Stolleisen, and Milde opened on 17 April 2006.

Meanwhile, the proceedings in Germany against Siegfried Böttcher, who was living in Baden-Württemberg, were separated from the Dortmund proceedings and moved to the Stuttgart prosecutor’s office, which filed for an indictment. Böttcher died in the summer. Another accused man was too ill to stand trial. The trial in Stuttgart was thus terminated early, while on 10 October 2006 the La Spezia trial ended with the sentencing of Bremen-based Max Josef Milde, former military band sergeant of the ‘Hermann Göring’ Division, to life in prison. In 2007, the sentence was confirmed by the Rome military appeals court, then again by the court of cassation in 2008.

On 21 October 2008, judges of the first criminal chamber of Italy’s Court of Cassation ordered the German Federal Republic to pay compensation to nine relatives of the victims. Germany responded with an appeal to the International Court of Justice in The Hague, which accepted the case and then confirmed that international law guaranteed the immunity of sovereign states from cases brought by national courts.

The victims request compensation

Some lawyers for civil parties filed lawsuits against Germany; this led to a delay in the criminal trial prompting a great deal of discussion. Gianluca Luongo, a lawyer from the Arezzo province who represented the family of one victim made the following statement: ‘This procedure is not only the result of advanced old age of those accused, who are appearing before the court more than 60 years after the massacre, but also of the extremely questionable defence strategy of some lawyers for the civil parties. With their claim that the German state is liable under civil law, they have produced a standstill in the trial. This has lasted circa five months, and because of the accused being over 90 years old this has regrettably meant that responsibility for this horrible massacre can no longer be determined.’ (ANSA report 19 August 2006.)

On 21 October 2008, judges of Italy’s first court of cassation nevertheless ordered the German state to pay compensation of one million euros to relatives of the massacre’s victims. Germany responded with an appeal to the International Court of Justice in The Hague, which accepted the case and then confirmed that international law guaranteed the immunity of sovereign states from cases brought by national courts. The European arrest warrant against Max Josef Milde issued by the military court in Verona in 2011 was likewise rejected in Germany, as was an application for carrying out Milde’s sentence there. The investigations of the Dortmund prosecutor ended on 15 May 2019.

Memory

Tensions and fractures

In the postwar period, the memory of the Civitella in Val di Chiana massacre was stamped by tension. On the one side were survivors and the victims’ families, on the other side local partisans were made responsible for what had occurred. This fracture became increasingly deep over time, and ever more difficult to bridge. The suggestion of distinguishing the commune’s banner with the Gold Medal for Military Valour was rejected by the commune. Instead, in 1963 the Gold Medal for Civil Valour was accepted and awarded to the Bucine and Civitella communes.

It is only now, with the passing of many directly involved, that these historic events can be recollected with somewhat less pain and emotional burden. The 1994 "In Memory" conference organized in Arezzo by historians Leonardo Paggi—himself a massacre survivor—and Victoria de Grazia brought international scholarly attention to this difficult history. Subsequent research and identification of still-living perpetrators in Germany enabled some reconciliation between victims' families and collective national memory.

Two important institutional visits to Civitella significantly advanced the integration process: that of Italian President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi on 7 October 2006, three days before the La Spezia trial ended; and that of Italian and German foreign minister Federica Mogherini and Frank-Walter Steinmeier (currently Germany’s President) on 29 June 2014, the massacre’s 70^th anniversary.

Finally, in 2006 a small but informative memorial space opened in Civitella's old town hall displaying pertinent documents, objects, and photographs of the massacre for public remembrance.

Sources

The Civitella massacre is hardly mentioned in extant German military documents. The only such document that can be clearly connected to the event is a map from of the Ic-detachment from 30 June 1944 showing the putative location of ‘bandits’. On the map, a large circle has been drawn around the area of Civitella, Cornia and San Pancrazio, identified as a ‘bandit area’ (Bandengebiet) and reference to a ‘countermeasure’ (G[egen]M[aßnahme)“ implimented there on 29 June: German Federal Archives, Freiburg, BArch, RH 24-76/13, Gen.Kdo. LXXVI. Pz.K., Ic-map of bandit locations, 30 June 1944. The reference to ‘Operation SIlkworm’, in which 391 persons were killed between 22 June and 8 July 1944, is located in BArch, RH 19 X/107 K. Information concerning the losses suffered by German battalions in Civitella and surroundings before the massacre is found in German Federal Archived section PA, Berlin.

Documents tied to the Allied investigation are kept in the British National Archives, London (Kew): WO 204/11479, Atrocities committed by German Troops at Civitella, Cornia and San Pancrazio; and WO 310/220. Material tied to the 1948-1950 trial of former General Wilhelm Schmalz is partly kept in the Rome military prosecutor’s office, together with material of the most recent investigations and proceedings. The 1956 and 1958 investigations of the Düsseldorf prosecutor’s office are kept in the state archive of North Rhine-Westphalia: NW 377, no. 3786. Files of the investigation of the Dortmund prosecutor’s office are kept in the office’s archive (45 Js 1/04).

Literature

Ida Balò-Valli, Giugno 1944. Civitella racconta, Cortona, L'Etruria, 1994.

Giovanni Contini, La memoria divisa, Milan, Rizzoli, 1997.

Carlo Gentile, Wehrmacht und Waffen-SS im Partisanenkrieg: Italien 1943-1945, Paderborn, Ferdinand Schöningh, 2012, pp. 320-326.

Carlo Gentile, Le stragi del 1944 in provincia di Arezzo ed i loro perpetratori (Relazione presentata in preparazione della richiesta di apertura di indagini da parte dei comuni di Bucine, Cavriglia, Civitella in Val di Chiana e Stia), Colonia, 1998; available at: https://uni-koeln.academia.edu/CarloGentile

Christiane Kohl, Villa Paradiso. Als der Krieg in die Toskana kam, Munich, Goldmann, 2002.

Authorship and translation

Author: Carlo Gentile

Translated from German by: Joel Golb

2023

Text: CC BY NC SA 4.0