Massacre at the Turchino Pass

The memorial dedicated to the victims. © Udo Gümpel

19 May 1944 , Turchino Pass near Masone (Genoa, Liguria)

Following an attack by the GAP partisan brigade on Genoa’s ‘Odeon’ cinema, which was frequented exclusively by German soldiers, the Genoa-based external headquarters of the Security Police and SD, headed by Friedrich Engel, decided on a reprisal-operation.

Subsequently 59 imprisoned men from the Marassi prison near the Turchino Pass were shot to death. Their corpses were only exhumed after 1945. Ten of the victims have still not been identified.

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Involved Unit

Kriegsmarine and Security Police

Commander

External headquarters of the Security Police and SD in Genoa

Culprits

Friedrich Engel and his men in the external headquarters, two Kriegsmarine officers, and the men of two firing squads.

Victims

Investigations and processes

1997-1999: Investigation by the military prosecutor’s office in Turin; trial in 1999; verdict on 15 Nov. 1999.

2001-2002: investigation by the Hamburg prosecutor’s office; trial in 2002; verdict on 2 July 2002.

Armed forces

SD
Security Police

The massacre

The attack in the cinema

On the evening of 15 May 1944, partisans of the GAP organisation staged an attack on the ‘Odeon’ German soldiers’ cinema, located in Genoa’s Via Vernazza.

Twenty men in the Kriegsmarine were victims of the attack – five killed and fifteen wounded. The German authorities decided to react to the attack with a severe retaliatory act. Preparation and execution was assigned to the external headquarters of the Security Police and SD in Genoa, headed by SS Sturmbannführer Friedrich Engel.

The attack had not been the first against German soldiers and officers in Genoa and Liguria. But previously, the reprisals had been the responsibility of the Italian Social Republic authorities.
The murders at the Turchino Pass

On 16 May 1944, the Military Kommandantur in Genoa announced a reward of three million liras for information regarding those responsible for the attack. At the same time, the Security Police and Kriegsmarine began preparing the retaliation. The next day, Jewish prisoners were forced to dig a large pit at the Turchino Pass in the mountains northwest of Genoa. Two days later, on 19 May, mass executions were carried out without any previous public announcement.

The Kriegsmarine units affected by the attack furnished volunteers for the operation: one firing squad consisted of men from the 11th Minesweeper Flotilla, another from the 22nd U-Boot Hunting Flotilla. Engel left the selection of those prisoners to be shot, 60 men held in Genoa’s Marassi prison, to his deputy, local Gestapo-head Otto Käß.

The most important sources for reconstructing the retaliatory operation are statements, made in 1945, by an employee of the external headquarters in Genoa, the South Tirol translator Giuseppe Nicoletti, together with testimony of a German sailor in the framework of the Hamburg trial of 2002.

The retaliation

The most important sources for reconstructing the retaliatory operation are statements, made in 1945, by an employee of the external headquarters in Genoa, the South Tirol translator Giuseppe Nicoletti, together with testimony of a German sailor in the framework of the Hamburg trial of 2002.

The prisoners destined for execution were taken from the Marassi prison on the night of 19 May 1944. The names of the condemned men had been read out twice in the prison: initially, sixty prisoners were named, but in the second announcement the name of a young partisan Raimondo Ricci, was omitted, probably by accident, so that in the end 59 prisoners were taken to be killed. Ricci was thus spared from the massacre, although he was later deported to Mauthausen. Those selected by the SS were brought to the execution site in buses, arriving there while it was still dark.

As dawn broke, the victims were chained and brought to the pit, located six hundred meters away from the street, in groups of six. Movement on the steep path was difficult. While the men still below the pit waited to be shot and killed, they could hear their fellow prisoners being murdered further on above – a worsening of the mental pressure inflicted on them. Above the pit or at its edge were long planks upon which the victims were forced to clamber. Each of the two firing squads stood under the command of an officer; the squads took turns killing the prisoners. No clergyman was present, nor a physician to confirm the victims’ deaths. Those who did not die immediately were killed by one SS-man with a shot to the back of the head. In the Hamburg trial, a witness identified this person as SS Sturmbannführer Friedrich Engel.
The Genoa announcement

In Genoa, after the massacre an announcement was issued to the effect that 59 ‘communists and bomb-planters’ had been shot and killed. The victims’ identities went unpublished, their families remaining uninformed. Many family members speculated that their loved ones had been deported to the north or to Germany. The corpses could only be exhumed after the occupation’s end, on 22 June 1945, families now receiving the bodies for proper internment. Ten of the victims remained unidentified.

Investigations and trials

The trial before the military court in Turin

In Germany, initially there was no investigation of the massacre at the Turchino Pass. In Italy, the Turin military prosecutor Pierpaolo Rivello headed an investigation in the mid-1990s. It led to an indictment of Friedrich Engel before the military court in Turin. On 15 November 1999, the former head of the external headquarters of the Security Service and SD in Genoa was sentenced in absentia to life imprisonment. This was the first sentencing of a German war criminal in Italy, following discovery of investigative files in the so-called ‘cabinet of shame’. In March 2000, the prosecutor’s office in Hamburg, where Engel lived, requested the trial documents from the Turin military court. The intent was to initiate legal proceedings; but the documents only arrived from Italy after a long delay.
The Kontraste interview

In Germany, Engel’s Italian sentencing initially received no attention. This changed after the broadcast of the political TV-journal Kontraste on the ARD network on the evening of 12 April 2001. In this broadcast, journalists René Althammer and Udo Gümpel reconstructed the Turchino Pass massacre and made clear that despite his Italian conviction Engel was living a normal life in Hamburg. There was a strong international reaction, the Italian authorities now exerting pressure on Germany’s Schröder government. That was the political climate in which the Hamburg prosecutor’s office instituted proceedings against Engel in the summer. As had Pierpaolo Rivello beforehand, Chief Prosecutor Jochen Kuhlmann here used the research of historian Carlo Gentile to support his legal work.

In the judge’s opinion, the retaliatory operation was not prosecutable, since the framework for its legal assessment was customary law of war. But, he opined, in the operation’s execution the accused man had shown subjective cruelty, a murder-criterion sufficing for conviction.

The Hamburg trial

The Hamburg proceedings began in May 2002; they ended in July with Engel’s sentencing to seven years in prison for the murder of 59 persons.

In the judge’s opinion, the retaliatory operation was not prosecutable, since the framework for its legal assessment was customary law of war. But, he opined, in the operation’s execution the accused man had shown subjective cruelty, a murder-criterion sufficing for conviction. The court found the delayed reaction of the Italian authorities a mitigating factor.
The appeals court decision

In June 2004, the German Federal Court of Justice (Bundesgerichthof; BGH) overturned the verdict in the Engel case on formal grounds. While the executions had indeed been cruel, a subjective cruelty on Engel’s part, the BGH opined, had not been adequately demonstrated by the Hamburg court. That court had not examined whether he had intentionally subjected the victims to suffering or if the cruel circumstances of the shootings arose from a lack of means for a more humane treatment. In the BGH’s view, the trial consequently would need to start afresh.

The BGH decision allowed for execution of the Italian verdict in the framework of the European arrest warrant then under discussion in Germany. This would have involved Italy requesting his extradition from Germany, since he had been found guilty in Italy in a legally binding way. While Germany could not have subjected that legally binding decision to a review, it could have insisted on itself implementing the decision. In any case, things could not have reached that point, since on 18 July 2005 the BGH declared the law concerning European arrest warrants unconstitutional as it impinged too strongly on basic rights.

Finally, the 5^th Criminal Division in Leipzig terminated the proceedings permanently, citing Engel’s advanced age and the long period of time between the crime and its prosecution in Germany and Italy.

Memory

The Turchino Pass monuments

In 1954, a monument was established on the street between the Turchino Pass and its Faiallo counterpart. It consists of a cross and a memorial stone with the victims’ names. In nearby Fontanafredda, a chapel was dedicated to the executed partisans. In addition, a memorial plaque is located on each side of the Turchino Pass tunnel, opened in 2013; the plaques are dedicated to the ‘Turchino martyrs’.

© Udo Gümpel
The monument for the victims of the Turchino Pass massacre. © Udo Gümpel
© Udo Gümpel

Sources

Some documents of Military Kommandantur 1007 in Genoa and Germany’s LXXV Army Corps, responsible for defence of the Ligurian coast, contain brief references to both the partisan attack and German retaliation. These documents are kept in the military archives of the German Federal Archives in Freiburg.

The documents pertaining to legal proceedings against Engel are kept in the military court in Verona and the Ludwigsburg Central Office (now German Federal Archives).

Literature

Giorgio Gimelli, La Resistenza in Liguria: cronache militari e documenti, Rome, Carocci, 2005.

Brunello Mantelli, Turchino, Passo del, in: Enzo Collotti, Renato Sandri, and Frediano Sessi (eds.), Dizionario della Resistenza, vol. 2, Luoghi, formazioni, protagonisti, Turin, Einaudi, 2001, pp. 399-400.

Ingo von Münch, Geschichte vor Gericht. Der Fall Engel, Hamburg, Ellert und Richter, 2004.

Pier Paolo Rivello, Quale giustizia per le vittime dei crimini nazisti? L’eccidio della Benedicta e la strage del Turchino tra Storia e Diritto, Turin, Giappichelli editore, 2002.

Pier Paolo Rivello, Il processo Engel, Recco, Le Mani, 2005.

Authorship and translation

Author: Carlo Gentile

Translated from German by: Joel Golb

2023

Text: CC BY NC SA 4.0