Monchio, Susano and Costrignano

The monument at Buca di Susano. © Elena Pirazzoli

18 March 1944 , Monchio, Susano and Costrignano (Modena, Emilia Romagna)

In March 1944, the Reconnaissance battalion of the ‘Hermann Göring’ Division received orders to secure the mountain passes in the northern Apennines. During a series of anti-partisan operations, the soldiers conducted brutal sweeps through the region. On March 18th, while searching the villages of Monchio, Susano, and Costrignano, they killed 127 civilians. Decades later in the early 2000s, German authorities launched the first investigations into the massacre. After parallel inquiries by the military prosecutor’s office in La Spezia, the military court in Verona convicted three former soldiers in absentia in 2011, sentencing them to life in prison for their role in the killings.

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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, Kommandeur of Parachute Panzer Reconnaissance Battalion ‘Hermann Göring’

Victims

127 victims: 72 in Monchio, 22 in Susano, 33 in Costrignano

Investigations and processes

2004-2015: Investigations of Dortmund prosecutor’s office

2011: Military court in Verona – three life sentences and four not-guilty judgements

2012: Military appeals court, Rome – two life sentences annulled; one confirmed

2014: The Italian court of cassation confirms the previously annulled life sentences; one of the accused men has meanwhile died.

Armed forces

Wehrmacht

The massacre

The ‘counter-bandit’ operation of the ‘Hermann Göring’ reconnaissance battalion

In March 1944, the reconnaissance battalion of the ‘Hermann Göring’ division had the task of securing the mountain passes of the northern Apennines in the area around Bologna and Modena from partisans and hostile parachutists. To this end, they stood under the leadership of the LXXV Army Corps and the von Zangen Army Battalion. The commander was 29-year-old Rittmeister Kurt-Christian von Loeben.

At the order of the military commands of Bologna and Parma, within a few days the battalion began its first “anti-bandit” deployments in the nearby mountains, proceeding in a brutal manner. On 18 March 1944, a combing operation began in the villages of Monchio, Costrignano and Susano, some 50 km south of Modena. The Germans suspected that around 200 partisans were to be found there.

The combing operation began on 18 March at dawn. From the Rocca di Montefiorino fortifications, at the time the headquarters of the National Republican Guard, the Germans fired artillery at the villages of Susano, Costrignano and Monchio, located on the opposite mountain slope.

Attack on Susano and Costrignano

In the days before the massacre, firefights broke out between the partisans on the one side and the fascist Italian Republican National Guard and German troops on the other side. Partisan units had been forming in this area since Sept. 1943. Many young men had fled into the mountains and joined these units to avoid being forced into military service for the fascist government. In March, the partisans became active.

The combing operation began on 18 March at dawn. From the Rocca di Montefiorino, at the time the headquarters of the National Republican Guard, the Germans fired artillery at the villages of Susano, located on the opposite mountain slope. Since the residents could not flee far, they hid in cellars or sought shelter in the woods.

Around 6:00, the soldiers began to move. These were members of the 2^nd and 4^th companies of the reconnaissance battalion and members of the infantry howitzer platoon, together with a group from the pioneer platoon of the reconnaissance battalion’s 5^th company. Initially, they searched and plundered farmhouses on the road between Savoniero and Monchio. Susano and other surrounding villages and farmsteads were combed through, some men being arrested and forced to transport plunder and munitions. Those who refused or were too weak to carry the boxes were immediately shot to death.

The Gualmini family, five adults and three children, lived in Vallimperchio, an isolated farmstead on the bottom of the main street. The entire family was killed, possibly because of discovery of a firearm. Also in Vallimperchio, the mother and all three children of the Albicini family were killed, as was an older married couple.

The soldiers then moved 2 km further to the village of Costrignano. Here they killed above all old and disabled persons. Finally, they moved all the booty from the houses into the ‘Cooperativa’, an old dairy with attached store and bar. No longer needed, the porters were now shot and killed. The units regrouped here in preparation for their last advance, toward Monte Santa Giulia and Monchio.
In Lama di Monchio

There is evidence of a remarkable occurrence in the village of Lama di Monchio. Reconnaissance troops were the first to reach the village, with two soldiers attempting to warn the civilians of the impending arrival of additional forces. Some civilians then fled and managed to escape. This behaviour seems highly irregular. One of the soldiers prepared a written statement for an Italian who had worked in Germany and spoke a little German, indicating he should be left unmolested as a ‘friend of the Germans’. When the next group of soldiers arrived, they read the note and moved onward, allowing the man to remain safely in his home even as a massacre and destruction unfolded around him. Such absurd situations have been documented with other massacres as well. Aside from this anomaly, the soldiers proceeded in Lama much as they did in other villages: five men were killed, four abducted to work as porters.
The attack in Monchio and last victims

With 72 murdered persons, Monchio had the most victims. Here too, soldiers searched the houses, assembling the male residents in a nearby field and gunning them down. When additional troops arrived in the early afternoon, the twenty-odd accompanying porters were also killed.

An additional ten men were killed in the nearby village of San Vitale, around twenty minutes away on foot. This raised the total number of murdered persons to 127. The victims in Monchio included 67 men, a woman, and 4 young persons aged between 14 and 16. In Susano, 22 persons were killed: 3 women, a 17-year-old boy, and 5 children aged between 3 and 13. In Costrignano there were 33 victims including a woman and 3 young teenagers.

Ermittlungen und Prozesse

The Dortmund prosecutor’s office investigated the Monchio massacre and other atrocities of the ‘Hermann Göring’ division in the early 2000s. In Italy, investigations were carried out by the military prosecutor’s office in La Spezia; that office’s authority was transferred to the Verona military prosecutor in 2007.

The 2011 trial

In the early 2000s, the Dortmund prosecutor’s office investigated the Monchio massacre and other atrocities of the ‘Hermann Göring’ division, including the massacres at Vallucciole, Civitella, Cornia and San Pancrazio. In Italy, investigations were carried out by the military prosecutor’s office in La Spezia; following the reform of military justice in 2007, that office’s authority was transferred to the Verona military prosecutor. On 6 July 2011, the Verona military court sentenced Ferdinand Osterhaus (5^th company of the reconnaissance division), Helmuth Odenwald (10^th battery of the flak regiment) and Alfred Luhmann (4^th company of the reconnaissance battalion) in absentia to life in prison for the murders in Monchio, Susano and Costrignano. Four other accused men were found not guilty.

On appeal, Odenwald and Osterhaus had their convictions overturned; Luhmann did not file an appeal, and his life sentence was upheld. However, in 2014, a decision by the Italian Court of Cassation reinstated Odenwald's conviction, sentencing him again to life imprisonment. Because Osterhaus had died in the interim, legal proceedings against him were nullified upon his death.

Separately, the investigation by prosecutors in Dortmund - which was exploring the massacres in Vallucciole, Cervarolo, and Civago in addition to the killings in Monchio - ended inconclusively on 3 February 2015 without charges filed.

The monument at Santa Giulia © Elena Pirazzoli
Cristo della frantellanza dei popoli in Monchio: a monument for the brotherhood of the peoples. © Elena Pirazzoli
Monument for the victims of the massacre in Monchio. © Elena Pirazzoli

Memory

The massacre and the Partisan Republic in public memory

For decades after the war, the massacre was publicly memorialised in the affected villages. Better known regionally and nationally was the history of the 'Partisan Republic of Montefiorino', an organized resistance effort that controlled the area from 18 June to 1 August 1944.

In 1950, the first memorial for the massacre, a stone with the names of the victims, was erected in Monchio’s Piazza Caduti (Square of the Fallen). In Costrignano, a memorial was set up in 1955, and in Susano 20 years later.

In 1958, the new commune of Palagano was established, incorporating Monchio, Susano, and Costrignano. This marked a shift in the region’s memory culture. Starting in the mid-1960s, initiatives increased: for example, the Orphan’s Committee was founded in 1964 on the massacre’s twentieth anniversary. In 1969, this committee successfully advocated for a memorial park in Monchio honouring the victims. In 1984, a statue titled ‘Cristo per la fratellanza dei popoli’ (Christ for the Brotherhood of Peoples) was installed there, with the victim’s names engraved on its base. Interior minister Oscar Luigi Scalfaro spoke at its inauguration, the first government representative to visit Monchio.

These memorial events were chiefly religious in character, reflecting the Catholic views of the local populace. The main proponent of the initiatives was a priest, Don Luigi Braglia, who had survived the massacres by hiding in the church roof and later described the event in his memoirs. Unlike the resistance rhetoric prominent in regional politics, local remembrance emphasized Christian forgiveness.

For years, Italy's national institutions inadequately recognized the communities' experience of Nazi violence. When Montefiorino received the Gold Medal for Military Valor in 1972, the massacre went unmentioned. The oversight was partially addressed in 1998 by awarding an equivalent bronze medal to the Palagano commune, acknowledging the March 18, 1944 massacre, though still omitting the specific villages impacted.

By contrast, the Montefiorino Museum of the Republic, opened in 2015, devoted an entire section to the massacre.

Source

Some German documents tied to the Monchio massacre are available. The report of Rittmeister von Loeben about the 18 March operation is kept in the military archive of the German Federal Archives in Freiburg, in the files of the LXXV Army Corps (attachment no. 4.1, dossier RH 24-75/20, attachments of the activity report of Corps Ic. The war diary of the Ia-section of the LXXV Army Corps and attachments (German Federal Archives, RH 24-75/2, war diary 20 Jan.-30 April 1944, RH 24-75/6, attachments) contain various references to deployment against ‘bandits’ by the reconnaissance battalion of the ‘Hermann Göring’ division in spring 1944.

The photo archive of the German Federal Archives, inventory Bild 101 I, containing the material of the war correspondents for the army and Luftwaffe, includes a series of photos by photographer Freytag (Karten 477, Film 2106) that demonstrate the presence of the ‘Hermann Göring’ division in the Apennines in the spring of 1944. The investigations of the Dortmund prosecutor’s office were carried out under proceedings no. 45 Js 1/04; they are kept in the Dortmund office.

Literature

Pietro Alberghi, Attila sull’Appennino. La strage di Monchio e le origini della lotta partigiana nella valle del Secchia, Modena, Istituto storico della Resistenza, 1969.

Giovanni Fantozzi, Monchio 18 marzo 1944. L’esempio, Modena, Artestampa, 2006.

Carlo Gentile, Wehrmacht und Waffen-SS im Partisanenkrieg: Italien 1943-1945, Paderborn, 2012, Ferdinand Schöningh, pp. 308-312.

Lutz Klinkhammer, Zwischen Bündnis und Besatzung. Das nationalsozialistische Deutschland und die Republik von Salò 1943-1945, Tübingen, Niemeyer, 1993.

G.S. Panzieri, L'occupazione tedesca in Italia, Turin, Bollati Boringhieri, 1993, pp. 335-337 (Ausgabe 2007).

Elena Pirazzoli, I due versanti della memoria. La repubblica di Montefiorino e la strage di Monchio, “E-Review”, no. 3, 2015, 10.12977/ereview101

Toni Rovatti, Fra politiche di violenza e aspirazioni di giustizia. L’esperienza di guerra della popolazione civile vittima delle stragi di Monchio e Tavolicci (1943-1944), Rome, Carocci, 2009.

Authorship and translation

Author: Carlo Gentile

Translated from German by: Joel Golb

2023

Text: CC BY NC SA 4.0