Monte Sole

29 September 1944 – 5 October 1944 , Area of Monte Sole (municipalities of Marzabotto, Vado-Monzuno and Grizzana, Bologna, Emilia Romagna)
On 29 and 30 Sept. 1944, the area between the Reno and Setta valleys in the Apennines near Bologna was the site of the worst massacre committed by German troops against civilians in Western and Southern Europe. Additional acts of intense violence took place until 5 Oct.
Soldiers of the
- Involved Unit
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The entire SS Reconnaissance battalion 16 ‘Reichsführer-SS’
A task force under an SS-leader of the Ic-battalion of division headquarters
A battery of SS Flak Battalion 16
Parts of SS Panzergrenadier Regiment 35
Parts of SS Artillery Regiment 16
Different ‘alarm’ (air-raid warning) units (unknown whether SS or Wehrmacht)
Parts of Flak Regiment 105 (Luftwaffe), including Light Flak Battalion 945 (Luftwaffe)
IV Battalion [actually III Battalion] (East)/Grenadier Regiment 1059 (former East Battalion 560, later Russian Battalion 560) of the army. - Commander
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I. Fallschirmkorps, 16. SS-Panzer-Grenadier-Division "Reichsführer-SS"
- Culprits
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Max Simon, Helmut Looß, Walter Reder, their company leader Willfried Segebrecht, Werner Horst Szillat, Friedrich Schmidtkonz, Max Adam Saalfrank and their men, including the men accused in the La Spezia trial.
- Victims
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770
- Investigations and processes
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1947: Proceeding of British military tribunal in Padua against Max Simon on account of massacres by his division in the Emilia and Tuscany regions. The death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. In 1948 the penalty was lowered to 21 years; Simon was released in 1954.
1951: Proceeding of Bologna military tribunal against Walter Reder and sentencing to life imprisonment; 1954 confirmation of sentence. 1980: approval by Bari military tribunal of release on parole; 1985: release and return to Austria.
2002-2007: Proceedings of the military prosecutors before the La Spezia military court against 17 former SS-leaders, non-commissioned officers, and soldiers of the 16th SS Panzergrenadier Division ‘Reichsführer-SS’. On 13 Jan. 2007, 10 accused were sentenced to life imprisonment, seven acquitted. On 7 May 2008 the military appeals court in Rome annulled two of the judgments, one through acquittal, the other because of the death of the sentenced man. Another man who had previously been acquitted was now sentenced.
2003-2009: Proceedings of Munich prosecutor’s office against Franz Stockinger and other former members of SS Reconnaissance Battalion 16. Proceedings terminated in 2009.
- Additional crime scenes
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Ca’ Beguzzi
Cadotto
Caprara
Casaglia
Cerpiano
Creda
San Giovanni di Sotto
San Martino di Caprara
Pioppe di Salvaro - Armed forces
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Waffen-SS

The massacre
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Monte Sole in summer 1944
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The partisan brigade in German eyes and the reprisals against civilians
The large-scale operation was prepared at I Parachute Corps headquarters and the ‘Reichsführer-SS’ division was assigned its execution. The 14th Army responsible for this front sector here refers to a Vernichtungsunternehmen, an ‘annihilation operation’. In the Wehrmacht documents from occupied Italy, use of the term Vernichtung in the context of anti-partisan actions appears otherwise absent.
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Planning of the operation in late September
As was the case with earlier planned 'cleansing'—the German term used was Säuberung—by the SS in Tuscany, SS Sturmbannführer Helmut Looß had command of the entire operation. He was head of tactical group Ic of the division’s general staff and responsible for security in the rear area.
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Participating troops in the massacre
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Italian collaborators as German agents
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The ‘annihilation operation’

Because not all victims had been buried in the days following the massacres, traces of these events were visible everywhere. Some German and Allied soldiers reported on this in their diaries. Military historian Neil Orpen writes as follows: ‘Reconnoitring forward to Cadotto, they found the village badly wrecked. About 17 civilian dead, including women and children who were obviously victims of atrocities, were found among the ruins’.
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Following the massacre: 'No-man’s-land'
Investigations and trials
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The 1947 trial of Max Simon
In autumn 1951 the military court in Bologna sentenced Reder to life imprisonment. But the judicial authorities never prosecuted other surviving company leaders such as Saalfrank, Segebrecht and Szillat, who bore just as great a responsibility for the massacres.
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The trial of Walter Reder in 1951
On 17 April 2002, in the course of a visit to Italy by German Federal President Johannes Rau, a memorial event was held at the Marzabotto memorial and in the Monte Sole memorial park. This was the first visit by a high West German official to the massacre’s site. Before relatives of the victims, Rau expressed his ‘grief and shame’.
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The 2000s: Press interest and new investigations by German and Italian prosecutors
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The La Spezia trial
Memory
Measured by the number of victims and size of the affected area, the massacre of Monte Sole was the worst war crime committed by German troops during Italy’s occupation and the largest such crime perpetrated against civilians in Western Europe.
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Monte Sole after the massacre
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Commemoration of the massacre
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Number of victims
718 enemy dead (including brigade leader Lupo and 15 identified bn. [battalion] commanders and co. [company] heads), 456 prisoners, 7 munition dumps with large stocks of munition of all sorts. Large amounts of munition detonated in the burning bases. 69 bunkers and a cable railway were destroyed, 3 dressing stations (2 of them in churches) and 3 large equipment camps were eliminated. Large quantities of weapons of all kinds destroyed or captured. 3 radio stations and 350 pieces of heavy livestock captured. Important papers etc. secured. Own losses 7 dead, 29 wounded (8 gravely).

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Official visits
Sources
The military archives in Freiburg hold some documents concerning the actions of German troops at Monte Sole. Records of directly responsible units and divisions (SS division ‘Reichsführer-SS’; the I Parachute Corps) are not extant. The most important surviving documents were in the holdings of the Wehrmacht’s 14th Army, the high command responsible for the front west of the Futa Pass. The most well-known documents are the 14th Army’s daily Ia and Ic reports, sent to Commander in Chief Southwest (Kesselring). They possibly contain excerpts from the original report of the ‘Reichsführer-SS’ division.
Less well known but equally important are some notes in war diary no. 4 of the Ia-Battalion (BArch RH 20-14/41), which include a report of a phone conversation on 29 Sept. at 15:05 between the chief of staff of the 14th Army, General Hause and chief of the general staff of the I Parachute Corps, Oberst von Hofmann. In the conversation Hauser warns that the Monte Sole operation is to be carried out ‘in accordance with the guidelines of the army group and the army’; there were to be ‘no abuses [Übergriffe]’.
As outlined earlier, the daily report of the 14th Army’s Ic tactical groups of 30 Sept. (RH 20-14/114, IC-Tagesmeldung, 30 Sept. 1944) refers to the razzia as an ‘annihilation operation’. Indication of losses suffered by German battalions in fighting with the partisans on 29 Sept. are among documents kept in the Bundesarchiv in Berlin (German Federal Archives in Berlin), section PA (formerly: Deutsche Dienststelle/WASt).
Relevant documentation of the Allied troops is largely kept in the National Archives and Records Administration in Washington. This includes the first news of and reports on the massacre in autumn 1944, interrogation of the first German prisoners and of deserters, and complex investigations. The documents are kept in these file-locations: Record Group 238, Entry 2, Box 10, Case 16-70 (San Martino/Monzuno); Record Group 153, Entry 143, Box 528, Case 16-70 (San Martino/Monzuno).
The National Archives in Kew (London) contain the files on the investigations of Feldmarschall Kesselring (WO 310/121; also 310/114 und /197) and legal proceedings against him held in Venice in 1947 (WO 235/366-376), as well as on the trial of division-commander SS Obergruppenführer Max Simon taking place in Padua that same year (WO 235/584-588). Especially important for reconstructing the events that took place during the massacre is the SS-soldier Julien Legoll.
For Italy, the most important documentation created during the country’s two major trials of the massacre’s perpetrators – the trial in Bologna of Walter Reder, 18 Sept.-31 Oct. 1951; and the trial in La Spezia, 2006, of many former SS officers in Reder’s battalion – were held in the archives of the military prosecutor’s office, La Spezia, until that office’s closure in 2008; now the documents are kept in the archives of the military court in Rome.
Literature
Luca Baldissara, Paolo Pezzino, Il massacro. Guerra ai civili a Monte Sole, Bologna, Il Mulino, 2009.
Carlo Gentile, Wehrmacht und
Luciano Gherardi, Le querce di Monte Sole: vita e morte delle comunità martiri fra Setta e Reno, 1898-1944, Bologna, Il Mulino, 1986.
Jack Olsen, Silence on Monte Sole, New York, Putnam, 1968.
Andrea Ventura, I tempi del ricordo. La memoria pubblica del massacro di Monte Sole dal 1945 a oggi, Reggio Emilia, Zikkaron, 2016.
Dario Zanini, Marzabotto e dintorni, 1944, Bologna, Ponte Nuovo, 1996. pp. 529-531.
Authorship and translation
Author: Carlo Gentile
Translated from German by: Joel Golb
© Project ‘The Massacres in Occupied Italy (1943-1945): Integrating the Perpetrators’ Memories’
2023