San Giovanni di Sotto

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Involved Unit

5^th Company SS-Panzer Reconnaissance battalion 16 ‘Reichsführer-SS’

Commander

16. SS-Panzer-Grenadier-Division "Reichsführer-SS"

Culprits

Max Adam Saalfrank

Victims

52

Armed forces

Waffen-SS

• Two tiny villages

  Together San Giovanni di Sotto and San Giovanni di Sopra form a large farmstead south of Caprara. The Paselli, Fiori, Massa and Castagnari families lived in the houses of both villages. In the summer of 1944, people from the valley and from Bologna also took shelter there from air raids. 

• From Casoncello to San Giovanni di Sotto

  On 29 Sept. 1944, the route to Monte Caprara of the 5^th Company of the SS-Panzer Reconnaissance Battalion 16 ‘Reichsführer-SS’ led through Casoncello and San Giovanni di Sotto. At around 9 in the morning, the SS men reached Casoncello and took away the civilians there. In San Giovanni, where they arrived by about 11, the residents had been alarmed by the sound of shooting and had hidden in an air-raid tunnel. The soldiers drove them out of the tunnel and gathered them, together with the civilians they had brought with them, in the farmhouse courtyard before the stalls. Using machine guns, the SS murdered a total of fifty-two civilians in San Giovanni, including nineteen children under the age of 13.

• Family grave and war memorial

  On 4 Oct. 1944, the victims’ corpses were laid to rest in a large mass grave. After the war, they were reinterred in the Marzabotto war memorial. The Paselli family – members of whom still live in San Giovanni di Sotto – had a plaque placed at the massacre’s site with the names of all the victims.