Pietransieri

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Involved Unit

II Battalion of Parachute Regiment 1

Commander

1st Parachute Division

Culprits

Major Karl-Heinz Becker

Victims

125

Investigations and processes

1944-1947: Investigations of Italians for theft and failure to offer aid 

1947: Trial of Generalfeldmarschall  Albert Kesselring before the British military court in Mestre

1995-2000: Investigation by military prosecutor in Rome

2004-2013: Investigation by Waldshut-Tiengen prosecutor’s office 

2015-2017: A Court in Sulmona declares the German Federal Republic responsible and orders compensation payments to victims’ surviving dependents.

Armed forces

Wehrmacht

The massacre

The images

• The evacuation’s failure and the German reaction

  Pietransieri, a village in the Roccaraso commune, southeast of L'Aquila, was situated between several front lines. The ‘Barbara Line’ ran in the south; further north the ‘Bernhard Line’; and between them, on the northern side of the Sangro Valley, the ‘Betty line’, consisting of outposts. In October, for some weeks the area’s main town, Roccaraso (an important ski resort in the Abruzzi with several hotels) served as the headquarters of the LXXVI Panzer Corps and a field hospital. Then supply units of the withdrawing 1^st Parachute Division moved in, and finally the division’s fighting troops.

  In early November 1943, an evacuation order was issued giving the residents of Pietransieri twelve hours to leave the area. The German soldiers brought them to Sulmona, from where they were meant to move northward. But in Pietransieri as in many other places, many preferred to stay where they were. Estimates are that around a third of the village’s residents failed to obey German orders – above all older people, women, and children. Instead, they withdrew to some farms near the Limmari forest, two km to the east. 

  Between 10 and 12 November, the Wehrmacht began to dynamite the village’s houses. It is unclear when exactly the two battalions of Oberst Karl-Lothar Schulz’s Parachute Regiment 1, at the time kept in reserve, arrived on the scene. The 1st Battalion, under the command of Major Wolf-Werner von der Schulenburg, took up its position at Castel di Sangro, the III Battalion, commanded by Major Karl-Heinz Becker, set up headquarters in Pietransieri. Here the front consisted of four outposts on the heights over the Sangro River near Rocca Cinquemiglia and the San Pietro tavern and in the Cantalupo forest. The Limmari farms were located on the street used by the battalion’s troops to reach the outposts in the valley as they moved toward the front. After the arrival of the parachutists and the issuing of a new evacuation order, the headquarters of the LXXVI Panzer Corps ascertained that many civilians had not followed the command. Moreover, at this time, the military situation on the front was worsening.

• The massacre on the farms

  The course of the massacre was only closely reconstructed by two local historians, Paolo Paoletti and Sulmona-based lawyer Lando Sciuba, in the late 1990s. 

  In mid-November, a new evacuation order was likewise not followed. Meanwhile, the parachutists had become aware of the presence of civilians in the area as a problem and initiated a combing operation. On 16 November 1943, some previously arrested men were caught while trying to escape in the woods and shot to death. It appears that some persons were also shot in the area on the two following days, their corpses left lying where they were killed. However, as was often the case, the soldiers’ behaviour was inconsistent. On 18 November, 17 civilians encountered in a farmhouse were brought to Sulmona without violence. 

  On the morning of 21 November, a patrol from Pietransieri reached the Limmari forest. The situation had now become even more strained as a result of Allied advances. The German soldiers stormed four of the farms where the villagers had taken shelter: all those present were killed regardless of age and sex. On the Aloisio family’s farm, there were four victims; on that of the Macerelli family 15; 30 persons were killed on the Virgilio-Di Battista farm, and 60 persons on the farm of the D'Amico family. 

  According to statements by survivors, persons on the Aloisio farm were warned by soldiers, allowing some to flee; this explains the relatively low number of victims in this case. But on other farms, there was no escape for those discovered. Assembled in groups before the houses, they were mowed down by machine gun fire, the buildings then being dynamited.

  Not all the victims died instantly: some gravely wounded persons, including children, received no aid and died soon after the massacre. Local history has focused on the fate of young Virginia Macerelli, one of the few survivors, who has indicated that initially her little brother survived but died soon after the event. In her account, later on two women from the village arrived at the massacre’s site and began to gather up the possessions found on the corpses. It appears that as a quid pro quo for their help, the women demanded a considerable amount of money that the girl’s mother had on her when she was killed. It seems that a second injured boy, Flavio di Matteo, stayed with Virginia for a while; but when her family collected her, he remained behind and later also died. 

  Like the entire front area of Alto Sangro, Pietransieri remained in German hands until the early days of June  1944. The corpses of civilians murdered in the houses of Limmari remained lying there for months before they could be buried.

Investigations and trials

• The difficult reconstruction of the massacre and its motives

  For a long time, the motives for the Pietransieri massacre remained unknown. There was talk of retaliatory steps for the murder of two German soldiers by the partisans. There is no reference to such an event in the Wehrmacht documents.

  Until the mid-1990s, there were no new investigations or intensive research. Despite their access to documents in the German archives, the historians Friedrich Andrae and Gerhard Schreiber could find no new information on the perpetrators. They identified one presiding officer, whose name was known, as Major Wolf-Werner von der Schulenburg and ascribed responsibility for the massacre to him. In reality, Schulenburg commanded a battalion of the parachute regiment that did not participate in the massacre, having been deployed at a distance from Pietransieri. 

  In the same period, however, Lando Sciuba and Paolo Paoletti collected new data finally allowing a more precise reconstruction of the massacre. Paoletti identified, in particular, the responsible III Battalion of Parachute Regiment 1 and ascribed the massacre to the men of the 11^th company, under the command of Leutnant Georg Schulze.

• Investigations in Italy and Germany in the 1990s and 2000s

  In 1995, the military prosecutor’s office in Rome resumed investigations of the Pietransieri massacre. The basis was documents from the immediate postwar period still filed under the name of Generalfeldmarschall Kesselring. Although the III Battalion’s responsibility had been demonstrated, the investigations were inconclusive. 

  In July 2000, after learning that Kesselring had died in 1960, the military court in Rome ordered the proceeding closed. A final investigation was initiated in Germany in 2004. But these proceedings, headed by the Waldshut-Tiengen prosecutor’s office, were terminated on 8 October 2013 without criminal-legal results, since the known perpetrators were dead and those still unknown could not be identified. When first questioned, one former German soldier indicated that he had seen the massacre’s victims with his own eyes; but in the formal interrogation he withdrew his original statement.

• The Restitution Process

  Given the failure of criminal-legal investigation of the massacre’s perpetrators, the Roccaraso commune and two surviving dependents of the victims turned to the court in Sulmona in 2015. They sued the German government and demanded compensation for the killings carried out between 16 and 21 November 1943 by German soldiers. Two years later, on 2 November 2017, the court in Sulmona ordered the German Federal Republic to pay the plaintiffs compensation. But this decision failed, as have all other such compensation decisions by Italian courts.

Memory