San Polo

Back to overview of massacres

Involved Unit

Grenadier-Regiment 274

Commander

305. Infanterie Division

Culprits

Regiment commander Lieutenant Colonel Wolf Ewert 
Staff Officer Klaus Konrad, and other German soldiers.

Victims

65 (of which 17 were killed during the attack in Pietramala and on the way to San Polo, the other 48 tortured in Villa Mancini, then killed and buried in the garden of Villa Gigliosi in San Polo)

Investigations and processes

September 1944: Investigation by Special Investigation Branch (SIB) 78

1967-1972: Investigation of Wolf Ewert, Klaus Konrad, and other regiment members by Giessen prosecutor’s office. 

2003-2007: Proceedings against Klaus Konrad and Herbert Hantschk by the La Spezia prosecutor’s office and military court. Klaus died in 2006, before the judgement; in 2007 Herbert Hantschk was pronounced not guilty, as he had not committed the deed.

Additional crime scenes

Molino dei Falchi, Pietramala
Villa Mancini, San Polo
Villa Gigliosi, San Polo

Armed forces

Wehrmacht

This photo / video contains sensitive content which some people may find disturbing. By clicking, you acknowledge and agree to visualize it.

Show the content

When the content is activated, personal data is transferred to the third-party provider "Youtube". I have taken note of the notes on the Privacy policy.

Show video

The massacre

• Interrogation and torture in the Villa Mancini

  When the prisoners walked in, Colonel Ewert was, by his admission, 'in an extremely excitable mood', having recently endured a partisan ambush. He greeted the prisoners—whom he referred to as 'pigs'—with an order to mow them all down. However, they were not immediately murdered. Initially, the men were confined to a cellar and subjected to extremely brutal interrogation. Soldiers, presumably members of the headquarters company and former prisoners of the partisans, stomped on the partisans and civilians and beat them unconscious with fists, clubs, and rubber hoses.

• The killings at the Villa Gigliosi

  That afternoon, after gaining General Hauck’s permission, Ewert ordered that the prisoners be executed. They were brought to the nearby garden of Villa Gigliosi, where some of them were forced to dig graves. The executions began at 17:00. The completely exhausted and gravely wounded prisoners were brought to the graves and killed with shots to the neck. Two partisans were forced to descend into the graves to stack the victims' corpses and were then themselves killed.

  According to witness statements, the former Russian prisoners volunteered as executioners, partly in revenge for abuse by the partisans. However, several of the staff soldiers also participated in the executions. Another witness indicated that an innkeeper from San Polo, who had appeared at headquarters shortly before the executions to complain about some soldiers who had not paid their bills, was also killed.

  Before the regiment left San Polo, explosives were set off in the graves. The motives for this are hard to determine: it may have been a clumsy, unsuccessful attempt to destroy the corpses and the traces of torture, as suggested by Klaus Konrad in an October 2004 interview with Udo Gümpel, or it may have been intended as a final atrocity inflicted on the victims. A forensic examination of the corpses carried out immediately after liberation, showed that some victims had been buried alive.

  On the evening following the massacre, the regiment’s command left the villa; the next day, the German troops withdrew from San Polo.

• The first British investigations

  The first British troops arrived on 16 July 1944. Exhumations carried out under the supervision of a forensic physician from Arezzo, began immediately and continued the next day. British photographers and cameramen documented the proceedings. The horrific images, stored in the Imperial War Museum in London, were made public during the journalistic investigations of René Althammer and Udo Gümpel.

  Special Investigation Branch 78 conducted careful examinations and collected evidence and witness statements concerning the events. On 12 September 1944, a British sergeant visited Villa Mancini and discovered the rubber hoses used to brutally beat the prisoners during interrogation. At Villa Gigliosi, he inspected the graves and noted that the leaves on nearby trees were blackened by the explosions, to the point of incineration. He found human remains in the trees, photographed this detail, collected evidence, and sent it for further examination to the Institute of Forensics at the University of Rome.

  Immediately following the war, the files of the British investigation were handed over to the Italian military judicial authorities. In October 1947, the Italian prosecutor general’s office attempted to extradite Wolf Ewert from the American occupation zone in Germany. The matter was urgent, as the American embassy had informed the Italian government that, starting 1 November 1947, officials in the zone would no longer cooperate with Italian efforts to extradite suspected German war criminals. However, the request remained unanswered, and the files were eventually archived like hundreds of others.

  The first British troops arrived on 16 July 1944. Exhumations carried out under the supervision of a forensic physician from Arezzo, began immediately and continued the next day. British photographers and cameramen documented the proceedings. The horrific images, stored in the Imperial War Museum in London, were made public during the journalistic investigations of René Althammer and Udo Gümpel.

  Special Investigation Branch 78 conducted careful examinations and collected evidence and witness statements concerning the events. On 12 September 1944, a British sergeant visited Villa Mancini and discovered the rubber hoses used to brutally beat the prisoners during interrogation. At Villa Gigliosi, he inspected the graves and noted that the leaves on nearby trees were blackened by the explosions, to the point of incineration. He found human remains in the trees, photographed this detail, collected evidence, and sent it for further examination to the Institute of Forensics at the University of Rome.

  Immediately following the war, the files of the British investigation were handed over to the Italian military judicial authorities. In October 1947, the Italian prosecutor general’s office attempted to extradite Wolf Ewert from the American occupation zone in Germany. The matter was urgent, as the American embassy had informed the Italian government that, starting 1 November 1947, officials in the zone would no longer cooperate with Italian efforts to extradite suspected German war criminals. However, the request remained unanswered, and the files were eventually archived like hundreds of others.

Investigations and trials

• The Giessen prosecutors dismissed charges against all the accused

  The assessment of the executions as separate cases led to significant inconsistencies. Initially, it resulted in a higher total number of victims than indicated in the investigation files. This contradiction was not resolved by the Giessen prosecutors; no new research was conducted, and no new Italian witnesses were interviewed. Consequently, the officers present at the allegedly initial execution, deemed homicide, were exonerated, as further prosecution was impossible due to the statute of limitations. Although the executions at Villa Gigliosi were deemed murder and therefore still punishable, the accused officers claimed not to have been present at the event, and the prosecutors could not determine who had been in charge.

  Ewert similarly exonerated himself. He told the prosecutors that he only ordered the killings after the 'interrogations' had made it clear that all those detained, including civilians, were either partisans or supported the resistance. He claimed that the division command had responded to his inquiry by declining to hold any captured partisans—a remarkable statement given that in the summer of 1944, a general order to shoot and kill partisans was in force. Nevertheless, the prosecutors unhesitatingly accepted this statement. Ewert also asserted that he gave no special instructions regarding the executions other than that the prisoners were to be killed by single shots and not by rifle volleys. He took responsibility for a single execution that had been legal according to both Nazi statutes and the law of war in force at the time and was classified as homicide by the West German prosecutors, thus subject to the statute of limitations. However, he rejected any responsibility for 'excesses of violence', claiming these occurred without his knowledge. Neither his accused officers nor the common soldiers interviewed by the presiding judges accused him of anything. Since his statements were not rebutted, Ewert easily cleared himself. The proceedings were terminated on 7 November 1972.

• The La Spezia trial in the 2000s

  In the mid-1990s, files about the San Polo massacre resurfaced, discovered in the so-called ‘Cabinet of Shame’. In January 2005, investigations that had begun in 1996 were terminated by the La Spezia military court. Already in 2000, the judge presiding over the preliminary investigation, Marco De Paolis, had ordered the proceedings terminated because those identified as responsible for the San Polo murders had been dead for some years, and the names of other perpetrators could not be established with sufficient reliability. However, shortly afterwards, the prosecutors gained access to the files of the Giessen investigation of 1967. Based on new elements found in the files, they reopened the investigation, identifying Klaus Konrad and other surviving regiment members, including the Austrian Herbert Hantschk, as newly incriminated persons.

  On 28 October 2004, Magazin Kontraste broadcasted an interview with Klaus Konrad by Udo Gümpel and René Althammer on German TV. The interview caused a sensation: Konrad, a well-known Social Democratic politician in Schleswig-Holstein, acknowledged having been a witness to torture and feeling no remorse for the actions involved until learning that the Italian authorities had initiated proceedings against him. On 31 January 2006, Konrad and Hantschk were put on trial. Germany’s Social Democratic Party decided to suspend Konrad’s membership at least until the trial's resolution. Proceedings began in La Spezia on 22 March 2006 but were postponed and interrupted several times. On 15 August 2006, Klaus Konrad died in his house in Scharbeutz, near Lübeck.

  The trial of Hantschk continued; his defence lawyer was Harald Ofner (Freedom Party of Austria), former justice minister in the Austrian governments of Sinowatz and Vranitzky (Social Democratic Party of Austria). The trial ended in February 2007 with Hantschk’s complete exoneration; the finding was that he "had not committed the deed".

Memory