Vallucciole

Abandoned houses in Vallucciole. © Elena Pirazzoli

13 April 1944 , Vallucciole, Monte di Gianni, Serelli, Molino di Bucchio, Giuncheto (subdivisions of Pratovecchio Stia commune, Arezzo province, Tuscany)

In an anti-partisan operation on Monte Falterona, soldiers of the ‘Hermann Göring’ division attacked the village of Vallucciole and murdered over a hundred civilians, mainly women and children. Later, Mussolini contacted German ambassador Rahn and requested an official inquiry. The ensuing disciplinary investigation by the Wehrmacht resulted in no action.

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Involved Unit

‘Hermann Göring’ Parachute Panzer Reconnaissance battalion; Gendarmerie Company ‘Toskana’, soldiers of the RSI

Commander

‘Hermann Göring’ Parachute Panzer Division

Culprits

Rittmeister Kurt-Christian von Loeben, Kommandeur of the ‘Hermann Göring’ Parachute Panzer Reconnaissance Battalion

Victims

107

Investigations and processes

Jan. 1945: investigation of the British SIB.

1948-50: trial of General Wilhelm Schmalz before the Florence military court. Acquittal on 12 July 1950 before the Rome military court.

2000s: Proceedings before the La Spezia military court and subsequently the Verona military court conclude with six sentences of life imprisonment (July 2011). Two verdicts annulled by the Rome appeals court in 2014.

2004-2015: investigation of the Dortmund prosecutor’s office.

Armed forces

Wehrmacht

Vallucciole and its cemetery. © US NARA - Record Group 373 - Aerial Photography

The massacre

The anti-partisan operations of the ‘Hermann Göring’ Division in April 1944

In April 1944, the ‘Hermann Göring’ Division carried out two operations against partisan units in the mountains around Florence. For these operations, Oberst Georg-Hennig von Heydebreck commanded the ‘Hermann Göring’ Parachute Panzer Reconnaissance Battalion and elements of the Panzer Regiment, supported by the German gendarmerie and Italian soldiers.

The first operation took place between 10 and 11 April near Monte Morello, northwest of Florence. Sixteen persons were killed over those two days. The second, larger operation took place on Monte Falterona, northeast of Florence, where groups of partisans were based since autumn 1943. On 13 April, troops of the ‘Hermann Göring’ Division murdered over 100 civilians in Vallucciole, a village located on the mountain slope. Those murdered were mainly women and children.
The partisan attack and brutal reprisal against civilians

On 11 April, while the operation was being prepared, partisans attacked soldiers of the ‘Hermann Göring’ Division’s reconnaissance battalion in Molino di Bucchio, near Vallucciole. On the German side, two soldiers were killed, a third escaping and sounding the alarm in nearby Stia. As a first countermeasure, the German garrison in Stia set some houses on fire at the attack’s location and arrested two women who were later released.

Meanwhile, units of the ‘Hermann Göring’ Division had arrived on the scene. The operation began on 13 April at 6 A.M. In Giuncheto, a settlement located on the main street, four men were stopped and forced to transport ammunition for the German troops. Two of them would later be shot to death. The buildings in the area were plundered and set on fire.

Another patrol killed five men, five women, and two children aged seven and four, all from the Casa Trenti settlement on the upper part of the street. Meanwhile most of the troops had reached Molino di Bucchio, which had been given the role of a collection point for prisoners and plunder.

From Molino di Bucchio, the soldiers moved in the direction of Vallucciole, through the village of Serelli. In the courtyard between the houses, they killed four women; at the same time a second group of women and children was placed against a wall and executed. In total, twelve women and four children and adolescents were murdered here. The troops then moved on.

The massacre of Valluccciole could only be reconstructed through reports of rescue workers, since no one survived.

In summer 1944, Allied reconnaissance aircraft searching for Wehrmacht positions along the Gothic Line flew over the houses of Vallucciole, which had been destroyed in April by the ‘Hermann Göring’ Division.

The buildings in Vallucciole have not yet been restored but work in the fields has commenced again: from left Serelli, the cemetery, Vallucciole, and Monte di Gianni. © US NARA - Record Group 373 - Aerial Photography
Monte di Gianni, summer of 1944. The craters on the bottom of the photo have most likely been caused by the emergency ejection of damaged allied bombs. © US NARA - Record Group 373 - Aerial Photography
Molino di Bucchio, at a branch of the Arno river. Two days before the massacre, a skirmish between partisans and German soldiers occurred here. © US NARA - Record Group 373 - Aerial Photography
The houses of Serelli. The village has been abandoned since 1992 due to a landslide. © US NARA - Record Group 373 - Aerial Photography
The houses of Serelli without their roofs after the massacre. © US NARA - Record Group 373 - Aerial Photography

No survivors and no witnesses

In Vallucciole, the massacre’s main location, the crime could only be reconstructed through reports of rescue workers, since there were no survivors. The corpses of 13 women, 8 men, and 4 children were found there.

Ten of the victims had been confined in a house, then shot to death with submachine guns. The corpses of Santa Marchi and her daughter lay scorched on the doorstep. In one of the house’s rooms, six additional murdered women were found, together with the corpse of an older man and a five-year-old girl, all likewise scorched. Discovered within another house were the corpses of an elderly man and of a woman, both shot in the head. A second woman, Angiola Gambineri, had partly hidden herself together with her two-month-old baby behind a cupboard – ambulance workers found her corpse together with that of the baby; mother and child had both been shot in the chest. A young woman and her ailing mother were killed by shots to the head while trying to flee. They lay prone in the street. Two additional corpses were found outside the village.

Similar atrocities took place in the village of Monte di Gianni: 23 civilians – nine women, seven children between two and fourteen years old, and seven men – were murdered in various places in the village. Meanwhile another unit in the reconnaissance battalion had reached the villages of Moiano di Sopra and Moiano di Sotto: three women and two men were murdered in Moiano di Sotto, a woman, an eleven-year-old girl, and five men in Moiano di Sopra. Many of the women had been raped.

Following these crimes, the soldiers began to ascend Monte Falterona, first encountering partisans near the summit. Fighting broke out and some partisans were killed. When the razzia was finished and the soldiers had returned to their starting point in Molino di Bucchio, the murder continued of those carrying out forced labour in the village. The last fourteen men were taken to Giuncheto and shot to death in a field.
The subsequent murders

Over the following days, there were further atrocities around Monte Falterona. In Castagno, a district of San Godenzo on the mountain’s northern slope, soldiers terrorized the residents and set some houses on fire. Here as well, there was rape and plunder. On 17 April, 17 partisans captured while the mountain was scoured were shot to death in the Stia cemetery. More to the south, the ‘Hermann Göring’ Panzer Regiment killed 29 men in Partina, eight in Moscaio, and four in Badia Prataglia. Thirteen people were killed in Rufina, including a number of women and two small children. They were presumably suspected of supporting the partisans.

The photo shows a group of German and Italian officers and soldiers during a pause in their operation on Monte Falterona, April 1944. The photo was probably taken by the German soldier, stationed in Stia, who brought the film it was on to photographer Pietro Ghelli for development. Ghelli recognized the film’s importance and saved some of the images, later handing them to British military investigators. This image was forwarded to Italian military justice and was eventually used in the 1948 trial of General Wilhelm Schmalz, then in the most recent military trials in La Spezia.

The troops were charged by the German military authorities simply with the plunder in Stia, not with the massacre in Vallucciole. Because of the ‘Barbarossa Decree’ of 1941, prohibiting the prosecution of soldiers for excesses in the course of combatting partisans, investigations and trials—not to speak of sentencing—had become unthinkable.

Investigation and trials

Italian Fascist protests and impunity of the perpetrators

After the German soldiers left the area, the Italian carabinieri in Stia sent a report on the events in Vallucciole to the Republican National Guard in Arezzo. Its officials protested and Mussolini demanded an explanation from the German ambassador Rudolf Rahn. The Wehrmacht then initiated a disciplinary investigation that had no results. Since on account of the ‘Barbarossa Decree’ of 1941, prosecuting soldiers for excesses in the course of combatting partisans was prohibited, the troops could only be investigated and placed on trial for the plunder at Stia, not for the massacre in Vallucciole. Hence the accusations of murder and rape led nowhere – and the plundering in Stia was declared a gift of the Italian fascists to the Germans, thus itself covered up.

Consequently, the goal of the Wehrmacht’s internal investigation was placating Mussolini and Ambassador Rahn, not identifying and punishing the guilty men. The commanders of the responsible units went unpunished. Only some officers who were especially culpable – Rittmeister von Loeben, Hauptmann Heimann, Hauptmann Hartwig – were transferred.
The trial of General Wilhelm Schmalz, 1948

After the war there were investigations of the ‘Hermann Göring’ Division’s atrocities in Tuscany. Proceedings were initiated against the division’s former commander, General Wilhelm Schmalz, before the military court in Florence. Schmalz had taken over the division’s command on 1 May 1944; he thus could not be accused for the killings in Vallucciole on 13 April 1944. On 12 July 1950, before the military court in Rome, he was acquitted for participation in the massacres in Civitella, Cornia and San Pancrazio, Cavriglia, and Bucine. The judicial authorities paid no further attention to the Vallucciole massacre.
The 1994 ‘In Memory’ conference

In June 1994, a conference took place in Arezzo with the title ‘In Memory. Per una memoria europea dei crimini nazisti’ [‘For a European Memory of the Nazi Crimes’]. The conference marked the first venue in which the German massacres in Italy were examined from a broad, interdisciplinary research-perspective; it had great significance for further work in this field. In 1997, the historian Carlo Gentile, commissioned by the communes of Civitella in Val di Chiana, Bucine, Cavriglia, and Stia (locations of the massacres perpetrated by the ‘Hermann Göring’ Division), conducted the first investigations meant to identify those responsible. In 1998, his findings were delivered to the Arezzo prosecutor’s office and then to the La Spezia military prosecutor.

In 2000, investigations of the massacre in Vallucciole were taken up by the Dortmund prosecutor’s office. Subsequently, the La Spezia military prosecutor resumed its investigations; the trial took place before the Verona military court and ended on 6 July 2011.

Investigations and trials in the 2000s

In 2000, detailed articles by Christiane Kohl on the ‘Hermann Göring’ Division’s massacres appeared in Germany’s Süddeutsche Zeitung daily newspaper. Following these articles, that same year the Dortmund prosecutor’s office took up an investigation of the massacre in Vallucciole. Subsequently, the military prosecutor’s office in La Spezia resumed its own inquiries. The trial took place before the Verona military court and ended on 6 July 2011 with the sentencing of six persons to life in prison: Erich Koeppe, Alfred Luhmann, Helmut Odenwald, Fritz Olberg, Wilhelm Karl Stark, and Hans Georg Karl Winkler. Three other persons were acquitted, and two of those found guilty had the verdicts overturned by the Rome appeals court.

The Dortmund prosecutor’s investigation, which also took in the massacres in Monchio, Susano and Costrignano, Cervarolo and Civago, was terminated on 3 Feb. 2015 without any charges being filed.

Memory

Postwar commemoration of the Vallucciole massacre

In the postwar period, commemorating the massacre was initially limited to the circle of survivors and those left behind. In this first phase, public commemoration was focused for a long time on the seventeen partisans killed in the Stia cemetery on 17 April 1944. The first public ceremony for the Vallucciole massacre’s civilian victims only took place in 1954; the occasion was marked by dedication of an ossuary in the local church and presentation of a plaque with the names of those murdered. Also in 1954, the writer Carlo Levi made the massacre the focus of one of his short stories (‘La Pasqua di Vallucciole’).

In the years that followed, the Stia commune organized the annual commemoration on a small scale, without the participation of other public institutions. In 1964, on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of the massacre, the Arezzo provincial administration distributed information on the partisans’ armed resistance to the local schools – that resistance continued to serve as the central focus.

In 1970, a monument was dedicated at the Stia cemetery for the seventeen partisans shot to death in April 1944. Two years later, a monument for the partisan Pio Borri was dedicated on the old road to Molin di Bucchio. Here nine plaques commemorate the most important events in the area around Stia during the German occupation. The first monument for the massacre’s civilian victims was installed in 1979 on Stia’s Piazza Pertini; it was moved to the old cemetery in 2006. At its original location, a monument now stands with the name ‘Vallucciole tra Ferro e Fuoco’ (‘Vallucciole between iron and fire’).

In 2011, the Stia commune, since 2014 part of the Pratovecchio-Stia commune, was awarded the Silver Medal for civic courage.

Sources

Some references to operations in the Monte Falterona area are found in the Freiburg branch of the German Federal Archives: documents of the Armeeabteilung ‘von Zangen’ (BArch, RH 24-87/39 and 40); of Army Corps LXXV (RH 24-75/2, war diary of the operations battalion; RH 24-75/20, appendices to the activities report of the Ic-detachment). Among the latter appendices, no. 62 furnishes additional information on the persons killed in the Vallucciole and Partina massacres, the material pillaged, and the villages destroyed in these operations. The documents of the Witthöft Corps (RH 24-73/8; RH 24-73/11) show the operation’s preparations and chain of command. More illuminating are documents linked to the British investigation, kept in the British National Archives (WO 204/11488). The memoirs of Oberleutnant Wolfgang Bach, Vom Garigliano zur Weichsel: Meine Zeit als Chef der schweren Kompanie der Fallschirm-Panzer-Aufklärungs-Abteilung 'Hermann Göring', 12. November 1943 bis 31. August 1944 (‘From Garigliano to the Weichsel: My Time as Head of the Heavy-Weapons Company of the “Hermann Göring” Parachute-Panzer Reconnaissance Battalion’) are kept in the Federal Archives, Freiburg (BW 57/346).

Literature

Carlo Gentile, ‘La divisione Hermann Göring in Toscana’, in Gianluca Fulvetti, Paolo Pezzino (eds.), La politica del massacro, Naples, l'ancora del mediterraneo, 2006, pp. 213-240.

Carlo Gentile, Wehrmacht und Waffen-SS im Partisanenkrieg: Italien 1943-1945, Schöningh, Paderborn, 2012, pp. 28, 129, 312-319.

Luca Grisolini, Vallucciole, 13 aprile 1944: storia, ricordo e memoria pubblica di una strage nazifascista, Consiglio regionale della Toscana, Florence, 2017.

Authorship and translation

Author: Carlo Gentile

Translated from German by: Joel Golb

2023

Text: CC BY NC SA 4.0

Vallucciole

The massacre

The anti-partisan operations of the ‘Hermann Göring’ Division in April 1944

The partisan attack and brutal reprisal against civilians

The massacre of Valluccciole could only be reconstructed through reports of rescue workers, since no one survived.

No survivors and no witnesses

The subsequent murders

Investigation and trials

Italian Fascist protests and impunity of the perpetrators

The trial of General Wilhelm Schmalz, 1948

The 1994 ‘In Memory’ conference

In 2000, investigations of the massacre in Vallucciole were taken up by the Dortmund prosecutor’s office. Subsequently, the La Spezia military prosecutor resumed its investigations; the trial took place before the Verona military court and ended on 6 July 2011.

Investigations and trials in the 2000s

Memory

Postwar commemoration of the Vallucciole massacre

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