Cerpiano

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Involved Unit

2nd Company of the SS-Panzer Reconnaissance Battalion 16 ‘Reichsführer-SS’

Commander

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

Culprits

Walter Reder, Werner Horst Szillat and their men, including Albert Meier

Victims

46 

Armed forces

Waffen-SS

• The ‘Palazzo’, the kindergarten, and the oratory

  Cerpiano, a district in the Marzabotto commune, is located on the southern slope of Monte Sole in the vicinity of Casaglia; a road connects it to the Setta Valley. Before the massacre, Cerpiano contained a ‘Palazzo’, a large, four-storeyed stone building to which a chapel, a primary school, and a farmhouse were attached. These structures no longer exist. The terrain was used for winegrowing. The kindergarten, led by Ursuline sister Antonietta Benni, originally was located in the valley, in the Gardelletta district, but had been moved to Cerpiano during the occupation period to escape the danger of air raids along the railway line.

• The massacre on 29 and 30 Sept. 1944

  On the morning of 29 Sept. 1944 between 8 and 9 o’clock, a group of soldiers from the 1st platoon of the Reconnaissance Battalion’s 2^nd company arrived in Cerpiano. The company-leader was SS Obersturmführer Werner Szillat. Later, partisans indicated they had engaged the marching soldiers in a firefight, but there is no mention of losses in the German sources.

  A number of civilians were living in Cerpiano, including people taking shelter from neighbouring villages, as well as kindergarten children, schoolchildren, and their supervisory personnel. Some civilians had been warned about the pending German arrival and managed to hide in an air-raid shelter in the woods.

  The SS took appr. fifty persons prisoner (27 women, 20 children, and two handicapped persons) and, as in Caprara, locked them in the chapel. They then threw hand grenades through the windows and fired machine guns from the doorway. Some people survived this first attack. It appears that guards stood in front of the building to prevent escapes. 

  On the morning of 30 Sept., the men from the 2^nd company returned and combed through the area of Monte Sole and Monte Abelle intending to find the partisans. While moving through Cerpiano, they murdered the previous day’s survivors.

• The role of Albert Meier

  The person of Albert Meier is linked to the massacre. Meier was part of the 2nd company and according to the deserter Willi Kneißl had the main responsibility for the massacre in Cerpiano. Kneißl reported as follows: ‘[…] Meyer (sic) forced the population of one village which consisted only of elderly people and women and children to take refuge in a church, the exact location is not known. After the doors of the church were locked, Meyer threw a hand-grenade into the church window in order, as he later boasted, to let these people suffer a little more. The next morning Meyer returned for the squad and killed the people that sought refuge in the church with small arms fire.’

• Acts of violence after the massacre

  A few days after the massacre, when the front had drawn closer, the ‘Palazzo’ of Cerpiano was made into the headquarters of the Reconnaissance Battalion’s forward-deployed command post. Walter Reder and his closest SS-leaders also spent time there in early October. Later, the 2^nd battalion of SS Panzergrenadier Regiment 35 (Battalion Galler), which had been responsible for the massacre of Sant'Anna di Stazzema in August 1944, took over this position. 

  Following the massacre, some survivors, mainly women, took shelter in Cerpiano. Sometimes the soldiers tolerated the presence of civilians, whom they put to work. Women were deployed in kitchen-work or to clean rooms and clothing, men as porters or to build quarters and trenches. One evening, Walter Reder and his SS-leaders organized a party with drinking. Inebriated, they raped some of the young women. Later the victims testified, with the public excluded. In the 1951 trial of Reder in Bologna, this crime took on particular weight and cemented the accused man’s reputation as especially cruel.

  In the trial, Reder claimed not to have seen any corpses in Cerpiano but recalled seeing blood on the chapel’s walls. After some days, all the civilians remaining in Cerpiano were driven away by the soldiers. Afterwards the front line ran through this area; for a long time it would be held by the 7^th company of SS Panzergrenadier Regiment 35 under SS Untersturmführer Gerhard Sommer.