Monte Sole Massacre Italy 1944 At the end of August in 1944, after the liberation of Florence, the armies of the allies as well as the Nazis confronted each other at the Gothic Line. The area of Monte Sole (Bologna), situated between the valleys of the Reno and the Setta (now the municipalities of Marzabotto, Monzuno and Grizzana), constituted the immediate rearguard of the Nazi army. In this area, in the end of October 1943, a partisan brigade, the “Stella Rossa” (Red Star) started to operate, founded by locals and constituted of people with different political and cultural backgrounds. Between the middle and the end of September 1944, the command of the 16th armored grenadier division of the SS decided for a military operation for the “destruction of the partisan groups and the cleansing of the adversarial territory”. This operation, consigned to the command of major Walter Reder, took place between the 29th of September and the 5th of October in 1944. All the area was surrounded by about 1000 soldiers, among them members of the Italian Republican National Guard. Divided in 4 platoons, they combed through the entire area from the north, south, east and west. They burned the houses and killed the animals as well as the people. The result after 7 days of massacre was 770 victims, of whom 216 children, 142 over-60-year-olds, 316 women. The massacre happened in 115 different places: villages, individual houses, churches. The massacre of Monte Sole was not a reprisal, but a combing through that ended in a massacre. It became a strategy widely applied in 1944 and 1945 by the Nazi army in Italy. This strategy, aimed at terrorizing the civil population, in order to eventually eliminate the formation of any form of resistance and the dispersion of existing resistance groups, is also known as “terror domination”.
Posted on: Fri, 14 Nov 2014 19:30:01 +0000
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