Page 81 - NONOSTANTE IL LUNGO TEMPO TRASCORSO…Le stragi nazifasciste nella guerra di liberazione 1943–1945

ENG
Isa bella Insolvibile
Isabella Insolvibile
Historian

According to the Atlante delle stragi naziste e fasciste in Italia
(Atlas of the Nazist and Fascist crimes in Italy), between July

1943 and May 1945 Germans and Italian fascists killed in It-
aly 24,436 people in 5,884 episodes of violence, hundreds

of single homicides but also mass killings; for instance, in
Sant’Anna di Stazzema (Lucca’s district, summer 1944) and
in Monte Sole, in the surroundings of Marzabotto (province of

Bologna), or also at the Ardeatine Caves in Rome (24th March
1944), one of the largest “urban” massacres. Carlo Gentile

claimed that “no other western country underwent similar

abuses like Italy” (Gentile, I crimini di guerra tedeschi in Italia (The German war
crimes in Italy), 1943-1945, Turin, Einaudi, 2015, p. 25).

These carnages were often characterised by the were civilians, that is to say men and women of
radical devastation of all the material and human any age who were not involved concretely in war-
spaces where they took place: every human being, fare, and were above all completely harmless.
every house, every shelter, every resource (from The definition of civilians overlapped with the
livestock to crops) has been swept away. A trag- idea of being defenceless: in fact, the civilians
ic example is the one of Monte Sole, the largest were the most defenceless of all. They were the
massacre ever committed in Italy and in western main victims of the world wars of the 20th cen-
Europe. After the passage of the “perpetrators” tury, as well as being the “targets” of nazi-fascist
- a sort of “scientific” name for the executioners crimes in Italy. In this case too, the Atlante clearly
- nothing existed anymore of the former hamlets reports that civilians (so no partisans, soldiers or
and villages, apart from the foundations or burn- other categories) were over half the total number
ing ruins. Whole communities, present and future, of victims: 13,010 out of 24,436.
destroyed within hours, and villages abandoned
also by those survivors who had nothing left to
live for. These places turned into symbols of grief
and memory, to be experienced only privately.
Devastation struck also those districts where
“smaller” massacres took place, like in most of the
cases. With some exceptions, the main victims

STORIA GIUSTIZIA MEMORIA HISTORY JUSTICE MEMORY 81

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