Marzabotto, Sant’Anna di Stazzema: are the places of the two most infamous massacres carried out in Italy by the Nazis during the cruelest period of the Second World War. I am symbolic places of a season, that between 1943 and 1945, which saw the German army and the SS, often with the support of the fascists, carry out many wicked actions against the Italian population.
For a long time the culprits of those terrible crimes were not prosecuted by Italian justice. Indeed, in January 1960, the attorney general at the supreme military court, Enrico Santacroce, signed 695 decrees with which he archived the judicial files relating to the many episodes of violence against Italian civilians and soldiers committed by German soldiers and their fascist allies during the Second World War. In the dismissal decree, Santacroce claimed that he had not acquired useful information to identify the culprits and that he had not managed to ascertain the responsibilities of the individuals. It wasn’t true: the evidence was there, but it was decided arbitrarily, for political and opportunistic reasons, not to continue with the investigations and not to prosecute the culprits. The archiving was therefore illegitimate.
However, the files containing information on the crimes and the results of the investigations were not destroyed. They were “buried” in a wardrobe turned with the doors facing a wall, so that it was difficult to recover them. In 1994, during the trial of the German war criminal Erich Priebke, what was later called “cabinet of shame” was reopened and the files of the massacres were finally sent to the relevant military prosecutors. In particular, the La Spezia prosecutor’s office found itself investigating some of the most brutal massacres: Marzabotto, Sant’Anna di Stazzema, Civitella in Val di Chiana. After further years of bureaucratic delays, in 2002, the files arrived on the table of a young military prosecutor who had just settled in the Ligurian city: Marco De Paolis.
It was the beginning of a long legal battle to bring those guilty of the massacres to booka battle that lasted from 2002 to 2018 and which De Paolis reconstructed in the volume “Hunt for Nazis” (Rizzoli, euro 19, pp.372, also e-book).
The volume wants to be at the same time public testimony and intimate story of what it means to be faced with immense pain, that of the survivors and relatives of the victims, while trying to re-establish a balance of justice denied for over half a century. In fact, De Paolis had to deal with the resistance that he continued to think was better forgotten, leaving things as they were, not reopening old wounds. It’s a shame that those wounds had never completely healed for those who had suffered them personally.
The magistrate then decided to act starting from a simple and clear assumption: the law, the Italian one as well as the German one, does not allow the statute of limitations in the case of massacre. So the culprits had to be prosecuted, despite the time that had passed. Between 2002 and 2018, more than five hundred war crimes cases were initiated, resulting in almost seven thousand victims. De Paolis obtained the indictment of 79 Nazis and had 17 trials held, which led to 57 life sentences. De Paolis knew that most likely no one would go to prison given their advanced age. The criminals on trial were naturally very old and some even died during the hearings. However, as the book tells us, the action of this courageous magistrate was anything but in vain. First of all, he gave a voice to those who had waited for justice for more than half a century. Thus the extraordinary humanity of the survivors and relatives of the victims emerged, people who have not lost their human warmth despite the violence they suffered. On the contrary, interrogations and trials showed the inhuman side of the executioners, none of whom showed regret for the crimes committed. As De Paolis rightly writes about the books, the defendants were not old criminals, but only aged criminals, fossilized in their ideology of death. Decrepit men, but still imbued with hatred towards the Italians who they continued to consider cowards and traitors.
Above all, the book makes us understand how seeking justice and truth is always necessary, indeed indispensable. A great pain for the victims was the further injustice of the State’s failure to fulfill the primary and dutiful task of searching for, trying and punishing those responsible for that brutal violence. With the trials it was concretely demonstrated that under Italian law a criminal guilty of massacre remains a criminal forever. And he must be prosecuted. This provides for the rule of law which is the exact opposite of tyranny and the system of abuse idolized by the Nazis and their acolytes.
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