2024-03-21 00:29:10
Dino Messina’s volume “Controversies per un massacre” is released in bookstores today. Via Rasella and the Fosse Ardeatine. An Italian tragedy” (Solferino). Eighty years after the events, Messina also reconstructs on the basis of new testimonies the entire story, the trials of those responsible for the reprisal, Kesselring, Mälzer, Mackensen, Kappler and Priebke. And the still burning political disputes, from Norberto Bobbio’s intervention in the Seventies to the more recent declarations of members of the government majority. We publish a preview.
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dino messina
“Feige Hunde”, “vile dogs”, shouted Major Hellmuth Dobek, commander of the Third Bozen Battalion when, having climbed into the attics of the Interior Ministry, where his subordinates were quartered, he was told that no, they just didn’t feel like participating to the reprisal to avenge the thirty-three comrades killed in the attack on Via Rasella. We must start from this no, from this unexpected refusal, which could also lead to severe penalties, to understand who the 156 soldiers of the Eleventh Company of the Third Bozen Battalion really were. Bloodthirsty Nazis? SS volunteers from a war they blindly believed in? Or conscripts who had been reluctantly forced to join? The first small group of military police in the Reich composed of South Tyroleans was formed in 1939, when, following an agreement between Rome and Berlin, the German- and Ladin-speaking citizens of the provinces of Bolzano, Trento and Belluno were offered the possibility of opting for the German citizenship, which also included the transfer. There were many South Tyroleans who opted. But after the first transfers, difficulties emerged which blocked the exodus: the change of nationality entailed the sale of the properties, not always at an advantageous price, and it was also realized that the welcome was not the best. So the majority of those opting remained in Italy, despite having chosen another nationality. Things became further complicated after 8 September 1943 when, in a lightning move, Nazi Germany created two zones of operations, the Adriatisches Kustenland, to the east, with Udine, Gorizia, Trieste, Ljubljana, Istria and Fiume, and the Alpenvorland south of Brenner, the area of operations in the Prealps, with the provinces of Bolzano, Trento and Belluno, which was entrusted to Gauleiter Franz Hofer. (…) In October 1943, under the direction of Colonel Alois Menschick, a regiment was established with four South Tyrolean police battalions, later reduced to three, with tasks of surveillance of military garrisons, control of internal security and fight against partisan formations. The original name was Polizeiregiment Südtirol, later changed to Bozen, with around two thousand units. Subsequently, the «Alpenvorland» (Pre-Alps), «Schlanders» (Silandro) and «Brixen» (Bressanone) regiments were born. Overall, the strength of the South Tyrolean Polizeiregiment reached ten thousand units. The Bozen regiment was sworn in on 30 January 1944 in the presence of General Karl Wolff, commander of the SS and German police in Italy, in the Gries barracks (Bolzano). The First and Second Battalions of the Bozen were used in the Alpenvorland and in the Adriatic area of operations also in bloody actions against the Resistance and the civilian population. The Third Bozen Battalion was transferred to Rome on 12 February 1944 on board buses of the Dolomiti Road Transport Company (Sad). It was a long and dangerous journey that lasted a week. The convoy moved only at night to avoid aerial bombardments on often bad roads.
These were soldiers already trained in the use of small arms, commanded by German officers and non-commissioned officers. The South Tyroleans occupied the lowest ranks of the military hierarchy. Were they volunteers? Officially not, because Gauleiter Hofer had obtained that the Alpenvorland recruits were not considered as such, but on the enlistment documents it was often declared that they were voluntary. It must be considered that refusal led to arrest and even retaliation against the family.
Were they SS? Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS and police, had decided on 24 February 1943 to rename all police regiments as SS-Polizeiregiment. But for the South Tyroleans there was a sort of autonomy, so the Bozen battalion was baptized as SS-Polizeiregiment Bozen only with a decree dated 16 April 1944, that is, almost a month after the attack in Via Rasella. From that moment on, the old paybooks were taken from the soldiers and returned with the SS letterhead. Each regiment of the Polizeiregiment was divided into battalions and these into companies, with progressive numbering. Each company was divided into platoons. The bomb on Via Rasella mainly hit the Second and Third platoons, the central ones, while the First and Fourth emerged almost unscathed from the partisan attack. The 156 of the Eleventh Company who marched through the streets of Rome in the early afternoon of March 23, 1944 had already been trained for three months at Colle Isarco and that day they had completed an additional course before replacing the comrades of the Tenth Company in the surveillance service of strategic points in Rome. The changeover was scheduled for the following day. Their pay was 12.5 lire a day, two and a half lire more than the pay due to Wehrmacht soldiers. A decree of 6 January 1944 had called up all the male residents of Alpenvorland in the age groups from 1894 to 1926, including those who had opted for Italian citizenship, called Dableiber (the remainder). Among the Bozen soldiers there were over forty married men with children and bachelors in their twenties and thirties. Analyzing the list of fallen soldiers, we discover that the youngest, Franz Niederstaetter, was born on June 1, 1917 in Aldino, in the province of Bolzano, therefore he was twenty-six years old, and the oldest, Jakob Erlacher, was born in Marebbe in July 1901 , so he was still forty-two. With a few exceptions, in the vast literature on Via Rasella and the Fosse Ardeatine, few lines are dedicated to the men of the Bozen battalion. (…) But today the history of the Bozen can be consulted by everyone in the excellent Wikipedia entry which cites the literature on the subject. This has not prevented the most abstruse legends about the Third Bozen Battalion from continuing to circulate. For example, one that was made up of elderly and harmless members of a musical band, as the president of the Senate Ignazio La Russa said with an unfortunate joke in an interview with «Libero» in March 2023. In reality the Third Bozen battalion had the tasks of surveillance of military garrisons inside and outside Rome. The Ninth company was deployed in Albano Laziale, the Tenth used for surveillance in the center and the Eleventh was in reserve.
The voices of the Bozens in Umberto Gandini’s investigation
It was not a musical band and they were not harmless soldiers, but that March 23rd they marched with a shot in the barrel, as a survivor of the Eleventh company, Franz Bertagnoll, said, ready to react to any partisan attacks, which the Nazi commands had taken into account. On March 23, 1944, the twenty-fifth anniversary of the foundation of the Fasci di Combattimento, danger was in the air. The survivors of the decimated South Tyrolean company told it to a journalist from «Alto Adige», Umberto Gandini, who from 24 to 29 September 1977, just over a month after Herbert Kappler’s sensational escape from the Celio military hospital, conducted an extraordinary investigation in the South Tyrolean valleys among the veterans of the Third Bozen Battalion, and in particular among the survivors of the Eleventh Company. These are four medallions, which constitute an exemplary reportage then collected in a file in January 1979 under the titleQuelli di via Rasella, with an introduction by the director Gianni Faustini. Gandini’s story gives us a point of view that is sometimes uncomfortable, but lively and original. Let’s return to the Bozens’ “no”, to Major Dobek’s request. How did they justify their refusal to avenge an attack that had cost thirty-three dead and fifty-five seriously wounded and which had more than halved the strength of the Eleventh Company?
The soldiers of the other two companies, the Ninth and the Tenth, to whom Dobek, who was of Bohemian origins, had addressed, had said that they were “baptized Christians”, “too Catholic”, that is, true believers, to agree to kill defenseless hostages. Some non-commissioned officers explained to the major that «those men had never fired at other men, not even in battle. It is out of the question and impossible to expect them to now start shooting defenseless hostages.” «The officers, all Germans from Germany or Austria, didn’t trust us» said Josef Prader, born in 1903, a carpenter from Bressanone. «Perhaps because we were too little “brown”, that is, Nazis, but above all South Tyrolese. The Germans, those from outside, still make me sick today, when I think of everything they put me through. I was, for several years, an Italian soldier, in the Eighty-fourth “Bolzano” infantry regiment, in Florence and Tripoli, in ’23 and ’24. And then for another three months in ’39 in Chieti. The Italians gave me a diploma on which it is written that I served “with honor and loyalty”. From the Germans I only got insults and kicks in the butt. If today they were to ask me to go back to being a soldier and to choose my uniform, I wouldn’t have a moment’s doubt: I would be an Italian soldier. Not because I feel Italian, but because there are things that are never forgotten.” From the documents it appears that Prader had left as a volunteer: «They made us sign cards on which it was written that we were volunteers. I said that if they wanted they could also enlist me, but not as a volunteer. They replied that they would define me as they wanted and liked, and that if I made a fuss I would end up in Russia. This is how we were volunteers…”. The carpenter from Bressanone was not the only one to have served in the Italian army. Others had done it, such as Peter Putzer from Varna, a mountain artilleryman in Merano and Rovereto, or Josef Praxmarer, from San Giacomo di Bolzano, who was an infantryman in Turin. Or again like Luis Kaufmann, from Nova Levante, engineer in Casale Monferrato, who had his brother Johann killed in via Rasella. Many of those interviewed by Gandini, in addition to the trauma of via Rasella and the hunger suffered (the rations were scarce even for the occupying troops), remember the insults and humiliations suffered by the officers. There was one in particular, Lieutenant Walter Wolgasth, from Hamburg, nicknamed “full gas”, company commander, who called them “Tyrolean knuckleheads”, “traitors”, “pigs”, “bastards”, when he was kind he was ironic about the not very fluent German of the soldiers of Ladin origin and about the poor discipline of that group of farmers who struggled to keep a martial pace. Lieutenant Wolgasth fell into an ambush in May 1945. According to some versions he was killed by partisans, other rumors say that he was eliminated by one of his subordinates. Even Major Dobek, who was killed by partisans in July 1944 while seeking refuge in Switzerland, did not spare the insults. He remembered Franz Bertagnoll, resident near Lake Caldaro, hearing him say: “You are sixty percent worse than the worst Italians.”
2024-03-21 00:29:10