The Germans take Corfu

By 27 September 1943 Corfu, occupied by the Italians since the spring of 1941, was in German hands. That day, in the Old Fortress, on a square in Corfu town and at several places in the interior of the island, the Germans shot the commander of the Italian garrison, Colonel Luigi Lusignani, and dozens of his officers, and sank their bodies, weighted with stones, in the sea. The island had not passed into German hands peacefully, as terse chronologies might suggest: from 13 September the Italian garrison had been repelling landings and enduring daily bombing, and the Germans landed on Corfu in strength only during the night of 23–24 September. The fighting ended on the evening of 25 September, Lusignani issued the order to capitulate on the morning of 26 September, and the last isolated posts laid down their arms on 28 September.

The island under Italian occupation

Benito Mussolini’s Italy had long-standing designs on Corfu. As early as 1923 the Italian fleet had shelled the town and put a landing force ashore (the Corfu incident), and in the 1940 plans for war with Greece the Ionian Islands were among the spoils Italy was to keep. After the capitulation of the Army of Epirus, the island was occupied without a fight on 28 April 1941 by units of the 33rd Infantry Division “Acqui”, brought over from nearby Albania. Rome treated the archipelago differently from the rest of occupied Greece: in August 1941 it removed it from the administration of the collaborationist government in Athens, and the Fascist official Piero Parini, who governed the islands as civil commissioner for political affairs, pursued a vigorous policy of Italianisation – with Italian law, Italian officials and a military court. According to Italian studies, some 3,500 opponents of the occupation were held in camps on Paxos and on smaller islets.

At the end of 1942 the headquarters and most of the Acqui Division were moved to Kefalonia, from where it was easier to guard the entrance to the Gulf of Patras. Left on Corfu was the division’s 18th Infantry Regiment under Colonel Lusignani, reinforced with artillery and detachments of the Carabinieri, the Guardia di Finanza and the navy – about 160 officers and 4,000–4,500 men in all. After Mussolini’s overthrow in July 1943, Parini handed over power to Lusignani. The Germans, who had previously had only a radio station and airfield ground staff on the island, from mid-August brought 500–550 men to Corfu, mainly ground personnel of the Luftwaffe and the Kriegsmarine. As part of the preparations for Operation Achse, the seizure of the Ionian Islands was entrusted to General Hubert Lanz’s XXII Mountain Corps, deployed on the coast of Epirus opposite the islands.

The decision to resist

News of the Italian capitulation took the garrison by surprise, as it did the whole army. On the morning of 9 September the commander of the Eleventh Army in Athens, General Carlo Vecchiarelli, under German pressure, ordered all units under his command to hand over their coastal batteries, artillery and crew-served weapons to the Germans by 10 September and then to await their supposed return home. Lusignani and his officers regarded this order as contrary to military honour and as issued by a commander who was himself a prisoner. The garrison made contact with the local resistance movement, released Greek political prisoners and from 12 September began handing out weapons to Greeks. On 10, 11 and 12 September Lusignani rejected successive German demands to surrender the island, and on 11 September an order arrived from Brindisi, where the Italian high command had fled, to treat German units as hostile.

On the morning of 13 September German bombers appeared over the town, and Italian anti-aircraft guns shot down three of them. A few hours later a German delegation delivered an ultimatum; when Lusignani rejected it, a convoy of a dozen or so boats carrying troops of the 1st Mountain Division, covered by Ju 87s, headed for the beach near Benitses. Fire from the Italian batteries sank some of the boats and forced the rest back to the mainland. The Italians then disarmed the island’s German garrison – taking 426 or 441 men prisoner, depending on the source – and that evening the Luftwaffe retaliated by bombing Corfu town with incendiaries; a large part of the old town burned down, about 30 Italian soldiers and an unknown number of Greek civilians were killed, and thousands of inhabitants fled to the countryside. On 15 September the Germans again tried to land near Benitses and were again repulsed.

Siege from the air

In these days further Italian units arrived on Corfu from Sarandë (Italian Porto Edda) in Albania, where the Italians were under pressure from both the Germans and Albanian partisans – some 3,500–4,000 men, among them the cohesive battalions of Colonel Elio Bettini’s 49th Infantry Regiment, but also many stragglers unfit for combat and two Blackshirt battalions of doubtful loyalty. The garrison grew to about 8,000 men. The Germans, busy from 15 September fighting the rest of the Acqui Division on Kefalonia, postponed their landing, but X Air Corps bombed the island almost daily; Italian sources count some 200 raids between 13 and 24 September.

Help from outside was meagre. The Allies, not yet trusting their recent enemy, were slow to approve Italian operations: two torpedo boats sent with ammunition and food on 17 September were turned back on their orders, and Italian fighters and Re.2002 fighter-bombers from airfields in Apulia were allowed to attack German barges in the ports of Epirus only from 17–18 September. On 20 or 21 September a British liaison mission under Major Oliver Churchill of the Special Operations Executive (SOE) was dropped onto the island by parachute. He promised reinforcements soon, but his radio set was damaged on landing and he could not make contact with Cairo; the promised British help never came.

Operation Verrat

On 22 September, the day the Italian troops on Kefalonia capitulated (the massacre on Kefalonia), Lanz approved the plan for taking Corfu under the telling code name Verrat – “Treason”. Battle groups of the 1st Mountain Division embarked in the afternoon of 23 September at Preveza and Igoumenitsa. About half an hour after midnight on 24 September the main group landed near Lefkimmi in the south of the island, a second at Agios Georgios in the north-west, and an assault detachment by the Korission lagoon, at the narrowest point of the island, which the Italians had considered unsuitable for a landing. By dawn the Germans had taken the hills overlooking the beachheads and begun pushing the Italians north; in the afternoon they landed further groups on the east coast. The Italian torpedo boat Francesco Stocco, called in to help, could no longer find the German barges and was sunk by Stukas on her way back; 92 members of her crew were killed or went missing.

On the morning of 25 September, after the second wave of mountain troops had landed, the Germans, with crushing superiority in the air, broke the line that Lusignani was trying to form on the passes linking the south of the island with the north. By around 4 p.m. resistance was weakening everywhere, and at 5 p.m. the Germans entered the town, where a white flag was flying over the Old Fortress. Lusignani, who had moved his command post to the north of the island, was captured that same day, and on the morning of 26 September he formally passed the order to capitulate to his units. That same day two motor sailing vessels carrying the German prisoners taken on 13 September reached Brindisi. Several dozen Italians, as well as both members of the British mission, managed to escape by boat to Apulia over the following days.

The executions of 27 September

As early as 21 September the staff of Army Group E had ordered that the Italians on Corfu be treated “the same as on Kefalonia”, where, in accordance with Adolf Hitler’s order, officers who resisted were not taken prisoner. On 26 September Lanz ordered that all officers who had taken part in the fighting be shot – except for Fascists, men of German descent, doctors and chaplains – starting with the most senior. About 280 captured officers were locked up in the New Fortress. On 27 September Colonel Lusignani, Colonel Bettini and their subordinates were shot – according to the most precise Italian findings, 27 officers in all (some sources give 28). In accordance with Lanz’s order, the bodies were weighted and thrown into the sea; they were never found. The next day the commander of Army Group E, General Alexander Löhr, forbade further executions – perhaps because Corfu had been taken much more easily than Kefalonia. Older studies, including English-language ones, speak of all 280 officers being shot, but more recent research does not confirm this. After the war Lusignani and Bettini were posthumously awarded the Gold Medal of Military Valour.

The fate of the prisoners

Italian losses in the fighting for Corfu are estimated at 600–700 killed, of whom roughly half – according to Italian historians – died after laying down their arms, shot in their positions by German soldiers. Between 8,000 and 9,000 men were taken prisoner. The Germans, who by various calculations lost a total of about 200 killed in the two weeks, shipped them to the mainland and on to the Reich as military internees (Italienische Militärinternierte), denied prisoner-of-war status and the protection of the Geneva Convention. Of the prisoners from Corfu who were asked in Ioannina in October whether they wished to go on fighting alongside the Germans, only two agreed.

Some never even reached the mainland. On 9–10 October about 5,500 prisoners were loaded onto the motor ship Mario Roselli, which was to take them to Patras. While still in Corfu harbour the ship was hit by British aircraft on 10 and 11 October and ran aground; the number killed – by bombs, by the guards’ bullets and by drowning – is put by various sources at between about 500 and more than 1,300. Similar disasters involving overcrowded transports, such as the sinking of the steamer Ardena off Kefalonia on 28 September, cost the lives of thousands of Italian prisoners in the Ionian and Aegean Seas in the autumn of 1943.

Place in the war

The defence of Corfu was, alongside Kefalonia, the longest armed resistance by Italian troops against the Germans in Greece after 8 September 1943, and one of the first acts of Italy’s war against its former ally. It also showed how little units left to their own devices could achieve: Marshal Pietro Badoglio’s government in Brindisi had no means of helping them, and the Allies, busy with the fighting at Salerno and distrustful of their recent enemy, decided against intervening. By the time the Allied command finally decided, on 24 September, to send P-40 fighter-bombers over the island, Corfu was already falling.

For the island’s inhabitants the German takeover meant a harsher occupation. It struck most tragically at Corfu’s Jewish community, one of the oldest in Greece, which united Romaniote and Italian-speaking Jews. Under Italian rule, as throughout the Italian zone of occupation, it had not been deported – unlike the Jews of Salonika, who were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau in the spring of 1943. On 9 June 1944 the Germans, with the help of the Greek police, arrested about 1,800 Corfu Jews and deported them via Athens to Auschwitz; according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, about 200 survived – hidden by neighbours or surviving the camp. In October 1944, after the general withdrawal of the Wehrmacht from Greece, the British occupied Corfu. The remains of the Italian officers shot on 27 September were never found.