The massacre of the Acqui Division on Kefalonia

On the morning of 21 September 1943, on the Greek island of Kefalonia (Cephalonia), German mountain troops stopped taking prisoners. Italian soldiers of the 33rd Infantry Division “Acqui”, who for a week had been fighting their former ally and now – out of ammunition, without air support and with no hope of help from Italy – came out with their hands up, were shot on the spot, whole platoons and companies at a time. The next day the divisional commander, General Antonio Gandin, capitulated. The executions did not stop: on 24 September Gandin himself and most of his officers were shot. What the Italians call l’eccidio di Cefalonia became one of the largest crimes committed against prisoners of war during the Second World War.

The Italian garrison in the Ionian Islands

After the German invasion of Greece in the spring of 1941, the country was divided into zones of occupation. Italy took the largest, and with it the Ionian Islands, which Benito Mussolini’s government regarded as a future territorial acquisition. In 1943 the garrison of Kefalonia was the Acqui Division: two infantry regiments (the 17th and 317th), the 33rd Artillery Regiment, a Blackshirt legion, naval coastal batteries and services – some 11,500 men and more than 500 officers in all. The division’s third regiment, the 18th, was stationed separately on Corfu. Since June it had been commanded by the 52-year-old General Antonio Gandin, a veteran of the Eastern Front, holder of the German Iron Cross and reputed to be a Germanophile.

In the summer, as the Germans began to reckon with Italy leaving the war, they reinforced their forces in the Balkans. Around 2,000 German troops – two fortress battalions of the 966th Grenadier Regiment with self-propelled guns and a few tanks – were sent to Kefalonia under Lieutenant Colonel Johannes Barge. In the German chain of command the island came under General Hubert Lanz’s XXII Mountain Corps, which in turn answered to General Alexander Löhr’s Army Group E.

Orders that never came

On the evening of 8 September 1943 Marshal Pietro Badoglio announced on the radio the armistice with the Allies, signed five days earlier at Cassibile. The Germans were ready: that same evening Operation Achse began – the disarming of Italian forces in Italy, southern France and the Balkans. Most Italian divisions in Greece, Albania and Yugoslavia laid down their arms within a few days, often in return for a promise of repatriation that was subsequently broken.

Gandin first received an order from the commander of the Eleventh Army in Athens, General Carlo Vecchiarelli: not to attack the Germans unless they attacked, and to meet force with force. The document was vague, and Vecchiarelli himself soon capitulated to the Germans. During the night of 8–9 September, in accordance with the terms of the armistice, Gandin sent most of his vessels to Brindisi, thereby losing any means of evacuation. On 9 September he opened talks with Barge. The two officers, who had so far got on well, agreed to wait for instructions.

On 11 September Gandin received signals from the Comando Supremo in Brindisi, signed by the Chief of the General Staff, General Vittorio Ambrosio: German troops were to be regarded as hostile, and any attempt at disarmament was to be resisted by force of arms. That same day Barge delivered an ultimatum offering three choices: fight on alongside Germany, fight against it, or hand over their weapons peacefully. Gandin hesitated and continued to negotiate; as a gesture of goodwill he withdrew his troops from the Kardakata massif, which dominates the island’s capital, Argostoli – a move that later proved a serious mistake. By 12 September he was prepared to give up his weapons in exchange for repatriation.

The “referendum” and a week of fighting

The younger officers, especially the gunners and the reserve officers, did not want to surrender their arms. News from the mainland – that disarmed Italians were travelling north in goods wagons instead of going home – undermined the German promises, and the 18th Regiment on Corfu reported by radio that it had rejected an agreement with the Germans. On the morning of 13 September, as a German convoy carrying reinforcements approached Argostoli, Italian batteries opened fire on their own initiative and sank two landing craft; five Germans were killed.

During the night of 13–14 September Gandin did something unprecedented in an army: he had his units asked whether they preferred to join the Germans, to hand over their weapons and hope for repatriation, or to resist. This so-called consultation, later known as the “referendum”, produced a clear majority for resistance, although its exact results are unknown and historians disagree over how spontaneous it was. On 14 September Gandin replied to the Germans that the division would not assemble near the port of Sami to be disarmed and would surrender at most its heavy weapons; he demanded that the Germans leave the island.

The German ultimatum expired on 15 September. That day Junkers Ju 87 dive-bombers flying from airfields in the Peloponnese appeared over the Italian positions. On the ground the Italians at first had numerical superiority: they routed a German battalion near Argostoli and took several hundred prisoners (sources give 400–500). Gandin repeatedly asked Brindisi for help. He received no reply; a messenger sent in a Red Cross boat reached Brindisi too late. According to some accounts, the Italian air force units based in Apulia were ready to intervene but the Allies did not allow it, and two torpedo boats heading for the island were ordered back to port.

From 17 September the Germans ferried reinforcements to Kefalonia from Epirus: battalions of the 98th Mountain Infantry Regiment of the 1st Mountain Division and a battalion of the 104th Jäger Division – the battle group of Major Harald von Hirschfeld, to whom Lanz entrusted the whole operation, sidelining Barge. The men of the 98th Regiment already had crimes against civilians in Epirus behind them, among them at Kommeno in August 1943. On 18 September Wilhelm Keitel’s Wehrmacht High Command ordered that, “because of the base and treacherous behaviour” of the Italians on Kefalonia, no prisoners were to be taken. Earlier, Adolf Hitler had ordered that Italian officers who resisted be shot as traitors and their men deported east for forced labour.

The following days of fighting decided the outcome. The Germans controlled the air and had experienced troops and superior firepower; the Italian conscripts, supported by a few units of the Greek ELAS partisans and by the local population, fell back with heavy losses. On 18 September several hundred Italians were killed at the bridge at Kimonico, and on 21 September hundreds more died in Stuka attacks and in fighting in the interior of the island.

The massacre

From the morning of 21 September the mountain troops, many of them Austrians and Bavarians, carried out the order to the letter. Italians who surrendered were machine-gunned where they stood, or led in groups to quarries, ravines and walled gardens – as near the village of Frangata – and killed there. According to a German participant, the Austrian Alfred Richter, the bodies were piled up and the soldiers pulled the boots off the dead. Bavarians who protested were threatened with being shot. The division’s infantry commander, Brigadier General Luigi Gherzi, was killed immediately after being taken prisoner on 22 September, while fighting was still going on.

On 22 September Gandin, with no ammunition left and no means of further resistance, surrendered the remnants of the division. The capitulation did not stop the killing. On 24 September Gandin and his officers were taken to the area of Cape San Teodoro near Argostoli, to a spot later known as the Casetta Rossa (“little red house”), and after a summary sentence by a drumhead court martial they were shot in groups. The number of officers killed there is given variously, from about 130 to more than 190; over the whole week several hundred of the division’s officers lost their lives. The chaplain Romualdo Formato, one of the few survivors, described how the condemned men prayed, wept and called out the names of their wives and mothers, and how the Germans announced that they would help the wounded, only to finish off those who came forward. The executions were halted when 37 officers were still alive. A German officer also released those who could prove they came from South Tyrol.

The bodies were burned on pyres or taken out to sea and sunk with weights; the sailors forced to do this work were then killed. For days the inhabitants of Argostoli saw unburied corpses in the streets and in the harbour. Greeks hid escapees, and some of the survivors joined the partisans. The Germans began shipping the remaining prisoners – several thousand men – to the mainland. On 28 September the overcrowded steamer Ardena, carrying 840 prisoners, struck a mine off the island and sank; around 720 died. On 13 October the steamer Marguerite (Marguerita in some sources) went down after hitting a mine, and about 540 of its 900 prisoners died. The survivors faced prisoner-of-war camps and forced labour in the Reich and in the occupied East.

How many victims

The figures for Kefalonia have been disputed for decades. A communiqué of the Italian Council of Ministers of 13 September 1945 spoke of 9,000 men and 406 officers killed in action, shot or drowned. On that basis it was repeated for years that the Germans had shot around 5,000 prisoners, with roughly another 3,000 dying at sea – figures also used in popular war chronologies, which speak of more than 4,500 executed and 3,000 lost in transit. In 1993 the Italian historian Giorgio Rochat estimated total losses on Kefalonia at around 6,500 dead.

More recent research based on German documents has brought a substantial revision. The German historian Hermann Frank Meyer, comparing the division’s strength (about 10,700 men present on the island) with the number of prisoners shipped to the mainland or held on the island, calculated that the Germans killed slightly more than 2,500 Italians on Kefalonia in combat and in executions, and that including those drowned the total number of victims was about 4,000. Of these, depending on the calculation, between about 2,000 and about 2,500 were killed in the executions alone; at least 1,300 prisoners died at sea. Rochat later admitted publicly that his earlier figure had been too high. Gianni Oliva concluded that total losses most probably lie between 3,500 and 5,000. What is certain is that around 1,300 Italians were killed in the fighting, and that German losses were many times smaller. The dispute over numbers does not change the essence of the matter: thousands of disarmed prisoners were killed on the orders of the Wehrmacht’s highest authorities.

Corfu, Kos and the fate of the internees

Kefalonia was not an exception. On Corfu, where about 8,000 Italians were stationed, including the Acqui Division’s 18th Regiment, the Germans landed on 24 September; the garrison capitulated the next day, and on 26 September Lanz ordered the officers who had led the resistance to be shot. Older studies speak of the killing of all 280 officers on the island; more recent research points to a smaller number. In October a similar fate befell around a hundred officers captured after the fighting on Kos in the Dodecanese, where Italians had fought alongside the British in the ongoing Dodecanese campaign. The overwhelming majority of the Italian soldiers disarmed in September 1943 – more than 600,000 men – ended up in German captivity. The Germans did not recognise them as prisoners of war but classified them as “Italian military internees”, which deprived them of the protection of the Geneva Convention and of Red Cross care; tens of thousands of them died in camps and in forced labour.

The perpetrators on trial

Major Harald von Hirschfeld, who directed the operation on the island, did not live to see the end of the war: promoted to Generalmajor in January 1945 – the youngest general in the German Army – he was killed on the Eastern Front a few days later. General Hubert Lanz was the only man to answer in court for Kefalonia. At the so-called Hostages Trial – the seventh of the Nuremberg trials before American military tribunals, in which the principal defendant was Field Marshal Wilhelm List – Lanz claimed that he had refused to carry out Hitler’s order, that the report of 5,000 shot had been a ruse for his superiors, and that at most a dozen or so officers had died. The Italian side presented no evidence to the tribunal, and the defence argued that Gandin and his men had been mutineers rather than prisoners. In February 1948 Lanz was sentenced to 12 years’ imprisonment – for the killing of Gandin and his officers and for crimes against hostages in Greece – a much lighter sentence than those given to, among others, General Lothar Rendulic. He was released in 1951 and died in 1982.

Later investigations by the public prosecutor’s office in Dortmund, opened in the 1960s and again after 2001, did not lead to indictments, and proceedings taken over by the Munich prosecutor’s office in 2006 were dropped. Only in 2013 did an Italian military court in Rome sentence the 90-year-old Alfred Stork, a former corporal of the 1st Mountain Division, to life imprisonment in absentia for taking part in the shooting of the officers.

Memory

In Italy Kefalonia long remained in the shadows – both because of the embarrassment of an army whose high command had left the division to its fate, and because of disputes among the survivors about the roles of Gandin and the young officers. Some participants and researchers, among them Massimo Filippini and, in a more cautious form, Elena Aga Rossi, blamed the “mutineers” for the clash; others saw Gandin’s hesitation as the cause of the disaster. The traditional interpretation made the Acqui Division a symbol of soldiers who remained true to their oath to King Victor Emmanuel III and would not hand their weapons to their former ally. On 1 March 2001, on Kefalonia, President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi called their conscious choice the “first act of the Resistance” of an Italy free of Fascism. In 2007 Giorgio Napolitano marked the anniversary of the liberation there, and in 2018 Sergio Mattarella commemorated the 75th anniversary of the massacre together with the President of Greece. The island’s story reached a wide audience through Louis de Bernières’s novel Captain Corelli’s Mandolin (1994) and its 2001 film adaptation, Captain Corelli’s Mandolin.

Place in the war

The massacre on Kefalonia was the bloodiest episode in the disarming of the Italian army after the armistice and one of the largest massacres of prisoners of war in the conflict. It showed how the Third Reich intended to treat its former ally: as a traitor to whom the laws of war did not apply. The same logic led the Germans to kill the officers on Corfu a week later and to turn hundreds of thousands of Italian soldiers into a slave labour force. For Greece it was another link in the chain of German crimes of 1943 – from Kommeno in Epirus to Viannos on Crete – committed by the same mountain units.

Events on the island also had a political dimension. Badoglio’s government, which had only just fled Rome and had been able to give its soldiers neither clear orders nor help, was soon seeking Allied recognition as a state fighting Germany. Mussolini, freed by the Germans and soon to head the Italian Social Republic, regarded the Acqui officers as traitors, although according to an account from 1944 he was shaken by the scale of the German reprisals. The memory of Kefalonia survived the war as one of the founding myths of the post-war republic – and as an example of how long the perpetrators of war crimes could count on impunity.