7 September 1944

October 2004

On Sunday, 12 September 2004, Moggiona held an official commemoration of the massacre that occurred in the village on 7 September 1944. The following article, describing the events that took place, has been included by kind permission of Pro Loco Moggiona. You can find the original article (in Italian) and some photos on the Pro Loco Moggiona website (www.moggiona.it). Translated by Marian Blaikley.

On the evening of 7 September 1944, some German soldiers killed 18 innocent civilians - men and woman, children and adults - in Moggiona. They had no motive at all to commit this brutal crime: such as a reprisal to avenge fellow Germans who had been murdered, or as a move against a partisan band - in fact there were none operating in the village. In the words of one survivor of the massacre: "I don't know why they did all this, we had done nothing wrong."

Like the other massacres perpetrated by the Germans during the Second World War, the file regarding the events in Moggiona (Number 2081) was hidden for a long time in the Bureau of Shame. The culprits were never found.

On 7 September 1944 the following people perished in Moggiona:

• ALBERTI GIOVANNI, 69
  
• ALINARI PIETRO, 59
  
• BENEDETTI ISOLA nei MECIANI, 64
  
• CECCHERINI OSVALDO, 9
  
• CECCHERINI CLARA, 14
  
• FABBRI MARIA, 64
  
• FURIERI AZELIA nei MECIANI, 36
  
• PAIS LUIGIA, 10
  
• ROSELLI IOLE nei PAIS, 37
  
• MECIANI ALFONSO, 60
  
• MECIANI CANDIDO, 69
  
• MECIANI CONSIGLIA, 20
  
• MECIANI FRANCESCO, 69
  
• MECIANI GIOVANBATTISTA, 36
  
• MECIANI GIOVANNI, 40
  
• MECIANI ISOLINA, 6 months
  
• MECIANI LAURA, 4
  
• MECIANI VITTORIO, 14

The following also lost their lives in September 1944 as a result of the warfront passing through:

• ACUTI ALESSANDRA, 16
  
• BALLERINI ATTILIO, 54
  
• MENCHINI ROMEO, 29
  
• NANNI GIUSEPPE, 60

On the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the massacre, the Pro Loco Moggiona website wished to commemorate these tragic events with this page.

The events: As a result of the advance of the warfront, on August 26 a company of German soldiers, commanded by a lieutenant and a sergeant, arrived in Moggiona, from the direction of Serravalle, in order to disperse the inhabitants of the village. After being rounded up in the village church, several people set out on foot towards Badia Prataglia, from whence they were going to be sent to Santa Sofia in Romagna. However, many of them managed to flee into the woods surrounding Moggiona. Others reached Poppi and the plain. Others still were recaptured by the Germans and sent to Romagna. In one incident, the Germans gathered together a group of people at a roadside near Moggiona: the Lieutenant and the Sergeant selected a few young women and forced their families to go away, threatening them by firing in the air.

Meanwhile, several people had agreed to remain in the village, in order to carry out various duties. The girls were sent to the house of one of the families who remained, situated in the 'Villa' district. Some of them were raped by the Lieutenant and the German Sergeant. On the evening of September 7 1944, the Lieutenant and the Sergeant entered this house and sent the girls, together with some soldiers, off towards Poppi. They then sat themselves down to eat and, when they had finished the meal, opened fire and killed the five occupants of the house. Francesco, Alfonso and Vittorio Meciani, Isola Benedetti and Pietro Alinari all died in this house. Those who also witnessed the shots were an old man of the village (the brother of Isola Benedetti, who up to a few minutes before had been in that house; afterwards he helped the survivors of the massacre); and two young brothers who sheltered in a drain, terrified.

The two young men then saw the Germans start towards their own house, situated a hundred metres or so away from the first one. There the Germans rounded up the people into the cellar and, without offering a word, shot them in the room. Altogether eleven people died, including one of the brothers who entered the house at the moment of the shooting. The other survived and first of all delivered assistance to his mother, who was not badly wounded, to another brother still in infancy (who, though unharmed, died a few months after this tragedy) and to another baby girl. One young woman succeeded in running away at the moment of the massacre and arrived in Poppi in a piteous condition, thus being the first to carry the news of the massacre over the enemy lines. The dead in this case were: Consiglia, Candido, Giovanni Battista, Giovanni, Laura and Isolina Meciani, Maria Fabbri, Azelia Furieri, Giovanni Alberti and Clara and Osvaldo Ceccherini.

Finally the Lieutenant and the Sergeant caught up with the young women whom they had sent towards Poppi and told them they could return to the village. Despite reassuring them by saying "there is no reason to be scared", the Sergeant opened fire and killed two people, Iole Roselli and her daughter Luigina. Another two young women luckily managed to escape into the darkness.

The following morning, September 8, the surviving brother got help from two old men in the village and succeeded in putting his mother and the other surviving children out of danger at another house in the village. Some German soldiers singled them out for execution but, perhaps moved by compassion, spared them. Compelled by the intolerable situation resulting from the lack of food, the fear and the worsening of his mother's wound, the young man who had survived went to the Monastery at Camaldoli to ask for help from the monks, on 11 September. The survivors were carried to Camaldoli, while one of the old men went to Poppi to warn the mayor.

Let us also remember four other people who died during the war in the following circumstances: Attilo Ballerini and Romeo Menchini, having come out of their hiding place in the woods to check the situation in the village, probably after the massacre, were captured and killed; their bodies were found some months later, buried in the wood near the Hermitage at Camaldoli. Giuseppe Nanni, who was found buried in the courtyard of his house some months after these events, having been declared missing. He was probably killed during the days of the massacre. Alessandra Acuti, who died on September 19 at Camaldoli, where her mother had taken her to escape the abuse of the German soldiers. She was the victim of a bombardment at the Monastery.

On the 26 September, once the front had moved on, the English arrived and, at the same time, the first villagers returned. They noticed how the houses where the massacres had taken place had been blown into thin air, while at the same time, the body of Iole Roselli and of her daughter were found cast into a pit. Very probably the Germans had wished to conceal the evidence of their crimes in this way. On September 30 the bodies of the victims, already in an advanced stage of decomposition, were submitted for an autopsy undertaken by the local authority doctor in Ponte a Poppi. Subsequently, their remains were gathered together in seven coffins and buried in the village cemetery, in the presence of the parish priest. The witness to the recovery and to the burial of the bodies was Sergeant Edmondson from the Special Investigation Section, who was in charge of conducting the inquiry into the massacre. After having reconstructed the events thanks to the depositions of the survivors and other village residents, he put together a description of the two men responsible for the massacre, the Lieutenant and the Sergeant. The account reads thus:

"The Lieutenant and the Sergeant, who often seemed to be drunk and sexually obsessed, were the only ones responsible and carried out these brutal crimes purely for entertainment." A liaison official from the Italian army, questioned by Sergeant Edmondson at Camaldoli, recognised the description of the Lieutenant as that of a Nazi official whom he had met while he was hiding in the mountains near Civita D'Antino in the Liri valley: Lieutenant Nothaft of the Fifth German Alpine Division. From the description, it seems that this German officer bore a strong resemblance to the officer responsible for the atrocity at Moggiona, in particular in his unrestrained lust for drink and women, his dress and the fact that he spoke Italian very well.

Like many other investigations in the Bureau of Shame, the file on the case remained archived until 1960. Reopened by the military attorney's office in La Spezia, it was archived again in 1996, with the following justification: "Having considered those things which were passed on to this office the deeds relating to the crimes of war indicated above more than fifty years since the actions were committed; that such a circumstance prevents us from realistically carrying out with benefit any investigation, taking into consideration also the lack of parts at our disposal and the impossibility of listening to the people informed with their facts and disentangle the basic checks."

The facts described in these pages are mainly reconstructed from the documents on the Massacre in Moggiona kept in the Public Record Office in London.

The images shown on the Pro Loco Moggiona website and stamped with the initials IWM are shots taken of the scene in Moggiona on September 27 by Sergeant Richiardi from the Cinematography and Photography Unit of the English Army. The film is kept in the Imperial War Museum in London.

For this reason the copyright of the black and white images belongs to the above-mentioned institution and cannot be used without their consent.

We have also consulted:

• Camaldoli nel Casentino in fiamme (Camaldoli in the Casentino in Flames) by Don Antonio Buffadini, 1946, G. Barbèra-Firenze
  
• Guerra e Pace (War and Peace) by Don Cristoforo Mattesini, 1977, Palmini-Arezzo
  
• Eccidi Nazifascisti nel Comune de Poppi dal sito internet Progetto Memoria della regione Toscana. (Nazi massacres in the Comune of Poppi, from the Tuscan internet site Memory Project)
  
• Tu Bum Bum, Franca Loretta Norcini, 1982, Calosci-Cortona
  
• Storie di Guerra (Histories of the War) by Fiorenza Alberti Salvi, 2002, A.L.I. Penna d'Autore - Torino.
  
• Storia di Moggiona (A History of Moggiona) by Danilo Tassini - pending publication
  
• I Meciani - Genealogia e Note sulla Casata (The Meciani - a genealogy and notes on the family lineage) by Pietro Meciani, Milano, 1981

One last note on the date of the massacre: the date of September 11 was indicated by many witnesses. The English report on the other hand agrees with the book by Buffadini in indicating September 7 as the most probable date of the massacre, with September 11 being the day when the survivors were collected by the monks and carried to the Monastery at Camaldoli. The ambiguity is also present in the Moggiona cemetery, where the gravestone on the tomb of the deceased from the first house records the date of September 7, while on the other is written September 11. Given that the English report and Buffadini's book were written after the events, we retain the date of September 7 as being the correct one.