Eighty years after occupying German troops hanged six Italian civilians in southern Italy in reprisal for the killing of a soldier who had been foraging for food, relatives of some of the victims are to receive a share of 12 million euros awarded by an Italian court as compensation for their families’ trauma.
Reuters reports that all but one of the family members alive at the time of the killings in the town of Fornelli are now dead, but under Italian law, damages owed to them can still be passed on to their heirs.
Fornelli mayor Giovanni Tedeschi is quoted as saying: ‘This wasn’t about the money. It was about seeking justice for a war crime, a question of pride.’
According to Reuters, in 1962, Germany signed a deal with Italy in terms of which it paid Rome 40 million Deutsche mark, worth just over 1 billion euros in today’s money, which the two nations agreed covered damages inflicted by Nazi forces on the Italian state and its citizens.
However, in 1994, a cupboard in the offices of Rome’s military prosecutors was found to be packed with files documenting hundreds of war crimes that had never been prosecuted.
Germany refused to pay, arguing that the 1962 accord disallowed further claims. In 2012, the International Court of Justice backed Berlin, but Italian courts continued to hear compensation cases, saying no limit could be imposed on war crimes.
With ever more cases being brought to the courts, then prime minister Mario Draghi created a fund in 2022 to cover the growing compensation claims.
Reuters reports that a study funded by the German government and published in 2016 estimated that 22 000 Italians were victims of Nazi war crimes, including up to 8 000 Jews deported to death camps. Thousands more Italians were forced to work as enslaved labourers in Germany, making them eligible for reparations.
Fascist Italy was an ally of Nazi Germany until 1943, when it signed an armistice with the Allies. German forces then in Italy became an occupying force, resisting the Allied advance that followed landings in Sicily and southern Italy.
[Image: Bundesarchiv, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5360872]