Posted on 03/24/2024 3:41:22 PM PDT by CheshireTheCat
On this date in 1944, Nazi troops occupying Italy avenged a partisan attack by executing 335 Italian hostages in the Ardeatine caves outside Rome.
It was six months since Germany had invaded her onetime ally, eliminating those fascists who had deposed Mussolini. Now an occupied country — an increasingly tenuous occupation as the Allied war effort bore down on Germany — Italy’s partisans multiplied.
On March 23, some of them bombed a German army column, killing 33.
The Germans ordered an immediate reprisal, although there were administrative debates over how many hostages to shoot for each casualty. Hitler initially ordered a staggering 100:1 ratio, the sort of boundary-pushing command that makes 10:1 look like the choic....e of moderate, reasonable mass-murderers......
(Excerpt) Read more at executedtoday.com ...
Damned cowards. Murdering innocent people to get revenge because your own soldiers were ambushed by other soldiers defending their nation?
Of course. He was literally Hitler.
I believe partisans were not considered soldiers under the Geneva Convention rules; they were guerilla fighters and did not wear uniforms, therefore considered non-soldiers. It doesn’t excuse at all how the German Army behaved in dealing with partisans (in Yugoslavia and Greece in particular), but they tied up large numbers of German Army units intended for fighting the Allied armies, and hence the intense retribution related to partisan activity.
The Germans were not acting under Geneva Convention rules. And even if they were upset with the partisans, nothing anywhere legalizes murdering a group of random people from town to get revenge on partisans you could not capture.
The Germans were murderers, outside the law, and were cowards.
On August 12, 1944 SS troops massacred some 560 people in the little Tuscan village of Sant'Anna di Stazzema. Bastards.
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