Talk:1st Mountain Division (Wehrmacht)

On the Italians massacre

"The Greek island of Cephalonia is only 200 miles from the Italian coast at the mouth of the Golf of Corinth. On 8 September the Italian Acqui Division who were the garrison on the island greatly outnumbered the Germans, but the island was so close to the mainland of Greece that the Germans were in a position to send massive reinforcements quickly while the nearby airdromes on the mainland gave Germany air superiority. On Cephalonia the Germans committed a crime against humanity by massacring all the large Italian garrison when they surrendered after hard fighting. Only the military chaplains were spared, and if it were not for them it would be impossible to piece together the horrific story. On 9 September, the first day after the Armistice, the German and Italian units remained in their positions amid a cold silence, although some German soldiers had joined in when the Italian soldiers rejoiced at the news of the armistice which they thought was the end of the war for them. At eight in the evening General Gandin commanding the Acqui Division received the order from his Italian superior General Vecchiarelli in Athens that his troops were to ‘cede’ all their weapons including artillery to the Germans, and would in due course be sent back to Italy by sea.

Gandin was amazed by this order because it contradicted the order sent by the Italian War Office from Rome during the preceding night to treat the Germans as ‘enemies’. He cabled to Athens that he rejected it because it contradicted the spirit and facts of the Anglo-American armistice (also it was partly indecipherable). In vain Gandin tried to contact the Italian War Office (which was en route to Brindisi from Rome) and Italian headquarters on the other Greek islands. A number of his more senior officers felt that it was ‘dishonourable’ to fight against the Germans, until the day before their allies. However, Captain Renzo Apollonio (who was strongly anti-Fascist and anti-German) and others warned Gandin that if the order was given to lay down arms, the bulk of the troops would refuse to obey. Apollonio was in touch with a band of Greek guerrillas and Greek officers, who offered the collaboration of a Greek battalion.

On the morning of 11 September the Germans put Gandin on the horns of a dilemma with an ultimatum: by seven in the evening he must make up his mind. He held a conference of senior officers, and consulted the chaplains. Both advised surrender. Gandin agreed with them, personally; but meanwhile he had at last succeeded in setting up radio communications with the Italian War Office in its new headquarters in Brindisi; and there had been skirmishes, initiated by the Germans, in which the Italians had suffered casualties. Gandin complained bitterly to the German officer who was negotiating the surrender, Colonel Barge, and as a delaying tactic asked for the negotiations to be carried out in future by a German of at least the rank of General. Then came news that Colonel Lusignani, in command on the neighbouring island of Corfu, had overcome German attacks and had the island under his complete control. Lusignani also reported that, on other islands, the Germans were disregarding their promise to repatriate Italian soldiers, sending them instead to internment camps in Germany. Stragglers who arrived in Cephalonia from the nearby island of Santa Maura confirmed this news. On the morning of 13 September two motorized lighters full of armed German troops tried to enter the port of Argostoli. On the orders of Captain Apollonio, without consultation with Gandin, the Italian artillery opened fire and sunk one lighter; the other put up the white flag. The artillery, inspired by Apollonio, also opened fire on German positions on the island. Gandin ordered this artillery fire to cease while he reopened negotiations with the Germans. Then a German parliamentario (a bearer of a flag of truce) arrived by sea with a senior Italian air force officer who had gone over to the Fascists; they asked Gandin to leave his division on the island until it could be sent back to Italy, while Gandin himself was asked to take over the job of Chief of Staff with the new Republican Army. Gandin sent messages to all his units that negotiations were in progress with the Germans and that a settlement was likely in which the whole division could retain its weapons.

The next morning, 14 September, General Lanz commanding the German XXII Mountain Corps arrived by boat; he sent an angry telephone message to Gandin that firing at the German lighters was ‘an act of hostility’, and by the hand of Colonel Barge a signed order that the Acqui were to lay down their arms immediately. By now, after tortuous changes of mind, Gandin had decided to throw in his lot with Badoglio and the king. His staff told him that soundings taken among the troops revealed them to be almost a hundred per cent in favour of fighting the Germans. And, finally, a written order had arrived by sea from the War Office in Brindisi that the Acqui were to fight the Germans. According to the Italian official history, ‘By now an irresistible hatred of the Germans was growing ever stronger among the soldiers and their impatience had reached a point where it could not be curbed.’ Three Italian officers who tried to organise a surrender were shot by their troops. During the morning of 14 September Gandin ordered his division to occupy positions from which they could launch an attack on the Germans, and told the Germans that hostilities would begin ‘at 9 a.m. on the 15th’ unless he received ‘a favourable offer’. At that moment came the ominous news from the island of Zante that General Paderni had laid down his arms and his 400 soldiers had been sent as ‘internees’ to Germany.

During the morning of the 15th German Stukas from the mainland made frequent bombing raids; they also machine-gunned the Italian positions and dropped leaflets threatening that any Italians taken prisoner while fighting would never see Italy again.

In their initial attack the Acqui captured 400 prisoners and the guns of a self-propelled battery, but the Stukas were causing serious casualties. German sea-borne reinforcements landed in the dark, and bitter fighting continued until the 19th, with the Germans gradually becoming superior in numbers and the Stukas devastating the Italian positions. Gandin asked Brindisi to send air and sea help to prevent the German landings, which were now taking place in daylight. The Italian War Office replied that this was ‘impossible’.

Here lies a mystery. On 9 September, over 300 Italian war planes with pilots loyal to the Badoglio regime had landed on the aerodromes of Lecce and Brindisi being the 8th Army lines. The pilots wanted to go into action immediately against the Germans. One Italian air force officer said afterwards to the author: ‘We asked for petrol and ammunition. Instead, we were told to fly our aircraft to Tunis, out of range of the hard-pressed Italian troops on Cephalonia.’ Meanwhile, Gandin had sent a motor-boat belonging to the Red Cross to Brindisi with details of the situation, requesting immediate help by sea and air, and more ammunition: after three days of fighting his dumps were nearly exhausted, whereas plenty of German supplies were coming in by sea.

No Italian ships intervened. Under the terms of the armistice they had mostly gone to Malta, far from the war zone. If some Italian destroyers had instead been sent to Augusta in Sicily, they could have intervened in Cephalonia. Allied warships were also available, but none were sent. However, on 19, 20 and 21 September the Allies allowed Italian fighter planes to make sorties to Cephalonia from Lecce. There were too few of them to have a real effect on the battle, but they shot down one Messerschmidt and machine-gunned German positions.

One Italian air force officer told the author at the time that the Allied Command was too frightened that the pilots would transfer their allegiance to the Germans to allow strong Italian air intervention over Cephalonia, and the Italian War Office suggestion of an Italian naval force under Admiral Bonetti was turned down for the same reason. Only on the 24th, a few hours after both islands had surrendered, did the Allies consent to seven Italian destroyers going to Cephalonia and Corfu. On 20 September, reinforced German troops made a decisive attack supported by relays of Stuka bombers. Gandin’s troops fought until their ammunition was nearly exhausted, and at 11 a.m. on 22 September they put up the white flag. Just as they surrendered a signal came from the Italian War Office that all available Italian war planes would attack the Germans on Cephalonia while squadrons of US fighters and bombers would attack the aerodromes on the mainland from which the Stukas were flying. Ambrosio concluded his signal with praise for the valour of the Acqui. Had the Allies authorised such an operation a week earlier, the outcome might have been different.

The XXII Mountain Corps had received a special Führer order to massacre all the Italian soldiers who had fought on Cephalonia. As the German soldiers entered the positions of the surrendering Italians, they mowed them down with machine guns. General Lanz gave orders that all officers belonging to the Acqui except Fascists, those of German birth, doctors and chaplains, were to be killed. The Acqui troops not shot in cold blood in their positions were marched down to San Teodoro. There they were incarcerated in the ‘Cassetta Rosa’ town hall, next to a convent. The first to be shot was Gandin, followed by all his staff officers.

The German orders specified that the Acqui troops were to be shot just outside the town by detachments of eight German soldiers, each under an officer. Staff officers were to be killed singly; others in groups of two or three. Inside the town hall the chaplains administered the last rites, and one, Father Romualdo Formato, has written movingly of three officers who linked arms as they walked out to be executed, saying ‘We have been companions in life. Let us go together to paradise.’ According to the official Italian history, the soil of the island became a carpet of corpses. The Germans specified that the bodies must lie where they would not be seen by other German soldiers or civilians, and were not to be buried. Instead they were to be ‘ballasted’, put on rafts and sunk in the sea. The Germans compelled twenty Italian sailors to do this, and when they had finished they too were shot, to make sure they could not give evidence of this crime to the civilised world. An official report from Lanz to Army Group E stated that 5,000 of the Acqui Division who surrendered had been treated in accordance with the Führer’s orders – that is, shot dead. Father Romualdo Formato’s published account details how 4,750 officers and men were shot dead, either at their posts under the white flag on the field of battle, or in San Teodoro. Out of 12,000 Italian troops on Cephalonia on 8 September, 1,250 fell in combat and almost 5,000 were put to death by the Germans after the surrender; these included sailors and nearly 100 medical orderlies with Red Cross armlets. About 4,000 who had surrendered their arms without fighting were imprisoned in a barracks on the island; they received only starvation rations and were subjected to severe hardships. In October they were embarked on three ships destined for Greece, all three of which hit mines and sank as soon as they left port. The Italian prisoners shut up in the holds had no chance; the few who jumped into the sea were machine-gunned by the Germans to prevent them from escaping. The sea became a mass of corpses. About a thousand Italian soldiers who had managed to escape from the Germans after the surrender joined up under Captain Apollonio with the Greek guerrillas, and when the British captured the island in November 1944, 1,200 Italian soldiers (some of whom had escaped from other islands), who had fought with the Greek partisans against the Germans, were repatriated with Captain Apollonio to Bari on British and Italian ships. In Bari, they all volunteered to fight with the Italian Army of Liberation under the Royal flag. A 22-page account of the appalling events on Cephalonia was sent to Mussolini at Salò (the document is marked ‘Seen by the Duce’). It was written by a Foreign Office official who stayed on the island during the fighting; he described the atrocities in lurid detail. To Mussolini’s eternal shame, he made no protests to the Germans after reading the document on 14 January 1944. Segenti was repatriated by the Germans via Berlin to Rome. His report made it clear that the Germans had no intention of treating the units who had fought against them as prisoners of war, and that after 'forced marches’, whole units were machine-gunned, together with all the Divisional staff’. According to him, only forty officers out of the 500 of the Acqui Division escaped execution, although a few more might have joined the guerrillas or disguised themselves as ordinary soldiers in the internment camps"

Source of quote:

Richard Lamb, War in Italy 1943-1945. A Brutal Story, 1994 Da Capo Press New York, pages 129-133.--Molobo 13:57, 4 August 2005 (UTC)

Edelweiss

What is Division Edelweiss? mikka (t) 00:49, 14 December 2005 (UTC)

Yes, I checked out at Feldgrau.com --Brand спойт 19:33, 7 May 2006 (UTC)

Photo

Instead of restoring the statement "This [the rounding up and execution of Jewish civilians in the city of Przemyśl ] has been also documented in the photo album of the division.", it would be more interesting, Molobo, if you could actually verify it leaving no doubts. I've had a look at the source but all that may be relevant seems to me to be this photo. Is the statement really only based on that picture? Sciurinæ 17:40, 14 March 2006 (UTC)

http://www1.yadvashem.org/about_holocaust/studies/ordinary/temp_levein_uziel_full.html Another example of correspondence between the visual image and the antisemitic worldview surfaces in an album portraying the life of Mountain Division 1 of the Wehrmacht, which saw action in Poland in September 1939. Among landscapes of the Tatra mountains, depictions of combat at the front, and shots of Russian localities and Polish prisoners, we find several photos of Jews. The subjects are evidently Jews whom the soldiers had rounded up to clear debris and rebuild a demolished bridge. The owner of the album added several remarks under the photos: "Jewish rabble" ("Jueden Gesindel") and "The Chosen People: they learn this, too" ("Die Auserwaehlten: Auch Sie Lernen's") (Photos 7 and 8).24 All the sarcastic captions that the photographer used to comment on the photos in his album reflect the language and spirit of the crude antisemitic propaganda and express his prejudices against the Jews whom he had encountered. This album also leaves no doubt about the origin of the soldier's inspiration. Interestingly, his division was considered a select Wehrmacht unit, whose members did not play a major role in actions against Jews. Nevertheless, when they were given the duty of rounding up Jews, at least one of them, the photographer, went out of his way to film the event and interpret it in the spirit of official Nazi antisemitic publications. As we browse through the album, we see clearly that the photographer internalized the typical Jewish image spread by Nazi propaganda and that his actions and photography were indeed prompted by Nazi ideology. --Molobo 18:17, 14 March 2006 (UTC)

I failed to see how the anti-semitic remarks underneath the images verify that the division murdered these people. perhaps you can tell me how the use of sarcasm is enough to condemn someone as a murderer. If that is true, I will never be sarcastic again, because well, only murderers do so according to Pan Molobo and this Wikipedia article.

Simply because the photographer was racist does not mean that the people were murdered. Pan Molobo, Can you please more clearly explain how a remark leads one to conclude that the author is a mass murderer?

--Jadger 16:51, 10 May 2006 (UTC)

www.deathcamps.org/occupation/przemysl%20ghetto.html Units involved in these killings (the so-called Aktion Tannenberg) were Einsatzkommando I/1 and I/3. Units of the 1st Mountain Division and groups of the HJ (Hitlerjugend) also took an active part in round-ups for forced labour and executions. --Molobo 23:03, 10 May 2006 (UTC)

and so why is that not stated in the article? that is a lot more clear then what is currently in the article. The article says it is documented in the photo album of the division, but there is only one picture that shows them guarding Jews, not anything more. How exactly is it extrapolated that the 1st Mountain Division thus committed the murders? don't get me wrong, I am not hear to protect Nazis and mass murderers, but blame should be placed on those responsible, not those simply associated with those responsible.

and that link you gave can hardly claim to be authorative on the subject, let alone unbiased or factually sound, especially given the quote from Bruno Shatyn. stating that the German soldiers were all "smiling examples of Hitler's New World Order"

--Jadger 03:03, 11 May 2006 (UTC)

Numbers...

Hello, I edited because the numbers differ between various sources. Kenaz9 20:04, 11 May 2006 (UTC)

should be renamed

I think it would be better to rename the article to 1st Mountain Division (Wehrmacht), because there was also the 1st Mountain Division (Bundeswehr) after WW II; compare: de:1. Gebirgsdivision. --Gamsbart (talk) 08:48, 10 February 2009 (UTC)

Copyedits

I've deleted "was transferred East" in the 'Poland and France' section before there are any arguments about it being 'East', 'south south east', 'south east' or any other points of the compass for that matter. The phrase did nothing for the article, so the easiest thing to do was to get rid of it.

I have also removed the bolding on units in the 'Order of Battle' section. The MoS says that only the subject of the article should be in bold. The units in the 'OOB' section were only part of the division.
I've also shortened the sub-section titles in the 'OOB'.

RASAM (talk) 16:39, 5 November 2011 (UTC)