Massacre of Kos
The Massacre of Kos (Italian: Eccidio di Kos) was a war crime perpetrated in early October 1943 by the Wehrmacht against Italian army POWs on the Dodecanese island of Kos, then under Italian occupation. About a hundred Italian officers were shot on the commands of General Friedrich-Wilhelm Müller, after being considered traitors for resisting the German invasion of the island (known as the Battle of Kos, part of the Dodecanese campaign).[1][2]
Background
Kos was occupied by Italy since the
In the dawn of 3 October, the German
The massacre
Between 4 and 6 October, 148 captured Italian officers (who belonged to the 10th Regiment,
Aftermath
In February 1945, 66 bodies were exhumed from eight mass graves near Linopotis and buried in the Catholic cemetery of Kos. In 1954, these bodies were transported to Italy and buried in a WW II memorial in Bari. Despite the fact that many bodies were still missing in Kos, no research campaign to locate them was undertaken until 2015. Then, a group of Greek and Italian volunteers carried out excavations which unearthed human remains and personal objects. The recovered remains were placed in a marble urn at the ossuary of the Catholic cemetery of Kos.[3]
After the end of the war General Müller was captured in East Prussia by the Red Army and extradited to Greece, where he was sentenced to death by a military court for retaliatory atrocities against civilians in Crete (but not for the events on Kos). He was executed by firing squad in Athens on 20 May 1947 and was the only person among those responsible for the massacre who was ever punished.[4]
The armoire of shame
In 1994, during the trial of former SS Erich Priebke, documents related to the Kos massacre were uncovered among many other files in an archive found in a wooden cabinet facing a wall (the armoire of shame) in the chancellery of the military attorney's office in Rome.[5] In 2003, inquiries by a parliamentary commission revealed that in January 1960, the Italian military attorney general Gen. Enrico Santacroce had signed a filing order for almost 2,000 Nazi war crime files.[5][6] In the context of the Cold War era, the military attorney general was under strong political pressure to cover up the material by ministers G. Martino and P. Taviani who feared that Germany, Italy's NATO ally, would be disturbed.[5]
See also
References
- ^ ISBN 978-88-495-2082-8.
- ^ ISBN 978-88-548-4047-8.
- ^ "Comitato Caduti di Kos - Operazione Lisia 1 - 8 luglio 2015". YouTube. 24 July 2015. Retrieved 16 May 2020.
- ^ "History of the United Nations War Crimes Commission and the Development of the Laws of War. United Nations War Crimes Commission. London: HMSO, 1948". Archived from the original on 2012-04-01. Retrieved 16 May 2020.
- ^ ISBN 978-88-520-1191-7.
- ISBN 978-900-436-3762.
External links
- L'eccidio di Kos, ottobre 1943. Un buon libro su una tragedia dimenticata e qualche appunto su una vicenda minore, Giorgio Rochat, Istituto piemontese per la storia della Resistenza e della società contemporanea; archived here.
- L’eccidio di Kos, la piccola Cefalonia "dimenticata": così 103 ufficiali italiani vennero trucidati dai tedeschi, Silvia Morosi and Paolo Rastelli, Corriere della Sera, 8 December 2017; archived here.