Josef Scheungraber was commander of the 1st Company of 818 Battalion of Gebirgsjäger, a department of the Deutsche Wehrmacht highly specialized in the works of repair and demolition of bridges and the laying of mines to create minefields. In 1944, the department is certified in the area of Cortona-Umbertide where, during the retreat, was undertaken to protect the advance of Allied troops in Germany.
In June of that year, two German soldiers, veterans of the looting in a farm at Falzano, were killed by partisans. In revenge, the Lieutenant Scheungraber raked fifteen civilians, young and old, men and women: four were killed in the adjacent countryside, eleven were pushed into a house that was blown up with dynamite. Only one survived: Gino Massetti. Not only. The entire Falzano was destroyed and burned. After the war and the period of imprisonment, Scheungraber returned home and expanded his woodworking in Ottobrunn. On 15 September 2008 in Munchen of Bavaria began the process for murder ("Mord") to Josef Scheungraber. Defended by a "triumvirate" of right-wing lawyers, the defendant rejects every accusation against him. Although it was already sentenced to life imprisonment in absentia in 2006 by the Military Tribunal of La Spezia, he continued to do business as usual in its Ottobrunn, conspiratorial protected by the embrace of his countrymen. On 11 August 2009 the Court of Munchen Scheungraber sentence to life imprisonment. This is the first case in Germany of an exemplary sentence belonging to the German armed forces for a massacre of innocent civilians in Italy. The news goes around the world.
Taking a journey back, the process of Munchen of Bavaria to the events of June 1944 during the German occupation, under a system of past and present, the book opens a series of windows on contemporary life, and social policy in Germany and Italy: The lesser-known aspects of reality away from the stereotype of German power - represented by new generations who are serving the mistakes of yesterday and all this new humanity is watching carefully German fervor against any reassertion of Nazi regurgitation - the "modern" attempts at revisionism, to those who feel uncomfortable and damaging to revive the memory.
All with openings of less known places and characters, that the author's talk, move, enhance, irritate. The reader is led on a journey between the two countries through a reading agile, well away from the academic "paper" town, which alternates between the shape of the chronicle and that of the narrative, but always taking high attention to the truth of History and make sure they are strictly documentary sources.
It was not easy for me to finish this book .... every page a stab, a painful memory, a tearing image.
Is the story of the 47 years I was always hearing my grandmother crying her husband, my grandfather, killed by the Germans in '44. Is the memory of the process, distressing, which ended with a life sentence for the insignificant little man who ordered the massacre and that after 60 years boasted around Ottobrunn how he made out that bunch of idiots Italians. Is the memory of my grandmother and my mother who kept until the last moment the shirt with the holes of gunfire and bloodstains that my grandfather was wearing when he was killed.
Is the story of the massacre of Falzano di Cortona, one of many massacres that were consumed at that time between Tuscany and Emilia, the only, for now, of which the author' was tried and sentenced to life imprisonment by a military German court in Germany.
When the judgment was given, my grandmother had been dead for two years. Me and my family were in the courtroom of the court in Munich of Bavaria.
At that moment the world became a little more clean.
I thank Alessandro Eugeni, the author, having written this book, on behalf of the relatives of the victims.
Nessun commento:
Posta un commento