In Europe

comrades.
    On 8 September, 1943, all that changed at a blow. A newly appointed Italian cabinet decided to end the fighting and sign a truce with the Allies. The Germans swiftly sent reinforcements to replace the Italians on the island. The commander of the Italian garrison, General Gandin, did not know what to do: should he lay down his weapons and surrender to the Germans, or take up arms and fight, this time on the Allied side?
    Astonishingly enough, it was his soldiers who finally broke the deadlock: they held a vote, and decided to fight with the Allies against the Germans. So when two German landing craft with reinforcements approached the harbour, Captain Renzo Apollonio ordered the artillery to open fire. One of the ships sank.
    More than enough opportunities presented themselves to come to the assistance of the troops on Kefallonia. The Allied navy was active everywhere in the region, and at least 300 Italian planes were standing ready at Brindisi. But nothing happened. One of the pilots later told the military historian Richard Lamb how they had urgently requested fuel and munitions, to go into action over Greece. ‘Instead we were told to fly our aircraft to Tunis, out of range of the hard-pressed troops on Kefallonia.’
    The Acqui Division fought till their ammunition was exhausted. On 22 September, at 11 a.m., they raised the white flag.
    Then the
Wehrmacht
's 22nd Mountain Corps, led by General Lanz, began slaughtering the Italians. Hundreds of soldiers were machine-gunned immediately upon surrender. Those who were not were locked up in Cassetta Rosa, the little town hall at San Teodoro. The first of them to beexecuted was General Gandin. Then it was his officers’ turn; in the end almost 5,000 Italian soldiers were killed.
    In Cassetta Rosa they were administered last rites before being led outside in little groups. ‘They knelt, wept, prayed, sang,’ wrote chaplain Romualdo Formato, one of the few survivors. ‘Many of the men called out the names of their mothers, wives, children.'Three officers embraced: ‘In life we were comrades, and that is how we shall enter paradise.’ Some of them clawed at the grass, as though trying to dig their way out. Meanwhile, the shooting continued.
    Cassetta Rosa is still there. The house was abandoned years ago, and nature is busy devouring what is left. There are trees and bushes growing through the windows and the roof, the walls have sunken halfway into the ground; in another twenty or thirty years it will all be gone. Amid the tall grass is a plain little altar, put there only last year, bearing a statue of the Holy Virgin and a handful of artificial flowers. You can still see the bullet holes in the walls.
    The bodies of the soldiers who were executed were burned, or loaded onto barges and sunk far out to sea; the
Wehrmacht
knew all too well that they had something to hide. The surviving soldiers of the Acqui Division – some 4,000 in all – were put aboard three ships bound for Piraeus, as prisoners of war. Just outside the harbour the ships ran into a minefield and exploded. The holds were padlocked and most of the prisoners were unable to escape, those who swam around were machine-gunned by the soldiers of the
Kriegsmarine
.
    Any elderly person on this island can tell you about the stench and the sea full of corpses, but officially none of it ever happened. General Lanz of the
Wehrmacht
was sentenced to only twelve years at Nuremberg in 1948, because he insisted that he disobeyed Hitler's orders to kill all the Italians. His report to Army Group E, in which he confirmed that 5,000 Italians had been executed, had been meant only to mislead his superiors. According to Lanz, fewer than a dozen officers were shot, and then only because they had put up resistance. Other German officers verified his story: most of the Acqui Division had simply been shipped out to Piraeus. The American judges believed them. According to the Nuremberg tribunal, therefore, Lanz had actually
prevented
a mass murder.At least half of the Acqui Division had apparently disappeared into thin air.
    In fact, only a few dozen Italians escaped, including the legendary Captain Renzo Apollonio. ‘I don't really remember how we felt in those days,’ Helena Cosmetatos says. ‘It was horrible, perhaps it didn't impact on us directly, but those Italians had lived with us for two years. And they were always very helpful.’ While the killings were still going on, a taxi driver brought a