Death In The Mountains: Warning From History

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This episode of We Have Ways of Making You Talk contains some content that some listeners may find distressing.

Aktung Aktung, welcome to We Have Ways of Making You Talk with me, Al Murray and James Holland, your Second World War podcast and YouTube video of choice.

As we've discovered that since we've started putting stuff up on YouTube, you're watching it.

So thank you very much, everybody.

Yeah, yeah, amazing.

I mean, you know, I thought I'll just scrub my shelves a bit.

I rather feel now that we're on video, the recording in your underpants.

I'm trying to pick my nose.

Recording in your underpants is a thing of the past, isn't it?

Yeah, it certainly is.

What we thought we'd do today, though, is kind of wash up from our last two episodes, Death in the Mountains, about the absolutely staggering story of what happened at Montessole.

And I, Jim,

when we got to the end of the episode, when we actually got to the, you know, we'd set the whole thing up then when we got to that day of this massacre there's no other word for it is there yeah yeah it was a massacre yeah i i don't know about you i i got to the end of the podcast i sort of thought well i don't want to we have to stop now this is so horrible and it is a truly shocking episode isn't it yeah it is and and why should it be worse because it's such a beautiful part of the world and i don't know but it just it just is that there's something about that place that's absolutely just got to me and it got to me the you know i literally heard, I read this piece in the Times back in 2004, went over there, and I felt absolutely sorry.

I've just got to go and see this place.

And it's so beautiful, it's achingly beautiful up there.

And it's not on the tourist beat, but you know, you can get into Boulogne, you get a car and go down to drive down to Marzabott and Sperticano.

And they've got a mausoleum in

all the victims are buried in a mausoleum in Marzabotto, which is the nearest town.

And I suppose, you know, as a crow flies, it's only a few miles, but it's sort of, you know, 15, 20 minutes from up there down into the town.

And outside the, so you go into the mausoleum and it's kind of all marble and it's got doors of the tomb on the walls.

You know, it's one of those ones where you've got the walls and it's got the name.

It just goes on forever.

And outside, they've got little pictures of all the different people.

And what I didn't tell you is what happened to Lupo.

Well, yes, I was going to ask.

Yeah, so Lupo.

He's such an amazing guy.

You know, he's so sort of courageous and charismatic and flawed, of course, because he's a romantic, isn't he?

Yeah.

That's the truth of it.

You know, so that's why he stays on Montessoli, because he's got this idea in his mind, hasn't he, that he's going to be with his allied comrades and army.

He's going to be taken seriously.

You know, he's not just an outlaw.

He's a soldier.

He is fighting for freedom.

He's getting rid of the Nazi fascists.

And when the Allies turn up, they're going to be incredibly grateful.

He's sort of incredibly, clearly very, very charismatic.

He's a dreamer, though, isn't he, Jim?

he's a dreamer he's a dreamer well he thinks he can win this thing without the politics he thinks that we can do this and there's no no need for any politics we're above politics and we're going to live in the mountains and it's all right if i go see my girlfriend he's not a he's not a professional is the thing and he's surrounded by ruthless professional operators the germans are pretty professional about how they go about this in its own appalling way.

And one of the things I was struck by, that the Germans, what they do is they form a little kampfgrupper, don't they?

Made up of different units from here and there, organized with everyone knowing what they need to do in a sort of Aufzreig tactique way.

But what it results in is the murder of hundreds of civilians.

And so we can say battlegroups, Kampfgruppers are things to admire up to a point, right?

The clear set of orders is deal with these partisans and any civilians who are obviously supporting them.

Those things that are seen sometimes when in the historiography, when looking at the Germans, that they're good at Kampfgruppe and they're good at knowing what to do.

Well, here's an example of a Kampfgrupper that knows what to do and it's murder civilians.

And he's a dreamer.

He hasn't got his head around any of that.

No, that's the point.

That's the point.

And he is trusting that the Allies are going to break through.

He's trusting that when they do break through, he's going to be treated like a hero, that he's going to be marching into Bologna on the top of a tank or something, you know, and taken seriously.

And he's going to be the great leader and he'll be the great freedom fighter.

And, you know, he'll be remembered down the annals as this guy who kind of defied everyone else, did it his way, and won out.

You know, that's his dream.

It doesn't work out that way.

And Jani survives.

Lupo is found in April 1945, his remains.

Really?

Literally, yep, very close to Cadotto in the edge of the woods in the trubs.

Basically, he gets shot on that morning when they're when they're running.

When Jani, Leone, and him are running, Jani gets shot in the elbow and then in the other arm.

He's on the ground.

He says, I don't think I can do it.

And Lupo goes stay calm we can do it they all get up jani's obviously not totally aware of what's going on he's adrenaline pumping he's been wounded he's just trying to get to the trees somewhere along that line that's that's when lupo gets shot and he gets killed and his body just isn't discovered and the reason it's not discovered is because the whole area is completely wrecked yeah That area around Kodoto, Kodotto is in Katermane, it's isolated.

You know, you can get up from the little village of Cuetcha.

There's a little track.

You can drive all the way down.

But if you were going to walk there, there was this ridge line from which the peaks of the mountains rise.

But there's a sort of ridge line.

And that's the road that goes from Grizzana Mirandi, goes all the way from Castiglione to Pepoli, which is where the South Africans were, past Monte Verghese, all these places.

It's this one single road.

And today it's an asphalted road up to Grizzana Mirandi.

Then it turns into a dirt road, you know, Estrada Bianca.

And that takes you eventually to San Martino.

Before you get to San Martino, now there is a nudist campsite, rather amusingly.

There's a little track that runs down, and this is an old partisan trail.

And it runs down, and you can get through this track and it takes you down a little, steep little lane.

Then you cross a little bit of open ground.

It's a bit boggy.

And then you go through a wood.

And then you go outside the other wood.

And then there's some shrubs and stuff and a field.

And then you're in Cadotto.

So it's a 20-minute walk from the track, something like that.

And that's where it is.

And that's where he's found.

And it's just, it's just, it's just awful.

It's, it's just such a terrible story that there he is this this dreamer cut down and he's he's identified by a few i you know bits of id and his clothes and stuff but he's you know his bones i mean you know that's that's all he is you know it's it's it's it's really awful one of the things that was really striking when we were talking about it is the moment when you decide which side to pick in the spring of 19 spring and early summer of 1944 if you're a young italian if you're 18 90 because you could argue couldn't you that what happens on montessolo the massacre there is inevitable.

If you do rise up against the Germans and they decide to send the SS, if you overdo it, perhaps, is a way of looking at it, if you're too successful, it's a one-way street to this kind of reprisal, this kind of massacre.

And the responsibility of someone like Lupo in the...

He's not responsible for what happens, but his actions lead to what happened, don't they?

And this is the eternal question of resistance, isn't it?

When you're dealing with an enemy who will reprise in this way, do you rise up and risk everyone's lives, not just your own?

Do you do that?

Or do you keep your head down?

Do you chug on and hope that the war will turn?

Or is the moment in that spring too irresistible?

Because Rome's about to fall and you know the Allies are coming.

And I thought it was really interesting to actually slice all those options.

and the way that the pressures you would be under if you were 18, 19, 20 in Italy.

Of course you don't want to join the army.

The war's over if you're Italian, as far as you're concerned, right?

Italy stepped out of the war the year before, right?

You don't want to go to work in Germany.

You don't want to be building fortifications on the Gothic line for the Germans much.

None of these are attractive options.

But as you said, if your dad has his card and his job depends on you showing willing.

Don't rock the boat.

Because after all, people join the fascist party for all, you know, and what we're not doing here is qualifying people's engagement with fascism.

But we're saying people do join for all sorts of reasons.

They get a party card for all sorts of reasons because they want to work.

They want to get on.

It's all part of that matrix of choices that you're having to make.

And I thought, you know, Lupo is unrealistic about the situation.

And, you know, I think that the worst thing is that he goes to see his girlfriend that night before.

There isn't a patrol.

There isn't a picket.

But the Germans would have still rolled them over, still killed everybody.

The Germans would have burnt that house and have killed everyone in it.

They'd have still killed Leone's wife.

They'd have still killed Lupo's girlfriend.

I mean, history doesn't relate what happened to her or Jani's.

You know, Jani never told me.

The problem is, if you're Cornelia Pacelli or you're, you know, any of these people, the civilians there, you don't have a choice.

You know, because as a, as a partisan, you do have a choice.

You either toe the line, join the fascists, do what you're supposed to do, keep your head down, all the rest of it, or you go and become a partisan.

You know, as a young man, you have choices, but the choices are none of them are very good, but you do have a choice.

Whereas if you're a civilian, you don't really have a choice.

Your choice is betray the partisans which are up there, which you're not going to do because they're already up there.

Yeah.

Because if you do, you'll get killed.

Yeah.

Or you keep your head down.

In which case, you've kind of got to support the partisans.

You know, you've got to give them food.

You've got to say, yeah, okay, you can stay in my barn.

But by tacitly supporting the partisans, you're then an enemy of the Nazi fascists.

And therefore...

you're open to so the choice is not yours but you're falling into that just because you are and i mean you know just think about the choices we have today about you know who you vote for and all the rest of it and you think about the massive information we have the data we have at our fingertips which which can help us inform our decisions.

These guys are completely bereft.

I mean, you know, these mountain communities are isolated communities anyway.

I mean, I always think it's amazing that in Italy, you know, 99.9% of the population is Roman Catholic.

It is a whole insofar that, you know, it is the kingdom of Italy.

But there are more regional patois and dialects in Italy than any other nation in Europe, which tells you all you need to know about the isolated nature of this.

You know, the rural areas of Italy are very, very remote.

And the truth is, is the Allies then sweep over this area.

They get stuck there over the winter of 1944, 1945.

It is the Guards Brigade occupying Montessoli.

And the Germans are at the kind of other side of Montessoli, but they're on the very edge of that mountain tip before, because it's the end of the massive.

Then you've got the Po Valley.

The Allies just couldn't quite break through into the Po before the...

winter came.

So the whole front was put on defensive.

So they were stuck there the whole of that winter.

It snowed.

There was lots of snow over on Montessoli that winter.

And so a lot of the dead were just left there because they hadn't been recovered, because there's no chance of recovering, because the Italians in the valleys are scared to go up there because there's Germans occupying it and because it's remote and because Germans don't really care.

You know, so they, you know, if you've got, if you've got sort of 27 dead Italians in a barn, leave them there, which is why Kendall Brook advancing along that road in November 1944 on a patrol.

You know, he comes across this barn and sees all these sort of rotting bodies in there, including pregnant women.

I mean, it's just horrible.

But that's why.

And then after the war, San Martino, Serpicano, Cassalia, they're gone.

You know, they are absolutely trashed.

The church is destroyed.

It's largely destroyed on the 29th to the September to the 1st of October, but it's also destroyed by Allied shells and by German shells and the kind of ding-dong that happens in between.

You know, so it's a combination.

And after the war, it's a different war.

It's a different Italy.

It's a different world.

And actually, people don't, it's the end of sharecropping.

You know, the Contadino system ends with the the end of the war because the monarchy is overthrown.

The old notion that there's padrones and all the rest of it, that's gone.

There's massive urbanization.

And this is why when you go to Italy today, you're driving, you see all these isolated farmhouses.

You think, oh, that'd be beautiful, wouldn't it?

But it's complete ruin.

Because

no one wanted to work there.

No one wants to work from dawn till dusk in this incredibly primitive way.

I mean, you know, when I was doing research for this,

and also when I was doing research for a pair of silver wings, this novel, I fictionalized Montessolio.

So I called it it Monte Luno.

Lupo was called Volpe, which is fox rather than wolf and so on.

But it was very, you know, anyone who knows would know that it's absolutely one of the same.

But it was fictionized and that allowed me to do that.

I did a lot of research into kind of rural life upper Montessoli at that time and generally in Italy at that time.

I mean, it's absolutely brutal.

I mean, you know, no running water, no electricity.

You know, you would have the cattle and animals would be on the first, on the ground floor, and the family would live upstairs.

And one of the reasons you would do that is so you get the heat from the animals going up through the floorboards and you know it's really pretty basic and obviously in in the modern world that is emerging after the war no one wants to live like that so it's it's it's just gone but there is this tragedy just a bit like the tragedy of san pietro that there is this centuries of continuity gone just like that and at the end of the war cornelia and her sister gisapina who were the only two left in her family you know twins gone father gone mother gone were living in a apartment in bologna because she went back to doing her seamstressing and her sister came to live with her.

And they kind of, you know, some people took pity on them and put them up and stuff.

So they were living in Bologna.

And I said to Cornelia, gosh, well, you know, when the Allies finally arrived in April 1945, gosh, that must have been a happy day.

And she goes, why was that a happy day?

And I said, well, you know, it's liberation and stuff.

And she said, it wasn't.

It was a terrible day because it just made me realize how completely pointless the whole thing was and how none of this needed to have happened.

Yeah.

And, you know, you're listening to this and you're just thinking, holy moly.

She was amazing.

I mean, absolutely just incredible.

So many ironies bound up in that, though, as well, James, because after all,

the fascists offer modernization of Italy, don't they?

And an urban revolution.

And the war delivers one.

You know, the old way of Italy, the link is broken with the past.

But it's not the fascists that achieve that.

It's the spoil of

Mussolini's adventuring through war, right?

Yeah, and their defeat.

And their subsequent defeat.

The thing is, is when we were talking about this, and

when we were talking about Lupo, when Gianni first joins and they, you know, they're told to dig graves and he talks his way out of it and the other guy's killed.

One of the images in my mind is, I'm afraid, is the godfather is thinking of, you know, Michael Corleone when he goes away to Sicily and he's wandering around with those guys with shotguns, right?

When you do have the Stellar Rossa, there are another, you know, you've had the fascists come through who'll chuck your dad in jail to avoid him getting himself into trouble when the fascists come, right?

The Caribbean area will do that with you.

They sound like another gang, right?

And what you've had is one gang come through, and the fascists are a gang, they come through, the police are a gang who are adjacent to the fascists, the stellaross are a gang, the Germans are a gang who are by the far the worst and biggest of the gangs.

And then, as she says, you know, another group of armed men turn up and turf out the Germans.

The Allies are another gang, you know, and if you start processing like that, if you're a civilian,

you've got to do what the what the Stellar Rossa want because they might decide you're a traitor and make you dig your own grave, right?

It's the whole thing.

Everyone's brutalised.

The entire thing is drenched in violence.

Violence is the solution to absolutely everything once you've let slip the dogs of war in Italy at this stage in its history.

Yes, and if you're Carlo Venturi or you're Gastoni Scarghi, who are 18 at the time in 1944 and have joined the Stellarossa, you are no longer protected by the laws of the land.

You could get stabbed in South London or something if you're wandering around the wrong places at the wrong time by a gang.

But for the most majority of us, we are safe because most people are nice, but we're also safe because we're protected by law and by laws and by the protections of the state.

When you're on the mountain, you're not, you are outside the law.

You are an out law.

So to go back to the kind of Robin Hood thing, what Lupo is trying to do is impress discipline whilst at the same time impress camaraderie.

And this is one of the reasons why he doesn't want the politics because he wants people to feel a bond of camaraderie, not be divided by different politics.

And he is wanting to keep it tight.

You know, he wants people to get on.

He wants people to be bound, not by the threat of the gun and the knife and violence, by bond of togetherness and camaraderie.

And in that, you know, good on him.

And he is a bit, he doesn't like killing people if he doesn't have to.

You know, he's not wanton with his violence.

But there are others who are.

Karatan, for example, the Russian, he's absolutely, you know, he's a beast.

And there are others who are pretty harsh.

And that means it depends which battalion you're in and which company you're in and all this sort of stuff.

And Lupo at the top of it is desperately trying to maintain an atmosphere, a culture, one where people don't constantly feel on edge all the time.

But when I was talking to Gastoni and Hector and Carlo, it was absolutely clear that that sense of menace was pervasive.

It was there because of their situation, because they were living, you know, in barns, in caves, in forests,

in the mountains, and everything was uncertain.

And they'd been severed from their families with no means of contacting them.

There was no colour WhatsApp message or anything like that pinging away.

Carlo and Gastoni's parents had no idea where they were.

No idea at all.

That has to be so tough.

It's so hard.

That's such a difficult thing to confront.

But the other thing I was really interested in, and it's very interesting how, say, Walter Rader was eventually captured and put on trial, And he was imprisoned for life on the prison of a little island of Gaeta, which is south of Rome.

It's a little, it's north of the Garrelliano.

It's a little island that juts out, just north of Minerno, south of Anzio.

And he was imprisoned there for life.

And every so often there would be a trial of someone who was at the Marzabotto massacre.

And they'd wheel in these survivors.

And they go, yeah, that was him.

That was him.

I remember him.

I remember his eyes.

And of course, they've got this shuffling old man standing in front of of him with his, you know, enlarged nose and ears and, you know, thinning hair.

And of course, he doesn't look anything like him.

And in 1944, he's wearing a helmet and it was raining.

And they can't possibly have known that was him.

But the thirst for revenge was understandably very high.

So these poor guys were kind of chucked in prison

and found guilty and so on.

When clearly the evidence was extremely spurious that they were actually there or directly involved or whatever.

But I thought it would be interesting to kind of think about, about, you know,

what the Italians had never done was actually ask themselves, why was it that an SS soldier could gingerly, you know, carefully help an old lady across the threshold of the cemetery?

How could a young man, young German man, set up a machine gun and just gun down people at point-blank range?

I would say from one side of the cemetery to the other, you're looking at 15 to 20 yards.

So you're gunning them down at 12 yards with a machine gun?

I mean, that's something, isn't it?

So why is that?

Why is that happening?

Okay, we're going to take a very short break here.

We'll come back to that thought, Jim.

Welcome back to We Have Ways of Make You Talk, where Jim and I are chewing over the issues of Mont Solo.

You've touched on it already.

A lot of it's got to do with the Eastern Front.

And I remember talking to a lovely fellow.

He's a baker from Dusseldorf.

He'd been a Feldweibel.

and he was obviously tough as old boots in the war.

He was a obviously, the way he was talking about his experience, and he'd written lots of stuff down on lots of foolscap and had photos and things.

And he had a very good memory, which was augmented by his records he'd kept, the papers he'd got, you know, official papers he'd kept, writing down his thoughts and stuff.

So he was very good on all this.

And I said, well, what did you, you know, when you, when you finally got to it, so he, he, he was recruited in 1941, drafted in 1941, joined the, I don't know, whatever infantry division he did, got sent to the Eastern Front, got wounded, came back again, did two stints at the Eastern Front, wounded a second time.

He then got posted to, you know, he was in Dresden, sent down on the train to Verona, Verona to the front, go to your field post, get allocated a division.

I think he was in the 334th or something like that.

I can't remember.

But one of those kind of, you know, 300 and something infantry divisions.

But his background in the Eastern Front had been a machine gunner.

And I said to him, what did you think of partisans?

He went, partisans.

Jesus.

He said, okay, so i okay he said this is my first experience i said i arrived in italy i got in verona and i hadn't been allocated where i was going to go so we had like 24 hours of inverona and he said i got off the train and me and my mates we went to a cafe been there five minutes partisans come in with sten guns and just shoot the place up and he said i thought oh my god here we go again he said bloody partisans all over again and he said i'll tell him my experience of partisans in russia he said so i was on this machine gun he said there were waves of russians coming towards us just waves of them.

And he said, it was absolutely terrible.

You just mowed them down.

And he said, they just kept on coming.

He said, it was just, he said, you've never seen anything like it.

He said, it was just, it was so horrendous.

But these guys just kept on coming and we kept mowing them down.

But he said, my number two was a guy called Peter.

He said he should never have been in the army.

He wasn't an army type at all.

He had glasses.

He said he was an intellectual.

He was studying theology at university when he was called up.

He hated it.

But he was a really lovely boy.

He said, and he said, although I was from the sort of rougher side of the tracks, I got of him really well.

We were really good friends because you have to be because you're machine gunners and you're faced with this absolute horror and you have to get on and we really liked each other and we had each other's backs and we'd always look out for each other.

And he said, I'd literally just changed over from feeding the belt to handing the guns.

He said, we'd take it in turns.

And he said, just then Peter got hit, got hit

and he was wounded.

He was really badly wounded.

And he said, this was in 1943 and we were falling back.

So he said, he got evacuated.

I carried on shooting.

The next day, or maybe it was two days later, he said, we were marching back and we came across this burnt out ambulance.

And he said, as soon as we saw it, we thought, uh-oh, the driver was burnt to a crisp and he'd had his hands tied with wire to the steering wheel.

And he said, then we went around the back and we saw the four men that had been wounded in the back and they were all out on the ground.

They'd been pulled out of the back of the ambulance.

And he said, they'd all had their penises chopped off and shoved in their mouths.

And one of them was Peter.

So he said, when I I got to Italy and the first thing that happens, the partisan comes in.

He said, did I have any sympathy for partisans?

No, I didn't.

And he said, as far as I'm concerned, they could have killed every single one of them.

And I don't care.

Yeah.

And he was a really nice bloke, generous with his time.

He was kind.

And the other thing, and I'll tell you one other thing about him.

He said, when I got home, all through the war,

he got married in 1941 or something, or maybe in leave in 1942.

He said, when I got home, I thought, I've been away from my wife so long, I'm never going to spend another night apart ever.

And he said, I never did.

The thing is, though, Jim, you know, in the background of that is, is

his attitude comes down to, do you mind?

We're trying to conquer you people.

Do you mind?

We're trying to fight a war here and you're interfering with it, given the German mission in the Second World War.

And I think this is one of the things absolutely remarkable that you see in conflict.

As you say, he's a nice guy.

You got on with him fine.

He clearly really cares about his family and his wife and all this sort of stuff.

But at the same time, he's able to, well, I hate these guys because we're trying to conquer the soviet union yeah but he's not thinking that no i think i think i i don't think that's quite right because i think he's a he's the squaddie okay he's like a squaddie in in afghanistan or iraq the squad in iraq or afghanistan is there because he's joined the british army and he's been posted there and that's what he's been paid to do and and yeah he's what he doesn't care about reconstruction and the problems with iraqis he cares about his mates and the guys in the platoon one of them's been shot and he's not very happy about it franz marson my machine gunner, he doesn't care about Nazi ideology.

He doesn't care about Nazi goals.

He's been drafted.

He's in the army.

He's been sent to the front and he's got to do what he's got to do.

And these partisans are playing dirty and they're brutalizing and they're chopping off penises and that's not acceptable.

This guy was in an ambulance in his mind.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But he knows what the Wehrmacht's been up to.

But he's not part of the big, he's part of the big global mission because he's in the Wehrmacht.

But that's not how he's viewing it.

He's viewing it, I've got to do this.

I've been told to do it.

I haven't got any choice in the matter.

I'm here.

You know, I've got my mates.

That's what I'm living and fighting for.

Yes, but he knows what the Wehrmacht's been up in Eastern Europe.

They know they've been setting fire to villages and murdering civilians.

They know that.

The soldiers know that.

They know what they've been meeting out, particularly on the Ost front.

They know that.

So, you know, after all those home movies that you looked at those years ago where people are sending home film, basically films of them destroying civilian homesteads and stuff and smashing villages up.

But it's brutalizing, isn't it?

That's the point.

You're being brutalized.

You're being sold a lie.

You're being sold how to think.

Don't forget, get in the run-up to this.

You've had six years up to the 1st of September 19th, six and a half years of being told Jews are awful, Bolsheviks are awful, Slavs are awful, this is our right.

This is a life and death struggle for the true master race.

You know, and if we're not equal to it, the Slavic hordes and Bolshevism and world Jewry will sweep us over and our world will be gone forever.

And that's been pummeled over and over and over and over and over and over and over again.

And you're told repeatedly that these people are not on our level.

And I'm not saying it's right.

I'm just saying that is how you get a young guy in here.

So you have in any unit with a, you know, the 16th Waffen-SS is only set up, I think, in 1943.

But the cardour of it comes from people who have been in earlier Waffen-SS divisions, who have been on the Eastern Front, who are tough as old boots, who are brutalized, and they're sending the culture and the vibe, aren't they?

And that seeps down, osmosis-like, through the rest of the division.

They're told these guys are all hardened communists.

They're the red star, after all, which is your point you were making yesterday, the slightly unfortunate name.

I mean, how could you ever have any more proof?

Wilfried Sigabrecht in his diary goes, what we do know is that these are some of the hardest, meanest, most fanatical communists in the country.

Well, they're not.

You got that completely wrong.

You know, here's another way of looking at it.

Perhaps they're just patriot Italians who want you out of here.

But they're not thinking it like that, are they?

They're thinking, we've got to fight at the front.

We've got Yarbos, we've got fighter bombers coming down.

We're being shelled to buggery all the time.

Now we've got these bastards at our back making our lives a misery, taking pot shots, not playing fair, whatever playing fair means.

You know, do I mind going in and clearing this problem out?

Not at all.

And the truth of the matter is.

that three days after that attack, that problem is solved.

They haven't got a problem at their back anymore.

You know, they can now just look forward.

You know, so that is how you do it.

That's how you get to that state.

But it's interesting, though, isn't it?

Because the ideological transfer from the East Front to the Eastern Front to Italy, because why, what are you doing fighting in Italy?

If you're a what's the German political objective in Italy?

Is it to keep the communists out?

Well, not really, because you're not fighting the communists, you're not fighting the Soviet Union.

No, it's completely pointless.

Well, I refer you to an earlier episode.

What the hell are they doing there?

Yeah, exactly.

But exactly.

And I think that's what's so interesting, isn't it?

Is that there there is this, and we talked about this in Victory 45.

You know, they're in this doom loop of destruction.

They're going to fight and they're going to fight to the end, whatever that might be.

Certainly not victory.

No, it's all part of us and them, isn't it?

Again, it's the rhetoric of us and them.

Yeah.

You know, it was Jews and Bolsheviks.

Now it's partisans.

You know, but they're just as bad.

They're all cut from the same cloth.

Well, yes.

And after all, on the Eastern Front, partisan means Jew means partisan means Jew.

If you're Jewish, you are a partisan because you're an enemy of the Nazi state.

And if you're a partisan, you're probably a Jew.

And in Italy, if you're a partisan, you're a communist.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

But the ideological transfer is fascinating because you're in Italy, as you said.

What on earth are they doing there?

Why fight in Italy?

Do you, at the end of the war, because has he abandoned that prejudice, your guy, about communism?

Or has he just, that's the end of that chapter in his life.

The war's over.

Yeah, that's really interesting.

That's a really interesting conversation.

I don't, I honestly, I don't know.

I think he went back.

He went back to his family bakery business.

That's extraordinary, isn't it?

He said to me, he was never involved in a Rust Relemente, but he would have, but you know, he said, said, had he been asked to ordered to do it, he wouldn't have thought twice about it.

Right.

But he wasn't thinking in terms of civilians.

He was just thinking killing partisans.

The enemy.

They're the enemy, yeah.

But, you know, I'd like to think he wouldn't have wanted to...

He would have felt very, very uncomfortable about sitting on a machine gun in front of 15 yards away from a bunch of Italian ladies and children.

But,

I couldn't.

But what's striking about that situation as well is that people, civilians in that situation, seem to be sort of paralyzed by what might be happening to them.

Because there are far more of them than there are of the Germans.

Could a crowd not overwhelm a couple of Lancaster setting up a machine gun?

You know what I mean?

No, yeah, yeah, yeah, but crikey, I mean, you're there.

What can you?

I mean...

This is the, I can't imagine myself into that scenario at all.

I can't do it.

I can't imagine being the guys with the machine guns.

And I I can't imagine the people being the people in that.

Just as she says, Carnellia in her account, it's different now telling the story from what the experience was like.

Similarly, I can't imagine myself in that position, what my emotions would be.

Well, don't you remember?

She said, all I wanted to do is get to the edge.

She was fixated on getting to the edge.

But how was that going to help?

I mean, you know, I was very, very struck with the monks up at Monte Cassino, the abbey at Monte Cassino.

Oh, yeah.

How these ascetes, you know, this ascetic life they were living of study and prayer and their bubble around the monastery, the abbey was, that was their world.

So when something completely alien comes in, they're totally, they might be the cleverest people in the world and they might be great intellectuals and asites, but but they're totally ill-equipped to deal with the situation in which they find themselves.

And most of the people and the mountain folk couldn't read or write.

You know, they're illiterate.

And how can you possibly comprehend what is happening?

And how can you make the right decision?

I I mean, you know, Virginio Caselli sending all his people up to the mountain because he thinks they're going to be safe because he thinks, well, you know, he fought in the First World War and he thinks, but well, people, armies move through the valleys.

So that's what will happen.

We'll be okay.

But he's just taking a punt.

He's doing the best he possibly can with his very limited knowledge and understanding of what's going on to try and save his family.

And his tragedy is he makes it worse.

You know, that's the absolute, you know, had he taken to the mountains on the other side of the valley, he'd have been fine.

But what are you supposed to do?

I mean, you know, these guys, and I remember this account of these guys, you know, in the Leary Valley, and they were saying, you know, you don't understand what it was like.

We were abandoned culturally, physically, politically, in every single way.

We were completely abandoned.

There was no state.

There was nothing.

We were just on our own in the middle of a war, trying to make the right decisions and having very little information with which to kind of make that decision.

It's just awful.

Well, it's horrendous and it raises that question, doesn't it?

Because obviously one of the attractions of thinking about the Second World War is what would I do in that set of circumstances?

Would I be able to be a fighter pilot?

Would I be able to be an infantryman?

What would it be like being in a tank, right?

The Channel Islands is the closest we get to having to make these kind of decisions.

What on earth do you do?

And everyone obviously likes to think to themselves that, well, they'd resist, of course.

They'd resist fascism.

They'd resist Nazism.

They'd resist the Occupier.

But it's nowhere near that straightforward, is it?

I think what this whole story tells, the whole of the Montessoli story tells us, is that these decisions are all impossible to make and they all bear bad fruit because that is what conflict offers is nothing.

War offers nothing but bad fruit.

100%.

Yeah, completely.

I'd recommend everyone to go there because it's...

incredibly moving.

It's so beautiful.

And obviously Bologna is one of the great cities of the world.

And, you know, for food and wine and everything, I mean, you know, you cannot go wrong.

You get very easy to get to Bologna, hire a little car, beetle down.

It is amazing.

You can walk to the top of Montessoli, and there's the monument to the Stella Rossa right at the very top.

And you can go into the cemetery.

The cemetery is still there, where all those 191 women and old men and children

were massacred, where Cornelia survived, and the bullet holes are still there.

You know, there they are on the crosses and stuff.

I'll pull up some pictures of this.

Cassalia is a ruin.

Sepercano is a ruin.

San Martino is a ruin.

The church of Cassalia, where they were all sheltering beforehand, it's you can see the outline of it.

Bits of walls are still there and all the rest of it, but it's a wreck.

You can walk on the same track that they would have been marched down the road at gunpoint by those SS guards before they were put into the into the cemetery.

You can you could see it all.

You can even scramble down the track to Cadotto and see where the partisans had their kind of last stand and all the rest of it.

The other thing I'd recommend is watching The Silent Village.

If you can get it, I think think it's probably on YouTube, which is a Humphrey Jennings propaganda film that was made in 1940, 43.

It's a Welsh village, and they filmed it in a Welsh village with the villagers.

And the concept is that the Germans turn up and round them all up and execute all the men.

And it's really shocking because this isn't an Italian village or Ladici or Orador.

This is a village in Wales.

And it's saying, you know, it's making a point.

This is what you're going to be in line for.

if you let in the dark forces of autocracy and evil.

Democracy is fragile.

You know, we all need to be a bit careful at the moment.

You know, I don't want to sort of overplay it.

But this is why we need to learn this stuff and understand what happened in a pinprick of time ago in the big scheme of things.

I mean,

this is only 80 years ago.

It's not very long.

No.

These terrible things were happening to people like you and I.

And it's hard to get your head around it.

It really is.

And sitting there listening to Jani Rossi, listening to Gastone and Carlo, listening in her front room in a flat in Bologna, listening to Cornelia tell this story with just no emotion at all.

And she said, the other thing she said, I remember this really, really clearly, she said, after the war, she said, I never liked hearing people shouting.

I never liked any arguments.

I never argued with anyone.

Said, I just always walk away from that.

She said, you just realize how precious life is and how futile much of what we do is.

It's just...

mind-blowing.

It's the single most powerful interview of a veteran of the Second World War I've ever done, bar none.

That one with her.

I'll never forget it, ever, as long as I live.

Thanks for taking us through all this, Jim.

And it's, you know, away from the story, talking around the issues around it.

I think it's really proper food for thought.

We hope you've enjoyed this episode, although I enjoyed might not be quite the right word.

Well, thought-provoking, isn't it?

It's good to think about this stuff because it is important to think about it, I think.

Yep.

Cheerio, ciao, chiveriamo, I should say.

Well, thanks everyone for listening.

We'll see you again very soon.

Cheerio.

Chiveriano, was it?

Chiveriamo.

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