Marzabotto Massacre Trial. The trial of SS Major Walter Reder, battalion commander of the 16th Reichsführer Panzer Division, accused of being responsible for the series of massacres collectively known as the “Marzabotto Massacre,” begins at the Bologna Military Court. The trial will conclude on October 31 with a life sentence (the major will be released in January 1985). Beginning in late May 1944, several German military units launched a widespread operation against partisans in the vast Apennine area of Marzabotto. This operation escalated into attacks on local civilians, fragmenting into individual attacks whose precise timing and total number of victims are still unknown. The peak occurred between late September and early October, when several hundred civilians were massacred, 189 of whom were children under the age of 12. The 1951 trial did not reveal the responsibility of the numerous soldiers and officers involved in the massacre, despite having acquired some of their names in the records. This was revealed by the discovery of some trial files in the so-called “closet of shame,” discovered by chance in May 1994, where 695 files on massacres that occurred after September 8th had been hidden for reasons of international politics.
