Memory and Massacre

This book recounts the massacre at Sant'Anna di Stazzema and examines its aftereffects. During the Nazi occupation of Italy, SS officers were charged with destroying anti-Fascist and anti-Nazi partisans. In the process, they also purposively disseminated terror throughout the Italian countryside and cities. On August 12, 1944, about 300 SS troops surrounded the village of Sant'Anna di Stazzema, which had been flooded with refugees, and rounded up and shot villagers. Some people were herded into basements and other enclosed spaces and killed with hand grenades. Before burning the village to the ground, the SS murdered hundreds of women and elderly and 116 children. This was one of the worst massacres of civilians on Italian soil during the war. Paolo Pezzino not only reconstructs the events in Sant'Anna, but deals with the 'forgetting' of the massacre as well as the continuing debates among historians, politicians and popular memory.