15 September 1943. The Greek island of Cephalonia erupts into violence after Italy’s sudden surrender shatters its alliance with Nazi Germany. One week earlier, on 8 September, Italy has capitulated to the Allies. Southern Italy falls under Allied control, while Benito Mussolini, rescued by German commandos, establishes a new Fascist regime in the German-controlled north. The Italian army is left divided, confused, and dangerously exposed.
On Cephalonia, the Italian Acqui Division receives conflicting orders. After bitter debate among his officers, General Antonio Gandin allows his men to vote on whether to resist the Germans. The majority choose to fight. As a result, German troops respond with overwhelming force. Aircraft bomb Italian positions, artillery pounds the hills, and the island trembles as former allies turn their weapons on one another.
Outnumbered and cut off from support, the Italians surrender after days of fighting, believing they will be treated as prisoners of war. Instead, the Nazis commit one of the most hideous war crimes during the German occupation of Greece. Thousands of Italian soldiers are executed with bullets to the back of the head, while others are forced onto ships that later sink in mined waters.
This atrocity, committed by the Nazis against more than 8,000 Italian prisoners of war, becomes known as the Cephalonia Massacre. However, this crime will not remain unpunished, and the perpetrators will pay for their crimes with their own lives. The Second World War started on 1 September 1939, when Nazi Germany invaded Poland. Less than 2 years later, Adolf Hitler set his sights on the Soviet Union, its partner in the war against Poland.
However, before he could launch Operation Barbarossa, which was the codename for the invasion of the Soviet Union, he needed to secure the southern flank to ensure crucial supply routes and prevent any interference. Therefore, on 6 April 1941, Germany invaded Greece with rapid and coordinated assaults and by 27 April 1941 Athens, the Greek capital, had fallen.
With mainland Greece under Axis control, the country was divided between Germany, Italy, and Bulgaria. The Ionian Island of Cephalonia fell within the Italian zone of occupation, where from June 1943 General Antonio Gandin commanded approximately 12,000 soldiers of the 33rd Infantry Division “Acqui”. From the following month alongside them stood roughly 2,000 German troops under the command of Oberstleutnant Johannes Barge.
By the summer of 1943, however, Italy’s war effort in Europe was collapsing. On 25 July 1943, Italian dictator Benito Mussolini was removed from power and arrested by order of King Victor Emmanuel III. Marshal Pietro Badoglio formed a new government and began secret negotiations with the Allies. On 8 September 1943, the Armistice of Cassibile was announced – marking the end of hostilities between Italy and the Allies during World War II.
Southern Italy soon fell under Allied control, while Mussolini, rescued by German commandos, was installed as head of a new Fascist regime in northern Italy under Nazi protection. The German High Command had anticipated this possibility and under Operation Achse, plans had been prepared to disarm Italian units and to seize control of former Italian-occupied territories.
In Greece, the armistice caused immediate confusion. Communications with Rome broke down, and Italian commanders received conflicting instructions. On Cephalonia, General Gandin received orders first to cooperate, then to treat German troops as enemies, and finally to resist any attempt at disarmament with armed force.
Negotiations began between General Gandin and Oberstleutnant Johannes Barge on 9 September 1943. As a gesture of goodwill, Gandin withdrew from the strategically important heights of Kardakata, surrendering a vital defensive position. At the same time, German reinforcements were already being moved into position. On 13 September, when German forces attempted to land additional troops at the port of Argostoli, Italian artillery batteries opened fire and sank two landing craft.
The brief exchange marked the beginning of open combat across the island. Yet even as clashes spread, Gandin hesitated, still seeking guarantees that his men would be repatriated safely to Italy. During the night of 13 September, Gandin ordered a referendum across the division. Officers and men were asked to choose between continued cooperation, surrender, or resistance.
By the following morning, the result was clear: the division would fight the Germans. As negotiations stalled, the Germans prepared to resolve the crisis by force and presented the Italians with an ultimatum that expired at 2 PM on 15 September. Even before the deadline passed, the Luftwaffe, the German Air Force, began bombarding Italian positions with Stuka dive bombers.
On the ground, Italian units initially held the advantage and captured roughly 400 German soldiers. However, the arrival of fresh German forces changed the situation. On 17 September, reinforcements from the elite 1st Mountain Division under Major Harald von Hirschfeld landed on the island.
Among them were elements of the 98th Mountain Regiment, a unit that had already taken part in brutal anti-partisan operations and atrocities against civilians in the region of Epirus in northwestern Greece in the months preceding the fight on Cephalonia. At the same time, the Germans dropped propaganda leaflets over Italian lines. The message read: “Italian comrades, soldiers and officers, w
hy fight against the Germans? You have been betrayed by your leaders!… LAY DOWN YOUR ARMS!! THE ROAD BACK TO YOUR HOMELAND WILL BE OPENED UP FOR YOU BY YOUR GERMAN COMRADES.” Gandin repeatedly appealed to the Italian High Command for assistance, but no response arrived. Allied authorities, fearing defection, refused to allow Italian aircraft or naval units to intervene, leaving the Acqui Division isolated on the island.
German air superiority, combat experience, and control of key terrain steadily weakened Italian resistance. After days of bombardment and mounting casualties, ammunition began to run out. On 22 September 1943, at eleven o’clock, the surviving Italian forces laid down their arms. During the fighting, approximately 1,315 Italian soldiers were killed, while German losses were reported at around 300 dead.
Fifteen Greek partisans also died fighting alongside the Acqui Division. The Italian soldiers may have surrendered, waving white flags, but what followed was one of the largest atrocities carried out by the Nazis on the Greek territory. Even before the surrender, orders had been issued from Berlin.
Adolf Hitler authorized the summary execution of Italian officers who resisted, and the German High Command declared that no prisoners were to be taken, citing what it called the Italians’ “perfidious and treacherous behaviour” on Cephalonia. With that directive, the fate of thousands of Italian soldiers was sealed. Beginning on 21 September, Italian soldiers who laid down their arms were assembled in groups of four to ten and shot at close range, often where they stood after surrendering. The executions were carried out by troops of the 1st Mountain Division,
many of them Austrians, who moved from one group to the next without pause. When several Bavarian soldiers protested the killing of surrendered prisoners, they were threatened with summary execution themselves and forced back into line. The senior Italian officers met the same fate.
On 24 September, General Antonio Gandin and 137 of his officers were hastily court-martialled and shot, their bodies later thrown into the sea. The divisional infantry commander, General Luigi Gherzi, had already been executed on 22 September, immediately after his capture, while the fighting was still ongoing. Romualdo Formato, one of the division’s seven chaplains and among the few survivors, later described scenes of unbearable anguish.
As the executions unfolded, Italian officers wept openly, prayed aloud, and began to sing. Many cried out the names of their mothers, wives, and children. Three officers embraced one another and declared that they had been comrades in life and would remain comrades in death, promising to meet again in paradise. Others clawed at the grass as if instinct alone might open a path of escape.
At one point, German soldiers moved among the wounded, loudly announcing that medical assistance would be given. When twenty men crawled forward in hope, a sudden burst of machine-gun fire cut them down where they lay. According to the Austrian soldier Alfred Richter, who later spoke about the events, prisoners were shot in the head after surrendering, their bodies thrown into heaps.
Boots were stripped from the dead for reuse. Groups of Italians were marched to quarries and stone-walled enclosures near the village of Frangata. There, machine guns fired for hours, the sound of gunfire and the screams of the condemned echoed through nearby homes. Richter later admitted that he and many of his comrades experienced what he described as “a delirium of omnipotence” as the killings continued.
He also recalled a soldier who had once entertained German troops in local taverns by singing arias; during the executions, he was forced to sing again while his fellow Italians were shot. The disposal of the dead revealed the scale of the slaughter. Thousands of bodies were burned on massive wooden pyres, the air over the island thick with the smell of burning flesh.
Others were loaded onto ships and buried at sea, or thrown into the water with stones tied to them. In Argostoli harbour, executions were carried out in full view of the Greek population, with corpses left where they fell as the streets filled with the stench of decay. The Germans refused to allow Italian soldiers to bury their own dead.
When chaplains later searched for remains, they found bones scattered across the landscape. In one of the final acts of cruelty, twenty Italian sailors were forced to load the bodies of executed officers onto rafts and push them out to sea. The Germans then detonated the rafts with the sailors still aboard. By the time the killings ended, an estimated 5,155 Italian soldiers had been massacred on Cephalonia.
The remaining officers and men were transported to the mainland and eventually to concentration camps, but several of the ships struck mines or were hit in Allied air raids in the Adriatic Sea. Approximately 3,000 more Italian soldiers died during those transports. When news of the massacre reached Benito Mussolini, he reportedly reacted with anger at the German killing of Italian soldiers, yet remarked: “Our men defended themselves.
They hit several German landing craft, sinking them. They fought as Italians know how to fight.” The Second World War in Europe ended on 8 May 1945. In the years that followed, those responsible for killing Italian prisoners of war, as well as for atrocities committed elsewhere in Europe, faced justice. Harald von Hirschfeld, who led reinforcements from the 1st Mountain Division and played a major role in the Cephalonia massacre, was severely wounded during the Battle of Dukla Pass on the border between present-day Slovakia and Poland.
He died of his wounds in January 1945, before the war had ended. By that time, he had been promoted to Generalmajor and was the youngest general officer in the Wehrmacht, the German Army. Thousands more who had once served in the 1st Mountain Division were killed during the Second World war.
Others were executed after the war, including the former divisional commander Josef Kübler, who was hanged in Ljubljana on 26 February 1947. Thanks for watching the World History Channel. Be sure to like and subscribe and click the bell notification icon so you don’t miss our next episodes. We thank you and we’ll see you next time on the channel.
