The massacre at the Cibeno shooting range was the most serious one ever perpetrated in Italy against the prisoners of a transit camp. It matured at the Fossoli camp after months of escalating acts of violence against the prisoners, coinciding with the arrival of Ukrainian SS units back from eastern front.
Even at Fossoli, a transit camp, the prisoners began to experience the violence and brutality of their perpetrators.
The dynamics of the massacre was the following.
At dawn on July 12,1944, 69 political opponents imprisoned in Fossoli were brought to this place to be shot. Two of them rebelled, escaped and, aided by the prolation, managed to save themselves. Two names had already been cancelled from the original list of 71 prisoners that the SS commanders from Verona brought the day before to the commandant of the Fossoli camp: one because he was considered useful for the dismantling of the camp that was being prepared in those days, while the second had managed to hide with the help of his comrades. Therefore, not 71 were shot as per the initial list read out at roll call on the evening of July 11, but 67 will be murdered and then summarily buried in a mass grave covered with quicklime to erase all traces of what had happened.
The death sentence was justified by the Gestapo in retaliation for an attack carried out days earlier in Genoa against a German patrol in which seven soldiers had died. Today this motivation is rejected by historiography because of the many inconsistencies it presents: the excessive geographical distance between the two areas, the delayed timing of the reprisal by weeks, the desire to keep the massacre secret.
Probably a combination of causes determined this execution, including the decision to kill the political prisoners who were considered the most dangerous in view of the imminent dismantling of the camp, people "who had important positions in the camp: army generals, university professors, known and established politicians; but there were also some ordinary men" from all regions of Italy. It must be remembered that in June, an SS command, simulating an escape, had already murdered Leopoldo Gasparotto, a leading man of the Milanese Resistance imprisoned in Fossoli since April.
In May 1945, on the initiative of some relatives, the bodies were exhumed and transferred to Milan where Cardinal Schuster, the town's bishop, held a solemn funeral in the town cathedral.
In 1946, the National Liberation Committee and the Association of Persecuted Anti-Fascist Politicians took the initiative to place a plaque on the grave to honour the 'martyrs of Fossoli' and from that day on, every 12 of July, family members, institutions and citizens continued to gather in memory of their choice for freedom.
The names of the 67 victims are included in the names of the Italian deportees graffitied in the Hall of Names of the Deportee Museum in Carpi, silent witnesses of a wound in history.
