Prozor is the most brutal war crime of which Italian soldiers were victims before the armistice of September 8th; privates, officers, wounded and mutilated, unloved, surrendered after having done their duty, murdered by the communist partisans to the last man, without any mercy or respect for the customs of war and international laws, of which the Kingdom of Yugoslavia was a signatory.

The 154th Murge Occupation Infantry Division was established on December 1, 1941; part of the VI Army Corps of the Royal Italian Army, it included the 259th and 260th Murge Infantry Regiments and the 154th Murge Artillery Regiment . From April 5, 1942, the unit was assigned to the occupation of Herzegovina, garrisoning Mostar, Jablanica, Konjic, Cacko, and Nevesinje. Constantly engaged in combat against partisan guerrilla warfare, in the so-called Battle of the Neretva (as it is known from the Croatian name for Narenta), the positions of the 259th Murgia Regiment were attacked by five partisan brigades, the 1st Dalmatian Proletarian Shock Brigade , the 10th Herzegovinian Proletarian Shock Brigade , the 2nd Serbian Proletarian Shock Brigade and the 5th Montenegrin Proletarian Shock Brigade , which had crossed the river to escape pursuit by Axis and Chetnik units.

The partisans advanced toward the small town of Prozor, occupied by infantrymen from the 3rd Battalion of the 259th Regiment, fortified in the stronghold, demanding their surrender, a demand that was rejected by the Italians. The communists numbered several thousand, organized into five Proletarian Assault Brigades ; the Italians numbered fewer than eight hundred. The partisans advanced toward the small town of Prozor, occupied by infantrymen from the 3rd Battalion of the 259th Murge Regiment , fortified in the stronghold, demanding their surrender, a demand that was rejected by the Italians.

The first attack on Prozor on the night of February 15–16, 1943, was repelled by the Italians, who fought with desperation, but not the second. Fighting continued throughout the night of February 16–17, when the 5th Montenegrin Assault Brigade , led by its commander Sava Kovačević, managed to capture Prozor only after the Italians had run out of ammunition. The town fell after a fierce melee, and the Partisans captured the survivors and wounded of the garrison battalion. The prisoners were all massacred: Milovan Gılas ordered the execution of the entire battalion, as he recalled in his memoirs. “The entire Third Battalion of the 259th Regiment was executed” (M. Gilas, The Yugoslav Revolutionary War. 1941-1945. Memories and Reflections , tr. it. Gorizia 2011, p. 276-277): seven hundred and forty prisoners were massacred in Prozor, simply because on the first day of the attack the soldiers had refused to surrender.

The officers were taken to Jablanica and massacred; the massacre of the officers in Jablanica was made possible by the denunciation of an anti-fascist officer from Trieste who had defected to Tito's side, Captain Riccardo Illeni (as recalled by Gino Bambara in The Yugoslav National Liberation War (1941-1943) published by Mursia in 1988), who handed over the list containing the names of all the officers to the partisans. In the Yugoslav propaganda film The Battle of the Neretva ( Bitka na Neretvi , 1969), the character inspired by Illeni is played by Franco Nero, and presented as a shining idealist…

The commander of the III Battalion, Colonel Molteni, was killed in Jablanica square with a gunshot to the back of the head by the leader of the formation, Sava Kovačević.

The partisans were initially unable to track down a lieutenant of the subsistence, therefore not belonging to a combat unit, whose name appeared in the garrison roll given by Captain Illeni to the guerrillas: therefore they announced that they would shoot twenty soldiers in his place. The officer at this point surrendered, being shot by the partisans together with the twenty infantrymen.

General Mario Roatta, commander of the 2nd Army, wrote in an official report to Rome: “… In the square of Jablanica (Herzegovina), one of the partisan formations shot 21 [sic for 31] officers of the Murge division who had been captured in combat shortly before. Colonel Molteni was killed in the said square with a pistol shot by the leader of the formation. And since a supply officer, who appeared on the garrison list that had fallen into the hands of the partisans, was not found, the latter announced that they would shoot 20 soldiers in his place. The officer who had been hiding, having learned of this, immediately presented himself, but despite his exemplary conduct, he too was shot. The bodies of Colonel Molteni and other officers were recovered after the reoccupation of Jablanica by the chaplain of the 259th Infantry, Father Giuseppe de Canelli, who found them; that of Colonel Molteni was quartered and buried in a grave. common with some soldiers and the dead quadrupeds of the garrison”

Returning to the Prozor massacre, even if a part of historiography has recently affirmed a difference in treatment to which the army soldiers and the captured blackshirts were destined, it is necessary to specify that this was absolutely not the rule. Episodes of benevolent behavior towards the Italian soldiers must rather refer to cases of desertion by individual elements.

Let's talk numbers: 771 victims, double the 335 deaths at the Fosse Ardeatine, more than the 560 at Sant'Anna di Stazzema, almost the same number as the 770 deaths—one less—at Marzabotto. The German perpetrators were prosecuted, convicted, and imprisoned; the Yugoslav ones were not. No one in Italy has written, dedicated essays, or memoirs about this Balkan Cephalonia, and no magistrate has ever opened investigations, even due to the tacit post-war agreements between Tito and the Italian Republic. The fact is that a certain historiography continues to babble about real or alleged Italian war crimes in the Balkans, about General A.D.'s decontextualized " We kill too little ." Robotti or Roatta's Circular 3C, but never mentions such a massacre, unjustifiable from any perspective: this leads us to reflect on how Italian (and Axis) reactions in the Balkans must be historicized, placed within such contexts; if they were sometimes criminal, often excessive, they were, however, for the most part, perfectly legitimate according to the laws and conventions of the time. Consider that the heaviest Italian reprisal in Yugoslavia, that of Podhun (Piedicolle, province of Carnaro) on July 12, 1942, resulted in 91 deaths (a reprisal carried out for the murder of the village's two Italian elementary school teachers and 16 soldiers who were tortured and killed: given the scale of the victims, it was decided to halve the usual ratio of 10 to 1, bringing it down to 5 to 1).

For the record, in Prozor, once the town had been reconquered, the Italians did not carry out any reprisals, both because the massacre had been the work of Tito's gangs fleeing the Italian-German offensive, and therefore the local populations were not to be considered involved; and because applying the 10 to 1 ratio would have meant killing 7710 people... for others, allies or enemies, it would not have been a problem, but for the Italian fascist enemy (as Tito's followers called the Italians) evidently it was.

by Pierluigi Romeo of Colloredo-Mels – 13/03/2021
Source: History on the Net