The Acqui Division in Kefalonia: the September 1943 massacre and where to remember it

Kefalonia in 1943: an Italian garrison beside a German ally

Kefalonia had been occupied by Italy since 1941, after the Axis conquest of Greece. Its garrison was the 33rd Infantry Division Acqui, about 11,500 soldiers and 525 officers on the island, commanded since June 1943 by General Antonio Gandin, an experienced officer who had served on the staff of the Italian high command. By September a German contingent of around 2,000 men was also stationed on the island.

On the evening of 8 September 1943 the radio announced that Italy had signed an armistice with the Allies. On Kefalonia, as on every front where Italian and German troops served side by side, the news arrived without clear orders. Germany had prepared for this moment and moved at once to disarm Italian units across Greece, the Balkans and Italy itself.

The Acqui Division, the German ultimatum and the fighting

The local German commander, Lieutenant Colonel Johannes Barge, demanded that the Italians hand over their weapons. Gandin negotiated for several days, while messages from the Italian high command told him to treat German forces as hostile. On the night of 13 to 14 September he consulted his units, and most of the men, according to the accounts that survive, favoured resisting rather than surrendering their arms. On 13 September Italian batteries had already fired on German landing craft in Argostoli harbour.

Fighting began in earnest on 15 September. German dive-bombers attacked Italian positions day after day, and from 17 September mountain troops of the Wehrmacht landed as reinforcements. The Italians had no air cover and dwindling ammunition. Some Greek partisans fought alongside them, and many islanders sheltered Italian soldiers. On 22 September the last Italian units surrendered. Roughly 1,300 Italians had been killed in a week of combat.

The massacre after the surrender and the Casetta Rossa

On 18 September the German high command had ordered that no Italian prisoners were to be taken on Kefalonia. After the surrender, soldiers who had laid down their arms were shot in groups in villages, fields and along the roads of the island; Italian accounts name places such as Troianata, Frangata and Kourouklata among the sites. Many bodies were burned or hidden, which is one reason the toll is so hard to establish.

On 24 September General Gandin was shot. The same day his officers were taken to the Casetta Rossa, a small red house near San Teodoro on the edge of Argostoli, and executed in groups. Italian sources put the number of officers killed there on 24 and 25 September at around 136. A few dozen were spared at the last moment, among them the chaplain Romualdo Formato. According to the Acqui veterans' association, Italian sailors were then made to load the bodies onto boats and drop them into the sea off the islet of Vardiani, and were later killed themselves. Gandin's remains have never been found.

Prisoners lost at sea

Most survivors were shipped towards the mainland and German prison camps, crammed below deck in old cargo vessels. Several of these ships were lost to mines or Allied air attacks in the following weeks: the Ardena struck a mine at the mouth of the Gulf of Argostoli on 28 September, and hundreds of prisoners died on that ship alone. Estimates of all the Acqui prisoners lost at sea vary from roughly 1,300 to about 3,000. Others were kept on Kefalonia as forced labourers, and the division's survivors only returned to Italy in November 1944.

How many died? Why the figures differ

There is no single agreed death toll, and any number you read should be taken with its source. A 1945 communiqué of the Italian government spoke of 9,000 soldiers and 406 officers, and that figure, often quoted as more than 9,000, shaped the memory of the massacre for decades. The historian Giorgio Rochat once estimated about 6,500 deaths on the island, about 5,000 of them after the surrender, and later revised that figure himself. The writer Alfio Caruso counts around 1,300 in battle, 5,000 shot and about 3,000 lost at sea.

More recent research is lower. Gianni Oliva gives between 3,500 and 5,000. The German historian Hermann Frank Meyer, in a study published in 2013, estimated about 2,500 killed on the island and roughly 4,000 including those who drowned. Massimo Filippini argued for about 2,000 on the island, a figure that academic historians largely rejected at the time. The Acqui veterans' association keeps a roll of named dead for Kefalonia and Corfu that currently lists about 3,900 men.

The figures differ because records were destroyed, bodies were burned or thrown into the sea, deaths at sea and on Corfu are sometimes included and sometimes not, and the event became politically charged in postwar Italy. What no serious historian disputes is that thousands of prisoners were killed after they had surrendered.

Trials and a long silence

Justice was slow and partial. At the Nuremberg Hostages Trial, General Hubert Lanz, the German corps commander responsible for the area, was sentenced to 12 years in prison in connection with the execution of Gandin and his officers, and released early. Hirschfeld, whose battle group led the reinforcements, was killed in 1945 and never tried. An Italian military trial in 1957 acquitted surviving Acqui officers accused of inciting the troops against the Germans, while proceedings against former German soldiers ended without a result.

Investigations in West Germany in the 1960s, and again from 2001, did not lead to a conviction. In Italy, case files on German war crimes had been archived in 1960 and were only rediscovered in the 1990s. In October 2013 a military court in Rome sentenced a former German corporal, then aged 90, to life imprisonment in absentia for taking part in the executions.

Memory in Italy and Greece

For decades the massacre was little discussed in public in Italy. The memorial on Kefalonia was erected in 1978, and Sandro Pertini became the first Italian head of state to visit the island in November 1980. On 1 March 2001 President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi called the division's choice the first act of the Resistance, and on 25 April 2007 Giorgio Napolitano marked Italy's Liberation Day on Kefalonia, the first time a president had done so abroad. In October 2018, for the 75th anniversary, Sergio Mattarella attended a commemoration on the island with the Greek president Prokopis Pavlopoulos.

Survivors and relatives founded the Associazione Nazionale Divisione Acqui in 1945, with its seat in Verona, where a national monument stands. Outside Italy the events are best known through Louis de Bernières' 1994 novel Captain Corelli's Mandolin, a work of fiction loosely based on the occupation and the massacre, and the 2001 film; our guide to Captain Corelli's Mandolin and its filming locations separates the story from the history.

Visiting the Acqui memorial sites in Argostoli today

The main Acqui Division memorial stands on a low hill above the ring road around the Lassi peninsula, just outside Argostoli. It is an open-air monument, free to visit at any time and easy to combine with the coastal walk from town past the Agios Theodoros lighthouse and the Katavothres towards Lassi. Little of the town the soldiers knew survives, because the 1953 earthquake destroyed almost all of Argostoli ten years later.

In the centre, a small exhibition next to the Catholic church of St Nicholas on the Lithostroto, the pedestrian shopping street, remembers the Acqui Division and is run by a Greek-Italian association. Opening hours are not always published, so check on the spot. The area of the Casetta Rossa, near San Teodoro, is a place of remembrance rather than a staffed attraction, so ask at the exhibition or locally for directions before you go.

Commemorations are held on the island each September around the anniversary, often attended by Italian and Greek officials and by relatives of the dead; if you are there in late September, check the local programme. September is also one of the best months to visit Kefalonia, as our weather and best time to visit page explains. These are places of mourning: keep your voice down, do not climb on the monuments and dress modestly at ceremonies. For the rest of the island, see our overview of places to visit in Kefalonia.