Subscribers can listen to the audio version of today’s post here.
A gentle reminder that paid subscribers are greatly appreciated and help fund my efforts to provide content that is free of charge and available to all.
A lot of people know Italy fought on the side of the fucking Nazis in World War II. What many don’t realize is that partway through they switched sides and joined in the Nazi killing. And the fucking Nazis were all fuck you you disloyal cockburgers, and in one case massacred over 5,000 Italian prisoners of war.
--On This Day in History, Shit Went Down: September 13, 1943--
In July of 1943 the Allies were invading Sicily and Italy was all you know I think maybe we chose the wrong side here, so they did a no confidence thing with that fascist fuckpuddle Mussolini and took him into custody. Italy didn’t officially declare war on Germany until October 13, but a month earlier the writing was on the wall as Italy was negotiating her surrender to the Allies, with the Italian armistice being made public on September 8. And that’s when things came to a head between Italian and German forces on a Greek island named Cephalonia.
Greece had been occupied by the Italians early in the war and the Italian troops had gotten bashed up pretty good by a powerful Greek Resistance. Then shit got worse for the Italians in Greece with Operation Achse, which involved disarming all the Italians so they wouldn’t pose much of a threat to Germany. And it worked like a motherfucker, disarming about a million Italian soldiers in a matter of days. Except the Italian soldiers on Cephalonia were like Republicans during the Obama administration with their “Fuck you don’t take my guns!” In this case, however, the fucking Nazis really did want their guns.
The Italians were part of the 33rd Infanty Division Acqui, and in the face of Germans trying to disarm them on September 13, 1943, they decided to fight back. And it was a democratic decision. The troops were presented with three options: Join the Germans; surrender to them and be repatriated back to Italy; or fight the Germans. A majority of the Italian troops voted to fight those Nazi fucks. Alas, it did not go well for them.
Over 1,300 Italians were killed in a week of fighting, and then the rest surrendered when they ran out of ammunition. Being kind and understanding people, the fucking Nazis went on a massacre, executing 5,155 Italian prisoners of war. FYI executing people after you’ve taken them prisoner is totally against the rules. But these people did the Holocaust so it’s not like they gave a shit. About 3,000 more were put on ships to be sent off to concentration camps, but in a terrible irony those ships were sunk by Allies and they drowned.
It’s worth mentioning that Mussolini was freed by German paratroopers in September of 1943, then Hitler put him in charge of a puppet regime in Northern Italy supporting the Axis, creating a civil war with the rest of Italy. The Italians caught him trying to escape to Switzerland in April 1945 and shot that fucker.
Support keeping this daily column free and get access to subscriber only content:
Get the book On This Day in History Sh!t Went Down.
Attribution Bundesarchiv, Bild 101I-177-1459-32 / Cuno / CC-BY-SA 3.0