Human remains found in Monte Sole: they could date back to the 1944 massacre

The carabinieri of the Casalecchio mobile radio section and the Marzabotto station intervened near the church of Santa Maria Assunta in Casaglia, in the historic park of Monte Sole, "to recover presumably human remains dating back to the Second World War". The intervention, the military said, was carried out at 12.10 yesterday, and "took place exactly in one of the areas where the ferocious massacre of Monte Sole took place", in the autumn of 1944.

The police detail that the alarm was given to 112 by "two citizens who, being on site, spotted the bones directly on the ground". It is not an entire skeleton, but bony remains, small pieces that can perhaps be traced back to a part of the mandible and a part of the tibia. Once they arrived on site, the military carried out a thorough inspection of the area, and according to what emerged from the first inspections "the soil affected by the discovery had recently been the subject of works for the laying of optical fibre".

Most likely "it was precisely these excavations that brought to the surface the traces buried for decades", further fragmenting the remains. At the end of the inspections, they were seized, and now "in-depth investigations are underway which will have to officially confirm the human nature of the bones" and try, if possible, to identify the person to whom they belonged.

Cardi (Honors of fallen soldiers): “The census of the massacre was very complicated”

The news of the discovery does not surprise Valter Cardi, president of the committee honoring the fallen of Marzabotto. "It took us 10 years to compile the precise list of the 770 people killed in the Nazi-fascist massacre which lasted from 29 September to 4 October 1944 - explains Cardi - while the deaths due to war in total were 1,830, but it is possible that someone, trying to give a worthy burial to some dead person they knew, buried the body and was then killed themselves. The census of what happened was very complicated: the registry office of the Municipality had burned, we had to rely on the Municipality of Bologna, the testimonies were missing and in the end the list we drew up was the one with all the evidence up to cases like this".

According to Cardi, there is also a more subtle and human motivation behind the difficulty of reconstructing the details of a massacre. "It was a very different era, entire families had been killed and no one wanted to talk about it - he remembers - even my father, who remained alive hiding under his mother's corpse, always had the shame to talk about it, because he was almost ashamed of having been a victim, he felt guilty for having survived. It is not easy today to think about what families, villages and the entire peasant society were like at that time".