Genoa Trento Café bombing

The Genoa Trento Café bombing is a wartime attack in Genoa whose significance extends beyond the café itself: the explosion was followed by the selection of twenty uninvolved prisoners for reprisal. Recounted during Caspar Leinen’s courtroom presentation, the episode links an attack on German soldiers to the retaliatory violence that followed.

Setting and Preparation

At 10:18 p.m. on 16 May 1944, all fourteen tables in the Café Trento on Via di Ravecca were occupied. The guests were German soldiers, nearly all serving in the marines. A man in a lance corporal’s uniform entered, set a bag beside him at the bar, ordered a small beer, and left after paying. The bag weighed about a kilogram; before entering, he had crushed an ampoule in a brass tube with pincers.

The device used copper chloride solution to corrode an iron wire. Once the wire gave way, a spring-loaded mechanism would strike a percussion cap and produce a spark. The English detonator had been explained to the man repeatedly; German detonators were unsuitable because they acted too quickly and made a loud hiss. The arrangement gave him time to leave before the charge went off.

Explosion and Immediate Effects

Eighteen minutes after the man left, the Plastit W detonated. Its stated speed was 8,750 metres per second, and the explosion was described as more violent than TNT. Two men died instantly, and fourteen others were injured; an NCO was among those affected. The pressure of the blast threw furniture through the café, shattered bottles and glasses, broke the windows, and tore the door from its hinges.

The account gives the attack a precise, almost procedural sequence: a crowded room, a small bag placed beneath the bar, a delayed mechanism, and then the sudden destruction of the café. That measured preparation contrasts with the violence of the blast and makes the timing central to how the attack unfolded.

Reprisal and Consequences

The bombing did not end with the destruction of the café. German authorities expected an answer to the attack and described the measures to come as uncompromising. At Marassi Prison, an interpreter was given a list of twenty prisoners and instructed to call out their numbers, not their names. The prisoners were told they were being moved; they understood that they were going to die. None had had anything to do with the bombing.

Hans Meyer joined the convoy leaving the prison. In the jeep, he referred to orders from Hitler and General Kesselring and to reprisals at a ratio of ten dead partisans for each German soldier killed. The bombing thus becomes the immediate context for a reprisal that swept up prisoners unconnected to the attack, exposing the gap between the stated rationale of retaliation and the people made to bear its cost.

Narrative Role

The event appears within Leinen’s courtroom presentation of the wartime history behind the case. Its chronology moves from the device’s preparation to its detonation and then toward the prison convoy, broadening the focus from the attack’s immediate victims to the state violence that followed. The café bombing matters both as a discrete act and as the beginning of a chain of consequences that reaches beyond those present at the scene.