16 May 1944

16 May 1944 is the date of the Café Trento bombing and the beginning of the reprisal that followed it: after the explosion in Genoa, German forces selected twenty prisoners for execution, none of whom had anything to do with the attack. Through the unnamed interpreter forced to translate for the authorities, the account connects a military response described as a clean operation to frightened prisoners, an appalling killing, and a list that later identifies Nicola Collini as one of the dead.

The bombing in Genoa

At eighteen minutes past ten in the evening, all fourteen tables in the Café Trento, on the narrow Via di Ravecca, were occupied. The guests were German soldiers, nearly all serving in the marines. Their uniform jackets were unbuttoned; some played cards and some were already drunk. A man in a lance corporal’s uniform came to the bar, ordered a small beer, and drank it standing without speaking to anyone. He nudged a light bag partly beneath the counter.

Before entering, the man had crushed an ampoule at the end of a brass tube with pincers. A copper chloride solution in the bag gradually corroded an iron wire, setting up a delayed mechanism: when the wire gave way, a spring would release a bolt against a percussion cap and produce a spark. The English detonator had been explained to him repeatedly. German detonators were unsuitable because they acted too quickly and made a loud hiss. The device gave the man at least fifteen minutes; he set down his empty glass, left money on the bar, and departed.

Eighteen minutes after he entered, the Plastit W exploded at 8,750 metres a second, with a force described as greater than TNT. The pressure wave crushed the body of a man standing near the bag and tore another man’s lungs; both died instantly. The blast hurled furniture through the room and smashed bottles, glasses, and ashtrays. A wood splinter entered an NCO’s left eye, and fourteen other men were injured by fragments of glass in their faces, arms, and chests. The café’s windows shattered, and its door was torn from its hinges and thrown onto the paving outside.

The prisoners selected for reprisal

The account follows the interpreter, who had been taken to German headquarters after German soldiers confiscated his food and cigarettes. When they discovered that he spoke South Tyrolese German, they told him he must either go to prison or serve as their interpreter. Later, ordered to reach Marassi Prison by a quarter to three in the morning, he understood what was expected despite having received no explanation. Earlier assassination attempts had not, in the Germans’ view, called for the same response as the Café Trento bombing. The authorities would now impose what they called uncompromising measures.

At three in the morning, the interpreter received a list and was instructed to call out the numbers beside its names—numbers only, twenty in all. The prisoners came out of their cells, still in the atmosphere of sleep. A German from Department V, responsible for criminal investigation, told them to dress and said they were being moved and could leave their belongings behind. The statement that they would be sent on gave away the deception: the prisoners knew that they were going to die. The German checked the numbers on the cell doors and crossed each one off the list. None of the twenty had been involved in the bombing.

The prisoners climbed aboard a truck in the brightly lit prison yard and sat on benches beneath its open tarpaulin. Four marines carrying sub-machine guns guarded them. No one shouted orders, and the prisoners did not resist. The interpreter travelled in a jeep with the officer in charge of the marines; Hans Meyer joined them at the prison door. Meyer spoke of Hitler’s orders, General Kesselring, and a reprisal ratio of ten dead supposed bandits for every German soldier killed. He referred to the killing of thirty-three German soldiers in Rome’s Via Rasella and to the subsequent execution of 335 civilians in the Ardeatine Caves, including a child. He called that operation neat and clean.

The killing in the ravine

After about an hour, the road narrowed. The interpreter saw a deer in the headlights before the convoy stopped, though he had lost his sense of direction. Two buses and perhaps forty German marines blocked the roadside. The prisoners were made to leave the truck and tied together in pairs by their left arms, so that one had to walk forwards while the other walked backwards. The interpreter stayed with them, translating orders, then followed Meyer and the marines into a ravine. At its bottom stood a pit, apparently dug by other prisoners and reinforced with boards.

Ten marines formed a line five or six metres from the pit. Five prisoners were led onto a wooden plank facing the gun muzzles. They were not blindfolded; no one explained what was happening, and no priest came. At the officer’s commands to release the safety catches, take aim, and fire, ten shots rang out. The men fell backwards into the pit. As another five were brought forward, an older NCO climbed down a small ladder in gumboots and shot two men through the head. The interpreter understood these as supposed acts of mercy after the firing squad had already killed them.

The next prisoners could see the bodies below them, lying one on another in dirt and muddy water, their limbs distorted and their jackets bloodied. They still did not resist. One man broke the prescribed sequence: instead of looking at the soldiers, he looked at the sky and raised his arms, crying “Viva Italia!” twice. A soldier, very young and shaken, fired too soon, striking him in the chest while his arms were still outstretched. The interpreter watched the young man’s face and understood the scene as human beings killing other human beings, rather than combat between enemies. The daily bulletin would later reduce the operation to the words, “Reprisal Operation carried out successfully. No incident of note.”

The list and its aftermath

When the killing was over, the marines covered the pit with earth and heaved a large rock over it as a marker. Nobody spoke on the journey back. By the time the interpreter cycled back into Genoa, the sun was well up. He did not want to go home or face his wife and children; instead, he went down to the sea, lay on the beach, and looked at the waves. These actions do not resolve what he witnessed. They carry the silence of the journey and the execution into the hours after it.

That evening, after getting drunk, the interpreter told his wife what had happened in the ravine. They sat in the kitchen while she listened. When he finished, she stood and struck him repeatedly in the face, stopping only when she was exhausted. They remained together in the dark for a long time. At last he turned on the light and handed her the list of names he had brought away from the prison. She read it aloud; the first name was Nicola Collini.

Four days later, news reached the village where the Collinis lived. Uncle Mauro bent over the sleeping Fabrizio and kissed him on the eyes, then told him, “from now on you are my son.” The execution’s consequence thus extends beyond the ravine: the list identifies the loss that leaves the child without his father and prompts his uncle’s declaration of parenthood. The contrast between the official bulletin’s sterile wording and the interpreter’s remembered details makes the reprisal’s human cost impossible to contain within the language of military procedure.