Hans Meyer—Nicola Collini: commander and execution victim

Hans Meyer and Nicola Collini are linked by an asymmetry of power with lifelong consequences: Hans Meyer commanded the German authorities holding Nicola, and Nicola was among the prisoners executed in a reprisal operation. The connection is first preserved in a family’s account of arrest and then, decades later, recovered in court as evidence that Hans Meyer’s role had been known and investigated. Its significance lies not only in the killing itself, but in the delayed disclosure that the victim’s son had brought charges against the man in command—and that the proceedings had ended because the statute of limitations had come into force.

Arrest and identification

After the destruction of the Collini farm, Uncle Mauro went to Genoa to find out what had happened to Fabrizio’s father. He returned with an official-looking sheet bearing two swastika stamps and the words Security Service. It identified the prison as being in the Marassi district and stated that the arrest had been ordered by a Security Service detachment posted in Milan. The paper also named the German now in charge of the prisoners: SS-Sturmbannführer Hans Meyer.

For the family, the document made an absent father legible through institutional details: a prison, an arresting authority, and the name of the official responsible for the prisoners. The account does not describe a personal meeting between Hans Meyer and Nicola Collini. Instead, it establishes their connection through the machinery of arrest and command. Hans Meyer’s name, carefully pronounced by Uncle Mauro as he read the document, would later resurface in a different setting, where its significance extended beyond the fate of one prisoner.

The prisoners at Marassi

In the account of the execution, an interpreter is ordered to Marassi Prison in the early hours of the morning. There he receives a list of twenty prisoners and calls out only the numbers beside their names. None of the men had been involved in the bombing of Café Trento. When they are told to dress and leave their belongings behind because they are being moved, they understand that the explanation is false and that they are going to die.

The prisoners are taken from the prison in a truck guarded by four armed marines. Hans Meyer joins the party at the prison door and rides in the jeep with the interpreter and the officer in charge of the marines. On the journey, he refers to Hitler’s orders, General Kesselring, and a reprisal ratio of ten dead partisans for each German soldier killed. He also invokes the killing of thirty-three German soldiers in Rome and the subsequent execution of 335 civilians at the Ardeatine Caves. The interpreter’s account presents these references as the rationale offered for the operation, while making plain that the twenty men selected at Marassi had no connection to the bombing for which the reprisals were being carried out.

At the ravine, the prisoners are tied together in pairs and led toward a pit. Ten marines form a firing line; five men at a time are brought onto a wooden plank and shot. An older non-commissioned officer climbs down into the pit to shoot two of the fallen men through the head. The prisoners are unblindfolded, receive no explanation, and are given no priest. One man raises his arms and cries out for Italy; a young soldier fires before the order, striking him as his arms are still outstretched. The interpreter understands the scene not as combat but as human beings killing other human beings. Hans Meyer is present as the senior figure identified with command, although the account assigns the firing commands to another officer.

Nicola Collini’s place in the record

After the pit is covered with earth and marked by a large rock, the interpreter returns to Genoa. That evening, he tells his wife what happened. When he has finished, she strikes him repeatedly; later, he gives her the list of names he has taken from the prison. She reads it aloud, and Nicola Collini is the first name. This moment connects the atrocity’s anonymous counting system—numbers called in a corridor, men moved in a truck—to the identity of a particular prisoner and to the Collini family’s loss.

Four days later, news reaches the village where the Collinis lived. Uncle Mauro bends over the sleeping Fabrizio and tells him that from then on he is his son. The episode does not show Hans Meyer speaking with Nicola or record a personal exchange between them. Their relationship is instead defined by the chain joining the arresting authority, the command over the prisoners, Nicola’s name on the list, and the family left behind. That distinction matters: the narrative makes the violence concrete without turning it into a private rivalry between two men.

The courtroom disclosure

Years later, during the trial of Fabrizio Collini, Caspar Leinen asks Dr Schwan who had brought charges against Hans Meyer. She identifies Fabrizio Collini as the complainant. The answer surprises the judges; Richard Mattinger’s face pales. The disclosure recasts the family history: Fabrizio’s father was not only one of the men killed in the operation, but his son had later pursued a formal complaint against the man whose name appeared in the record of his father’s imprisonment.

Leinen then asks whether Hans Meyer had been involved. Dr Schwan answers that Hans Meyer was in command. Asked why proceedings against him were discontinued, she explains that the statute of limitations had come into force. The exchange links the wartime hierarchy to a postwar legal outcome: command is stated plainly, but the prosecution did not proceed. The relation between Hans Meyer and Nicola Collini therefore reaches beyond the execution. It becomes a measure of what the surviving family could establish, what the legal record had already registered, and why that record still failed to bring Hans Meyer to trial.