In what will definitely go down as a first in the history books, Italy has paid compensation to victims of Nazi war crimes, paying 800,000 euros ($840,000) to the heirs of a man killed in a 1944 civilian massacre in Tuscany, according to a lawyer for the heirs and the Italian Treasury on Wednesday, December 4.
The landmark decision is following decades of legal struggles and will mark a remarkable shift in the Italian government’s approach, possibly setting a paradigm for the families of other victims of Nazi and fascist crimes.
Metello Ricciarini was killed together with 243 others in Civitella in Val di Chiana, a city about 220 kilometres north of Rome, on June 29, 1944, in a counter attack by German troops after two of them died in a shootout with Italian partisans.
“I express my satisfaction, of my mother Metella and of my relatives, who received the money from the economy ministry last week,” the family lawyer and victim’s nephew, Roberto Alboni had said, adding that it took two decades to get compensation.
In 1962, Germany paid Italy 40 million Deutschmarks, worth just over 1 billion euros in today’s money, to take care of the damage(s) inflicted by Nazi forces on the Italian state and its citizens during World War Two.
That agreement had left Italy subject to paying any future compensation demands from victims, but no action was taken for years on years.
The then-prime minister Mario Draghi established a fund worth 61 million euros in 2022 to cover growing compensation claims from victims and their descendants, hoping to mark an end to a dark chapter in Italy’s history.
The Nazi troops who committed atrocities in Italy were regularly help by local Fascists.
A study funded by the German government and published in 2016 adjudged that about 22,000 Italians were victims of Nazi war crimes, including up to 8,000 Jews who were deported to death camps.
Thousands more Italians were also forced to work as enslaved labourers in Germany.
