Cefalonia: the massacre and the aftermath

[Gian]

http://www.cefalonia.it is a website dealing with the massacre of the Acqui Division in the Ionian Isles in 1943. It is the brainchild of Massimo Filippini, a lawyer and retired Italian Air Force officer whose father, Maggiore Federico Filippini, is himself a victim of the atrocity.
The pages detail the facts, inquiries and trials from the early days, and contain a very large press release.
Filippini Jr. maintains that the official version on the Cefalonia massacre (the unanimous vote of all officers and men for the fight against the Germans) was a façade conceived in the immediate postwar period to hide the responsibility of actual culprits for political reasons: some junior officers with sympathies for the ELAS communist underground movement and disobeyed General Antonio Gandin's orders by first firing on the Germans. In fact, the whole Division was plunged into battle by the Comando Supremo in Brindisi, which wired the order to fight despite the obvious impossibility to provide any back-up or reinforcements while the rest of the Italian military was coming apart.
After the war, the mutineers proclaimed themselves "partisans" (in a time, September 1943, when the Italian Resistance movement was still to come) to censor that, while Greek guerrillas vanished after they'd been given Italian rifles, various hundreds of Italians stayed on the island as German "collaborators" for over a year; they were repatriated after the Wehrmacht evacuated Cefalonia in Fall 1944.

Also, the webmaster does not spare criticisms to most of the fictional literature, movies and TV series inspired by the historical facts, and also tackles the issue of the casualty count. Despite being officially reported in various occasions as 10,000 (more than the full complement of the Division), 8000 (i.e. the full complement with no survivors), or 5000, a more recent enquiry of his own shows that the number of dead, wounded or missing is much lower.
He is very willing to communicate with visitors and to send any of his books to anybody who requests it. Both the website and the books are entirely in Italian language.

The books can be ordered directly from the publisher (IBN) through this address: info at ibneditore.it