Miracle of Sant'Anna: Rewriting history?

When six Nazi SS officers were sentenced to life in 2005 for the massacre of Sant'Anna di Stazzema, it was the first moment of catharsis the village had enjoyed since the day in August 1944 when four columns of Nazi stormtroopers poured down from the hills and slaughtered everyone in sight, including dozens of women and children.

But this week even that small dose of justice – the SS men were tried in absentia – was threatened when Italy's senior prosecutor argued in its highest court, the Court of Cassation, that the trials were unfair and the sentences should be quashed.

Suddenly the village feels vulnerable. Its belated, symbolic vindication is at risk, to the dismay of the few survivors of the massacre and their relatives, who believed a line had finally been drawn under the village's agony. And then there is Spike Lee, the American director, about to start making a feature film set in the village, which has excited an entirely different debate.

Lee is basing his film on a novel, The Miracle of Sant'Anna, by James MacBride, a black veteran of the Second World War, the story of four black GIs abandoned high in the Appenines while the Allied troops fought to drive the Germans across the so-called Gothic Line and northwards. His main aim in the film, he told journalists in Rome, was "to restore the voice of black soldiers who fought in the war. Black soldiers always fought with great courage and sacrifice for democracy; they were always distinguished by their heroism and humanity, but back home they were still considered second-class citizens."

But by getting justice for black soldiers, voices in the village say, he risks doing a grave injustice to history. One scene in the film has convinced some villagers that he is going to depict the massacre as a reprisal for partisan attacks; in fact, the German attack was gratuitous and planned in minute detail.

Four companies of the 16th SS Panzer-Grenadier Division arrived in Sant'Anna before dawn on 12 August 1944. When villagers saw a flare fired by the Germans at about 6am, the signal for their operation to begin, the village's able-bodied men disappeared into the woods. Then suddenly SS men stormed into the village and killed everyone they came across, old men and women, infants, children, pregnant women. In all, 560 people died, 116 of them children.

The massacre was the beginning of a Nazi scorched-earth policy intended to deprive the partisans of cover. Yet Sant'Anna was the victim of decades of official amnesia: the Italian state behaved as if nothing had happened. Not until the discovery in 1994 of a cabinet stuffed with documents about the massacre – "the cabinet of shame" – were the first halting steps taken on the road to justice.

Sant'Anna's inferno is no longer a secret, a dreadful deed of which no one outside the village cares to speak. But this week villagers fear the memory of what happened there again risks being distorted and abused.

Italy's prosecutor general, Vittorio Garino, told the Court of Cassation that the convictions of three of the six SS officers, in a trial that lasted 13 years, were based on inadequate evidence. There was no proof, he said "of their physical presence in Sant'Anna".

The trial was also faulty, he said, because "ordinary Nazi soldiers were heard as witnesses to the massacre, people who participated in it and who for that reason also deserved to be investigated".

Mr Garino's objections apply to several trials of former Nazi soldiers for massacres committed in Italy, including that in the town of Marzabotto (1,836 fatalities) for which 10 men were sentenced to life in January.

To the great relief of Sant'Anna, the court upheld the sentences yesterday. But Spike Lee's decision to immortalise the hideous events remains a concern for some villagers.

"It's a false reconstruction that does not take account of the historical reality," said Marco Bonucelli, a local reformed communist politician.

"While I esteem and appreciate the films of Spike Lee, it's not possible to claim 'cinematographic licence' for the total invention of the motives that led the Nazis to carry out the massacre.

"This sort of fiction should be banned, otherwise the damage to the memory and historical truth will be very serious."

The mayor of the village, Michele Silicani, did his best to restore calm: the fuss, he said, was over one brief scene in which a Nazi soldier asks the village priest where the partisans are. The film, he said, will do no violence to the memory of the village or the reputation of the partisans, adding: "I am sure Spike Lee will make a masterpiece."

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