What is the legacy?

The creation of public memory begins

Monte Sole has become “Marzabotto”, a name that automatically means something to the ears of every Italian, just as the massacre at Oradour sur Glâne has a special meaning for the French  and the reprisals at Lidice have a special meaning  for the Czechs. It is a symbol of the Resistance, the sacrifice of a people for liberty from occupation and oppression.

Monte Sole became Marzabotto. As two Italian  historians have observed:

We know everything about the massacre of Marzabotto. On the contrary we know almost nothing  about the slaughters of Monte Sole.

Pezzino, Baldissara, Il massacro. Guerra ai civili a Monte Sole, Il Mulino, Bologna, 2009

Public awareness of the complexities of what actually happened  has been replaced by, on the one side, myth and, on the other side, individual memories. Historical analysis of the events in Monte Sole came much later.

Oradour sur Glâne, a village in the Haute-Vienne departement of France, was destroyed and the people massacred by the 2nd Waffen SS Panzer Division on 10 June 1944. It has been left as it was in memory of the victims.

The museum  which was built on the site of the village of Lidice in Czechoslovakia which was destroyed by SS forces on June 10, 1942 in reprisal for the assassination of Deputy Reichsprotektor Reinhard Heydrich.  The men were killed and the women and children sent to concentration camps.