Dryden closed his eyes and wished for sleep, but felt only the claustrophobia of the moon tunnel. He thought of Serafino Amatista, dying in his grave, and the German officer who had identified him as a deserter. Could that officer really have been Siegfried Mann? The short Who’s Who entry left little doubt he had been a prisoner. Had he spent the last years of the war inside the wire at California? Was the aged historian the agent of Serafino’s nemesis?
Dryden swung the COMPASS screen round, pulled up the bedside chair, and using Google typed in ‘Nuremberg’ and ‘Agios Gallini’, the village Roman Casartelli had named as the scene of Serafino’s desertion.
No matches. He deleted the village name and trawled an official site on the Nuremberg Trials, which had been held in occupied Germany between 1945 and 1949, and at which the leading Nazi war criminals had been arraigned. There was no mention of Agios Gallini but there was a brief reference to a 1942 agreement between the Allied Powers to allow, at the end of hostilities, local courts to pursue allegations of war crimes committed in occupied countries. Two such courts were listed in Greece in 1946, in Athens and Salonika. Dryden found a weblink to an online account of the proceedings for both courts on a site run by the Greek government: there were four language versions – Greek, English, German and Italian. Following the English route he found the first reference to Agios Gallini – Case 42 of the sixty-eight heard at Salonika.
He called up the full indictment and let the cursor blink on the name of the principal accused: Oberstleutnant Siegfried Viktor Mann.
The complete transcript was eighteen pages long and he decided not to print it out in case the clatter woke Laura. Instead he settled himself by the bedside, pouring a fresh glass of wine.
Mann was not the only accused. He was indicted alongside four men in his command who had, under their own admission, formed a firing squad in a quarry outside the village of Agios Gallini on the afternoon of 4 August 1943. Mann, however, as the commanding officer, was the only accused who faced the death penalty if convicted. The charge was straightforward: that they had summarily executed Constantine Karamanlis, a 73-year-old peasant farmer in the village, in reprisal for the alleged murder of Serafino Ricci, an Italian conscript and the guard provided by the civilian occupying administration. While the court noted that a proclamation issued by the Italian authorities specifically required reprisals in such cases, the presiding judge referred to an Allied declaration of 1943 which made it clear that such acts were barbarous, and would constitute a war crime whatever local legislation had been put in place. Mann and his comrades faced a further charge: that on the afternoon of the same day, while the rest of the villagers were held in the church by other members of Mann’s company, he or his soldiers were responsible for the death of Katina Papas, Constantine Karamanlis’s five-year-old granddaughter. She was last seen entering her grandfather’s house shortly before his arrest.
Mann and his co-accused did not appear at the preliminary hearing. A statement was entered into the court records by his lawyer in which Mann stated that a search of the village had revealed a cache of three rifles and a box of ammunition hidden in the old man’s house. Karamanlis had, therefore, been shot as a partisan, not in reprisal for the death of the village guard. Mann’s lawyer, who had secured statements from two Greek eyewitnesses to the ransacking of the village, stated that the discovery of the arms and ammunition was not disputed. Further, there was no evidence, except the circumstantial, to link Mann and his men to the disappearance of the child. The submissions were reluctantly accepted by the court, and the indictment put aside. The fate of Katina Papas remained unknown, the court ruled, adding a direct appeal for any information which could help identify the whereabouts of the child’s body.
Dryden briefly reviewed the other cases before the court. More than forty preliminary hearings led to full trials, before a bench of three judges, in Salonika in 1947. Of these twenty-nine resulted in convictions and eight German officers were hanged at Piraeus in November of that year. Six others were given prison sentences, served out in their native Germany. Dryden followed another link to a newspaper cutting on the executions. There was a grainy black and white picture: the eight strung up from a single gibbet in a prison yard.
Outside Laura’s room the moon hung, perfectly framed in the clear cool glass of the window. Dryden considered the life and times of Siegfried Mann. A well-educated young man, set for an academic career, pressed into Hitler’s army. Posted to Greece, where the simple polarities of war are blurred by the Italian civil government, and the simmering hatred of Right and Left, which would later explode into civil war. Then came Agios Gallini, and the events of 4 August 1943.