Silence on Monte Sole

The chilling true story of the Nazi massacre of 1,800 Italian civilians.

Monte Sole. Mountain of the Sun. A 2,000-foot peak in the Apennines, fifteen miles south of Bologna, where tenant farmers tended their fields, priests served their parishes, and families had lived for generations. On the morning of September 29, 1944, the SS came.

Over three days, soldiers of Walter Reder's 16th Waffen-SS Reconnaissance Battalion, acting with the full authorization of Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, systematically killed nearly 1,800 men, women, and children. Among the dead were 45 children under the age of two. Five Catholic priests. Entire families. Kesselring described it as "a war operation." In operational terms, it meant mass murder.

Monte Sole had the misfortune of lying on the main route of the retreating German army. The mountain had sheltered partisan fighters, and the SS deemed it necessary to "neutralize" it. The massacre that followed was, as Kirkus Reviews wrote, "the unspeakable three-day butchery of innocent Italian civilians that ranked among the blackest atrocities in the history of man's inhumanities to man."

Jack Olsen's Silence on Monte Sole, first published in 1968, remains to this day the only book-length account of this massacre written in English. He went to Italy, interviewed survivors, examined the few surviving official records, and built the story from the ground up, beginning with the postman on his morning rounds, visiting the farmers, the priests, the storekeepers, the elders who had no idea what was coming. It is their individuality, rendered with compassion and precision, that makes what follows so devastating.

Jack Olsen, whom the Philadelphia Inquirer called "an American treasure," here proves himself something rarer: a witness to history, determined that these 1,800 souls would not be forgotten.