Mattarella marks anniversary of Stazzema Nazi massacre

(ANSA) - ROME, AUG 12 - President Sergio Mattarella on Saturday marked the 79th anniversary of the World War II Nazi massacre in the Tuscan village of Sant'Anna di Stazzema, when 560 unarmed people including 130 children were murdered.
    In a message Mattarella said Sant'Anna di Stazzema is one of the "symbolic places of the tragedy of the Second World War" that has become an "emblem of civil redemption, of rebellion against the most ferocious and inhuman violence, of solidarity, of moral and social reconstruction".
    "It is a duty for our community to remember what happened seventy-nine years ago in Sant'Anna and the other hamlets of Stazzema, when Nazi SS soldiers, supported by local fascists, carried out one of the most heinous massacres of the conflict," said the president.
    "It was a massacre of innocent lives. Women, old people, children - well over five hundred - were mercilessly killed. So many bodies were burnt and rendered unrecognisable," he added.
    "Europe touched the bottom of the abyss [...] but it is from that abyss that the path of the Italian people and of the European continent resumed," continued the head of state, adding that it is "up to each one of us to preserve and hand over the witness of memory to the younger generations so that they can be conscious protagonists of a responsible future in which the values of the human person are no longer put at risk".
    The August 12, 1944, massacre in Sant'Anna di Stazzema was the second worst WWII Nazi atrocity in Italy after the September 1944 Marzabotto massacre which killed over 770 people. (ANSA).