Free Weekly Digest

On the Road

This week I paid a visit to see one of my favourite people at his specialist bookshop in Salisbury. Patrick Hillman was a librarian for many years before he desired to live the dream in retirement and run a second hand bookshop entirely catering for history nerds.

It is currently located (after a terrifying move from its original site in which many of us stopped by and thought he’d closed up) in Fisherton Mill, in the town centre. IN the course of the last few years I’ve spent many happy hours chatting with Patrick and exploring the shelves, and highly recommend it for any history fans who happen to be in the area.

Stephen Fisher of ‘Sword Beach’ fame is a massive nerd. IDET. He’s been visiting Patrick for longer than I have.

---

Do us all a favour though…

One particular book has been sitting on the shelves in both versions of the shop for a decade. It’s become a running joke - every time I arrive I inquire as to whether Lord Curzon is still there. Arguably, if he was less tedious it might have sold by now, and we don’t advocate destruction of books, but if it doesn’t leave soon, Patrick is threatening to dispose of the self-aggrandising old duffer. Someone out there must want him…

Patrick doesn’t open every day, he is retired after all. To check his opening hours and find full details of the shop, click here.

---

---

This Week

On Monday, I looked at a banker piece of true crime from pre-WW1 Germany…

It feels like the world is losing its mind at the moment, but this isn’t a new phenomena. If you’re remotely interested in history, you’ll know that there is nothing new when it comes to people. They’ve always been the same, and they’ve always done inexplicable things. I want to take you back to Germany in 1900, where a whole town full of Prussians in one town lost their sh*t in epic fashion and started pointing fingers at a minority group in their midst decades before Hitler was a household name…

Konitz is now in Poland, but in March 1900 it fell within Germany’s borders. At the beginning of that year, Ernst Winter was 18 years old. An only son, he was raised with his four sisters in a working class, Protestant family outside of the town proper. His father Johannes was a robust figure; a powerful construction worker. Ernst had done his parents proud; receiving his education amongst the sons of the middle-class at the Konitz gymnasium and boarding in town; faring well enough in his studies. He excelled, however, at sports and was swimmer, a cyclist, a dancer, and a gymnast. In his spare time, he did that age-old teenage thing of hanging out in town; no particular purpose, just socialising, passing the time. Ernst was popular with the young ladies of Konitz, and he could often be found promenading from the Wilhelmsplatz, along Danzigerstrasse, around to the market place and back again; smartly dressed.

This, in fact, was where he was last seen on Sunday 11th March, wearing a dark blue blazer with a fancy velvet collar, a dark blue silk tie, a lambskin coat and a silk blue scarf. On his head he had worn a black felt hat decorated with gold buttons. Various witnesses put him in town, walking with another young man, perhaps two, idling at the end of one street or another, until 6:30pm. Then, Ernst Winter disappeared.

48 hours later, Johannes Winter was searching for his son on the edges of a thawing lake called the Mönchsee with a baker named Hermann Lange, when they spotted a package bobbing in the water, wrapped up tightly in thick paper. They used a stick to poke it to within reach, and began ripping off the layers of packaging. They might have wished they hadn’t, because inside was part of a human torso oozing blood and water.

Winter was utterly convinced that it was his son. As he and Lange waded about in the long grass at the edges of the lake, a crowd gathered to watch. Police and fire officials assembled, joined by hunters with dogs and they began a meticulous search for the rest of the body and any clues as to the boy’s demise. Almost immediately, Winter and Lange found another package. Inside was the other part of the torso, still attached to the pelvis; though the victim had been disembowelled.

The victim, Ernst Winter (historiachojnic.pl)

---

That was it, for now. It was another four days before a local boy finally stumbled across an arm; sitting by the town’s Protestant Cemetery on some freshly fallen snow; and afive days more before the lake turned up a left thigh. It was established that the parts all belonged to the same individual, and Johannes Winter was proven right almost straight away. The victim’s digestive tract bore traces of his last meal: soup, pork, potatoes and sour cucumbers. Without a doubt, this tallied with the last thing Ernst had been seen eating. Key to the burgeoning investigation was the fact that the food was hardly digested. That meant that the young man had barely survived past those last sightings, but what, on earth could have happened to him?

Then on Thursday I looked at the eventful life of an Italian general…

A last one from the recent trip to Italy today. On our last day, we decided to take a walk up to a pretty nondescript building down a side street in Rome. If you walked past it, it wouldn’t stand out at all, if you didn’t know it’s history. The building in question was in German hands prior to Italy leaving her ally in the lurch in 1943, and when Hitler’s men moved in and began subjecting the ancient city to what would be a short, but brutal occupation, the SS decided to use it as a prison/interrogation (torture) centre. Walking through the ‘cells’ and taking in all of the content is a sober experience. I was reading messages etched on the walls in one, when I noticed a pencil inscription someone had added. It read, in broken English:

‘General Simoni’s cellar [sic]. Great invalid of 1st World War. Seven medals of valour 1st World War. Here from 22nd of January 1944 to 24th of March.’

Rabbit hole accepted…

The town of Patrica (Giuseppe Diana, via Flickr)

---

It turns out that Simone Simoni was born on Christmas Eve 1880 in Patrica, a hilltop town near Frosinone, about 60 miles southeast of Rome. His family was large, (he was among the elder of six children) and opportunities were limited. He received a decent enough education under Dominican guidance, but then at seventeen, he enlisted in the army and joined the 52nd Infantry Regiment. He was clearly marked out as a potential leader, and by 1899 he’d been promoted twice to sergeant. He continued to progress. In 1903, Simoni received a commission, and by 1907 he had been promoted to full Lieutenant.

His life was not without setbacks. He was engaged to be married, when in 1908 a catastrophic earthquake took place with its epicentre in the Straits of Messina. Simoni’s fiancee was one of up to 80,000 casualties suffered as a result of 37 seconds of carnage.

In so far as combat is concerned, by 1911 Simoni found himself in Libya. Italy was trying to colonise this pocket of North Africa, and met fierce resistance from the Ottomans, who had counted this land as theirs since the 1500s. The Italo-Turkish war began in September, and Simoni departed for North Africa at the beginning of November. Sailing from Naples, he arrived in Cyrenaica and by the end of the month, had already earned his first bronze medal for military valour. ‘Head of a reconnaissance patrol, he was the first to enter a house occupied by the enemy.’

It was not a one off. Simoni would prove adept at guerrilla warfare, and brave with it. The war would end in Italy’s favour in October 1912, but a military presence would obviously remain and Simoni did not leave Africa for some time. On 10th January 1914, he was noticed again as a result of an incident at Marabutto di Sceneiscen. 'With positive initiative, he led 40 local guards to the liberation of a leader captured by the marauders, managing to put them to flight and seizing weapons and livestock.’ This time, he was wounded, suffering chest wounds and damage to his right thigh in the process. Shortly afterwards, King Victor Emmanuel III knighted him and he was promoted once again.

Simoni returned to Italy in September 1915, to marry his deceased fiancee’s sister, Mercedes, but he had no intention of returning to Libya. Italy had joined the Allies and dates her official entry into the First World War as 24th May, 1915. Simoni now asked to be given a European job, and in October he was appointed as a battalion commander with the 73rd Infantry Regiment.

In his absence, the 73rd had taken part in the First Battle of the Isonzo back in May, attempting to punt the Austro-Hungarians off Monte Peuma. Almost immediately, General Cadorna, in command of Italy’s armies, ordered another assault, which also failed. He then allowed some time to elapse in order for units to recover from heavy casualties, before the Third Battle of the Isonzo was launched in October. Once again, the Italian offensive failed, and Simone Simoni had arrived just in time for round four. The big objective in all of this was the town of Gorizia, to the south of the 73rd, but yet again, Cadorna’s plans came to nothing, and in the course of the battles so far he had amassed some 185,000 casualties.

Once again, it took Simoni less than a month to draw attention to himself on arriving in a theatre of war. His medal citation reads:

’In fierce fighting, for several days against very well-fortified enemy positions, he gave admirable proof of courage under the fury of the enemy fire, managing to instil in his troops a very high sense of self-denial. Imposing himself with his constant presence in the most threatened points of the line reached at the cost of heavy losses, he withstood with resolve the shock of repeated and violent counterattacks by the enemy, superior in strength and armed with much artillery and many machine guns.’

Simoni was transferred further north to join the 228th Infantry Regiment in the sector around Tolmin. He did not participate in any of the interminable battles of the Isonzo in 1916. He did, however, eventually receive yet another medal for valour in November, for his actions during a localised attack:

‘After intelligent and assiduous preparation, under violent fire, the attack on strong enemy entrenchments was boldly launched. Stopped by the serious obstacles posed by the impassable terrain and the tenacious resistance of his adversary, he persisted, and inciting his troops by example, he repelled the enemy's furious counterattacks, holding firmly to the positions he had reached.’

In the summer of 1917, Simoni was promoted again, to Major. Within a a few weeks, his men were launched at the Isonzo once again. By now, Cadorna was on the eleventh attempt to crack this. Simoni and his men were allotted to the first wave of the attack near a hill known as il Dosso Fáiti. Here’s his later citation for five days of madness:

‘Commander of a battalion, he prepared his troops for the action in which the unit was to participate as the first wave of assault. Despite the very violent fire of the enemy, he led the battalion to the assault, and finding himself in front of an intact wire entanglement, behind a fold of the ground, he encouraged his men to repeatedly to attack.’

Once again, the Italians ran out of steam before they could win victory over the enemy. And this time, they really were done. This latest offensive cost Cadorna almost another 160,000 casualties. The only saving grace was that the Austro-Hungarians were just as spent. The two adversaries now sat, all out of resources and ideas. Unfortunately for Cadorna, Germany now recognised that they were going to have to come and prop up their ailing ally, and so when the Twelfth Battle of the Isonzo came, Italy would be facing a combined force. That battle is known by another name, one that is still a watchword for a complete catastrophe in Italy today: Caporetto…

Next Week

Come back next week for a 1940 guide to India published by the British Army, and a free look at a new book examining just how much Allies new about the Holocaust…