It would seem that some of the Italian troops after the surrender were more aggressive then before it. I hadn't realized that the Germans were ready to kill so many also. Especially on Cephalonia where they shot the Italian commander and around 5,000 troops who resisted.
"The massacre of the Italian troops was prompted by Italy's decision to pull out of its alliance with Nazi Germany in September 1943 after the Allied invasion of Sicily.
Italian troops stationed on the Greek island of Cephalonia resisted subsequent German demands that they surrender and fought a week long battle with a Wehrmacht invasion force.
The Italian resistance was broken after the island was attacked by Stuka dive-bombers. Adolf Hitler ordered that no prisoners should be taken on the island, so the surviving Italian troops were rounded up and slaughtered as retribution for their country's "treachery".
The village of Troianata on Cephalonia was one of at least five locations on the island where the mass killings were carried out. Spiros Vangelatos, a 75-year-old retired English teacher and Cephalonian resident, witnessed the slaughter of about 600 Italian troops outside the village as a boy of 16.
The Italian troops were being held in the village school. Mr Vangelatos said that they expected to be sent back to Italy and spent the night before their murder singing sentimental songs of home.
The following morning they were marched out of the school into a field next to the village and mown down by Wehrmacht machine-gunners.
"Bits of bodies, clothing and lumps of earth were hurled into the air as the machine guns danced on their tripods. It lasted no longer than about three to four minutes," Mr Vangelatos said in an interview with the Tagesspiegel newspaper.
"The dying soldiers collapsed over each other next to a wall at the edge of the field." The villagers were then forced to dump the bodies in a well.
Mr Vangelatos's testimony forms part of the evidence supplied by six surviving Cephalonian residents who witnessed the murders. Last week their names were sent to the Dortmund state prosecutor as potential witnesses in the case.
Others on the island such as Stavros Niforatos, a doctor now aged 95, recalled how he passed a ravine full of butchered Italian troops after delivering a baby in one of the island's homes. "They [the Germans] had slit the Italians' throats with knives," he said. "It was as if they had slaughtered a herd of sheep."
About 3,000 Italian troops avoided the initial German round-up by hiding in caves on Cephalonia while the Wehrmacht laid waste to the island by burning and plundering homes.
Once they were captured they were put aboard ships which were to take them to prison camps in Germany, however the vessels hit mines after leaving harbour and sank.
Those who survived the shipwrecks were taken to the Eastern Front and forced to serve as labourers. Many ended up as Russian prisoners of war after Germany was driven back by the Red Army. More than 200 Greek civilians and resistance fighters were also shot or hanged during the year-long Nazi occupation of the island that ended in 1944.
Attempts by Greek residents of Cephalonia to obtain compensation from post-war Germany for the atrocities committed were rejected by the German government in 1996 as not being in accordance with international law.
The state prosecutors in Dortmund now believe that they will have sufficient evidence to put some of the surviving culprits on trial.
Ulrich Mass, the state prosecutor who is leading the investigation, said he planned to visit Cephalonia this autumn to interview the witnesses.
Earlier attempts by Italy to prosecute the alleged perpetrators were dropped because of a clause in German law which stipulates that its citizens cannot be extradited to stand trial for crimes committed abroad.
Attempts to prosecute the culprits in Germany failed because of lack of evidence that could convict them of murder rather than manslaughter - a charge which automatically expires 15 years after the crime was committed.
"Most of the former Wehrmacht officers involved in the Cephalonia murders are dead and the remainder are very old," Mr Mass said. "We are nevertheless optimistic that we will manage to bring some before the courts before they die."
Germans face charges over massacre on 'Corelli island' - Telegraph