The events of Chiasso

Chiasso, Como

Key figures: Mario Martinoni, Joseph McDivitt

Further reading: Chiasso's darkest dawn (RSI), Operation Sunrise

The darkest dawn (28 April 1945). The Americans were already in Como, Mussolini was on the run. In front of the Chiasso border three hundred German soldiers, from the SS and the navy, massed, determined to enter Switzerland rather than end up as prisoners of the Soviets. Corso San Gottardo was cleared, and three thousand Swiss soldiers stood on alert with their weapons aimed. Bern's order was clear: the Germans must not enter.

The negotiation (28 April 1945). Colonel Mario Martinoni, the regimental commander, crossed the border by car and reached Como. At the Hotel Suisse Metropole he found the American major Joseph McDivitt and obtained the promise that the Germans would be interned in American camps and not handed over to the Soviets. Back in Chiasso, with McDivitt and the Swiss consul in Milan, Franco Brenni, he persuaded the Germans to surrender. One by one they laid down their arms on the customs forecourt, in front of Christian Schiefer's camera.

Punished, then rehabilitated (1945–2010). The people celebrated the colonel who had saved Chiasso. But for his superiors Martinoni had left his command post without authorisation: he was relieved of his command and punished, and the next day 1,500 Ticino soldiers were replaced by troops from German-speaking Switzerland. He would be rehabilitated only after his death, in 2010. A glass plaque in front of the Ponte Chiasso customs post commemorates him: «He spared this city the horrors of war».

The end of the war (May 1945). On 2 May the German troops in Italy surrendered, after secret negotiations held in Switzerland between the American Allen Dulles and SS General Karl Wolff, Operation Sunrise. On 8 May the war in Europe ended and church bells rang all over Switzerland.

A German officer in a cap talks with two American soldiers in a dark room

An American major negotiates the surrender of a German unit in Rovereto, 4 May 1945: in the same days in Chiasso Colonel Martinoni obtained the surrender of three hundred German soldiers