NEWS Another victim of the Ardeatine massacre identified

By Pagine Ebraiche staff

Heinz Erich Tuchmann, son of Otto Tuchmann and Gertrud Essenberg and husband to Hilde Rosy Jacobson, was a German Jew who was born in Magdeburg on 18th January 1911. It was already known that he had been killed in the Ardeatine massacre, but no remains had yet been associated with his name. The DNA test undergone by his grandson Jeremy delivered the desired outcome.

A few months after the identification of another victim of the Nazi-fascist massacre, i.e. the Polish Jew Marian Reicher, this new scientific evidence leaves seven bodies still to be identified. The General Commissariat for the War Fallen, with the help of the Carabineer’s Scientific Investigation Department and of Florence University’s Laboratory of Molecular Anthropology, aims to find every missing piece as soon as possible.

“We will make every effort to identify the bodies. We owe it to those who gave their own lives for freedom,” underlined Minister of Defence Lorenzo Guerini upon hearing the news. The ministry said Tuchmann’s family, “immediately contacted by General Commissioner Alessandro Veltri, welcomed the news with deep joy and gratitude”.

It was announced that, when the health emergency is over, a ceremony will be organised in conjunction with the National Association of Italian Families’ Martyrs of the Ardeatine Caves and the Jewish community “to officially pay homage to the two new-found victims”.

Translated by Claudia Azzalini and revised by Mattia Stefani, both students at the Advanced School for Interpreting and Translation of Trieste University and interns at the newspaper office of the Union of the Italian Jewish Communities.