Villa Fossati

Also known as Villa Triste, in the summer of 1944 was the headquarter of the “Banda Koch”, which is the special department of the republican police. It is today the headquarter of a religious institution.

Villa Fossati, aka “Villa Triste”, situated between via Paolo Uccello and via Masaccio, between the summer and autumn of 1944 was the headquarter of the “banda Koch”, the special police department assigned to antifascist repression.

The former grenadier Pietro Koch, born in 1918, in November 1943 became a member of the Partito fascista repubblicano and enlisted in the “Banda Carità” in Florence, an illegal police formation engaged in anti-partisan repression under the command of major Mario Carità.

In December 1943, Koch moved to Rome where he established a new Reparto autonomo di polizia under the leadership of lieutenant colonel Kappler. This department was temporarily located in the pensione Oltremare, but moved in April 1944 to pensione Jaccarino, where the basement and the attic served as cells for the prisoners.

Interrogations were usually carried out at night and encouraged with beatings and maltreatments: among the torture equipment were “tongs to extirpate the teeth, pincers to tear off nails, red-hot daggers to be placed on the most delicate parts of a body”. During its activity, this department executed six hundred arrests, 435 of which happened in Rome, 191 in Milan and 7 in other locations.

After the Allies’ arrival in Rome, on 4th June 1944, the department moved to Milan in Villa Fossati, via Paolo Uccello 19, seizing it from its old owner Adele Mariani Fossati. The Villa hosted the department offices and, in its basement, the security rooms. Barbed wire was installed on top of the surrounding walls, its facade had powerful searchlights. They had their own specific modus operandi: in most cases, the arrests were carried out at night and following a list of names and addresses. Once they reached their destination, the agents would break into the house of the victim armed and with their faces uncovered and order the victim to follow them and give any object of value.

As for the treatment of prisoners, besides the practices already experimented in Rome – some maltreatment even had a precise name, like the “scientific slap” or the “somersault” – in Milan, the victims were forced to “sprint across a room between the shower and their cell with two rows of agents ready to hit them while they passed”. In the afternoon of 25th September 1944, about 60 members of the Legione Muti and some public safety agents broke into “Villa Triste” and arrested the members of the department who were immediately sent to San Vittore. Koch, while detained, managed to escape with the help of the Germans a few days before the Liberation but, once he reached Florence, was recognized and arrested. Put on trial in Rome by the Alta Corte di Giustizia on 4th June 1945, was shot the following day at the shooting range of Forte Bravetta.
Roberta Cairoli