Pietro Koch

[1] Koch served as a lieutenant in the Grenadiers where he was unpopular with his fellow soldiers and was dismissed from the Royal Italian Army in 1939 for insulting a superior officer.

[1] Settling in the Social Republic in the north of Italy, Koch joined the Special Service of Republican Police led by Tullio Tamburini.

[1] In January 1944, he established the Banda Koch as a special task force charged with hunting down partisans and rounding up deportees, including Jews, for the Germans.

[1] Koch was given his own prisons and torture chambers and continued his activity in Florence and then Milan following the fall of Rome to the Allies.

[1] Along with police chief Pietro Caruso, who was independently involved in the killing of partisans, Koch was behind hundreds of deaths; the Social Republic government even ordered an amnesty for political prisoners not charged with murder out of fear that Koch would have them killed.