A total of 1,315 Italians were killed in the battle, 5,155 were executed by 26 September, and 3,000 drowned when the German ships taking the survivors to concentration camps were sunk by the Allies.

On 5–6 July Lt Colonel Johannes Barge arrived with 2,000 men of the 966th Fortress Grenadier Regiment, including Fortress-Battalions 810 and 909 and a battery of self-propelled guns and nine tanks.

[7] After Italy's armistice with the Allies in September 1943, General Gandin found himself in a dilemma: one option was surrendering to the Germans – who were already prepared for the eventuality and had begun disarming Italian garrisons elsewhere – or trying to resist.

[10] In the case of a German attack, Vecchiarelli's order was not very specific because it was based on General Pietro Badoglio's directive which stated that the Italians should respond with "maximum decision" to any threat from any side.

At 22:30 hours of the same day Gandin received an order directly from General Ambrosio to send most of his naval and merchant vessels to Brindisi immediately, as demanded by the terms of the armistice.

[10] That gave the Germans a sense of justification in treating any Italians disobeying their orders as mutineers or francs-tireurs,[7] which, at that time, the laws of war considered unlawful combatants subject to execution on capture.

[7][10] Under these circumstances, that same night, Gandin presented his troops with a poll, essentially containing the three options presented to him by Barge:[10][11] The response from the Italian troops was in favour of the third option by a large majority but there is no available information as to the exact size of the majority,[10] and therefore on 14 September Gandin reneged on the agreement, refusing to surrender anything but the division's heavy artillery and telling the Germans to leave the island, demanding a reply by 9:00 the next day.

[10] He even went so far as sending a Red Cross emissary to the Ministry, but the mission broke down off the coast of Apulia and when it arrived three days later at the Italian High Command in Brindisi, it was already too late.

[7][10][21] Alfred Richter, an Austrian and one of the participants in the massacre, recounted how a soldier who sang arias for the Germans in the local taverns was forced to sing while his comrades were being executed.

Bodies were cremated in massive wood pyres, which made the air of the island thick with the smell of burning flesh,[10] or moved to ships where they were buried at sea.

[8][10][23][24] Others, according to Amos Pampaloni, one of the survivors, were executed in full sight of the Greek population in Argostoli harbour on 23 September 1943 and their bodies were left to rot where they fell, while in smaller streets corpses were decomposing and the stench was insufferable to the point that he could not remain there long enough to take a picture of the carnage.

[8] An additional three thousand of the survivors in German custody drowned, when the ships Sinfra, Mario Roselli and Ardena, transporting them to concentration camps, were sunk by Allied air raids and sea mines in the Adriatic.

[10] In January 1944, a chaplain's account reached Benito Mussolini after Aurelio Garobbio, a Swiss Fascist from the Italian-speaking Canton of Ticino, informed him about the events.

[10] Major Harald von Hirschfeld was never tried for his role in the massacre since he did not survive the war: in December 1944, he became the Wehrmacht's youngest general officer, and was killed while fighting at the Dukla Pass in Poland in 1945.

[33] An attempt to revisit the case by the Dortmund state prosecutor Johannes Obluda in 1964 came to naught, as the political climate in Germany at the time was in favour of "putting the war behind".

From this point of view, the well-established disputes that emerged before the battle between the "rebel" officers and the "hesitator" Gandin are interpreted as the opposition between the impetuosity of young men eager to fight and the wise family man negotiating with the Germans, who would like to save the honor of the arms and the lives of his soldiers: a simple generational contrast that does not question the unity of intentions between the commander and his subordinates.

From the very beginning, polemical readings of the facts have opposed the canonical interpretation: on the one hand, some survivors expressed very critical judgments against the actions of General Gandin, considered too weak or even intending to betray to bring the Division into the German field; on the other hand, others accused some young officers, predominantly reserves, identifying in their rebellion against Gandin the main cause of a useless clash and the fierce reprisal that followed.

The fracture among the survivors corresponds to two historiographical interpretations of the facts that, although diametrically opposed, can both be traced within the realm of revisionism, understood as criticism of the dominant thought.

According to Filippini, Apollonio and the others were guilty of insubordination, conspiracy, and rebellion, hindering Gandin's work, who, far from wanting to betray, was only seeking a peaceful and, above all, honorable solution to the complicated situation in which the Division found itself.

[38] Opposed to those of Filippini and Aga Rossi are the theses of the historian Paolo Paoletti,[39] the main accuser of Gandin, according to whom the general acted with the intention of leading the Division into the German field after the armistice.

Paoletti goes beyond the accusations of ineptitude and weakness commonly directed at the general by his detractors: Gandin, from the outset, intended to hand over the armed division to the Germans to continue fighting alongside them and, to this end, negotiated with them.

Reversing Filippini's view, according to Paoletti, the young "rebel" officers and, in particular, Captain Renzo Apollonio were heroes, whose initiative thwarted the plan of the "traitor" Gandin.

According to Gian Enrico Rusconi,[40] the first desire of those men was to return home, but not at all costs: keeping their weapons, safely and honorably, as befits a soldier who has done his duty.

Even Patrizia Gabrielli[41] proposes an unconventional reading of the facts, according with her the distance from home, the loss of the role of head of the family, now fully covered by the women at home, the apathy and frustration due to the long inactivity may have pushed those men to fight to reclaim, against the humiliating conditions imposed by the Germans, their dignity, which actually never failed during that apparent holiday that, unlike what is described in the film 'Mediterraneo', did not make them lose their sense of responsibility.

Olivero, noting the diversity of views that characterized the soldiers of the Acqui in the approach to the clash and the multiplicity of possible motivations that led them to fight, all plausible and worthy of being remembered, identifies the main merit of those men precisely in their capacity to smooth over differences.

According to Olivero: "Moved by such different motivations (loyalty to the Crown, military obedience, anti-fascism, the desire for redemption, the desire to return home honorably), the soldiers of the Acqui were therefore the first Italians to leave behind the fierce divisions that in Italy would have caused countless deaths";[43] in Cephalonia "the divisions that in Italy would have led to civil war were revealed, but the soldiers of the Acqui knew how to overcome them: they were the first fighters of the Resistance, but also - and above all - the first Italians who regained unity by overcoming the differences that opposed them".

[4] The subject of the massacre was largely ignored in Italy by the press and the educational system until 1980, when the Italian President Sandro Pertini, a former partisan, unveiled the memorial in Cephalonia.

[45][17] Despite the recognition of the event by Pertini, it was not until March 2001 that another Italian President, Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, visited the memorial again, and even then he was most likely influenced by the publicity generated by the impending release of the Hollywood film Captain Corelli's Mandolin, based on the novel with the same name.

During the ceremony Ciampi, referring to the men of the Acqui Division, declared that their "conscious decision was the first act of resistance by an Italy freed from fascism" and that "they preferred to fight and die for their fatherland".

[22] The massacre of the Acqui Division is emerging as a subject of ongoing research,[46] and is regarded as a leading example of the Italian Resistance during World War II.