During the events of 1943-1945, Villa Caramora was occupied multiple times by German forces of the SS-Polizei. From June 10 to 22, 1944, it served as a command post for the direction of the sweep operation in the Val Grande for the first time. The officer in charge of the sweep was SS-Polizei Lieutenant Colonel Ernst Weis. Weis, decorated with the Iron Cross Second Class, had carried out numerous massacres of Jews on the Eastern Front and was later tried in Osnabrück in 1964 for crimes committed in present-day Eastern Poland; he died of cancer during the preliminary investigation. Ernst Weis and Villa Caramora are sadly known for hosting most of the forty-three people shot in Fondotoce on June 19-20, 1944. Most of them were partisans and civilians, including one woman, Cleonice Tomasetti. The core of the group had been captured during the final stages of the large sweep operation in the Val Grande. Initially taken to Malesco, where they were subjected to torture at the Elementary School, the group was then sent to Villa Caramora on the afternoon of June 19, 1944. Here, in the basement, the members of the group were tortured again. Judge Emilio Liguori from Verbania was also at Villa Caramora; he'd been arrested in his office on the 19th, on suspicion of collusion with the partisans.
The cellar door opened, and about thirty people were pushed in with kicks and rifle butts by a squad of infuriated, bestial thugs wearing the so-called honorable uniform of the chosen people, the Herrenvolk, the super-people: the Teutonic. The scene that presented itself to my eyes, after so many unfortunate people entered the cellar, was one of the most painful I have ever witnessed. I think that a pack of hungry wolves, when they come across a flock of sheep, treat their victims with less ferocity and less sadism than the German soldiers did toward the poor partisans swept up in the Val Grande. - Emilio Liguori
On June 20, the prisoners were forced to march along the lakeside of Intra, Pallanza and Suna and then they were transported to Fondotoce. In groups of three, they were shot, and their bodies were left exposed for several hours as a warning, right in the area behind the current Casa della Resistenza. Of this group, only a partisan named Carlo Suzzi managed to survive, becoming known as "il Quarantatré" (Forty-Three) from that moment on.
On the same day of the execution, at Villa Caramora, Commander Ernst Weis organized a lavish party to celebrate his fiftieth birthday before leaving Verbania for Galicia, where he was assigned command of a new battalion of the SS-Polizei.