On the night of July 6, 1945, ten masked former partisans from the Garibaldi Brigade found the prison warden drinking in a local bar. They marched him back to the jail and forced their way inside. Ten more joined them at the Bortoli Hospital, which served as a temporary overflow prison. What followed was chaotic and deliberate in equal measure. The partisans argued among themselves about who deserved execution. Some spoke with the prisoners. Then, abruptly, one of the group opened fire. Around 70 inmates who had been lined up were targeted with sustained gunfire. Forty-seven died immediately; seven more succumbed to their wounds later. Those who survived did so by hiding beneath the bodies of the dead. Fourteen of the 54 victims were women. According to historian Sarah Morgan, some of the prisoners were genuine war criminals, but the majority were second-rate supporters of the defunct fascist state. Twenty-seven had no documented connection to fascism or German collaboration at all.

Because the Veneto was under Allied Military Government control, the investigation moved quickly by postwar Italian standards. Seven former partisans were arrested and charged with 54 counts of premeditated murder in an Allied military court. Three received death sentences: Valentino Bortoloso, Renzo Franceschini, and Antonio Fochesato. Two others, Gaetano Canova and Aldo Santacaterina, were sentenced to life imprisonment. None of the death penalties were carried out. Several of the accused had already fled to Czechoslovakia or Yugoslavia, beyond the reach of Allied justice. When Ruggero Maltauro was eventually extradited, a second trial was held in Milan in 1952, resulting in life sentences for him and seven others tried in absentia. Under the Togliatti amnesty, which sought to reconcile Italy's warring political factions, Bortoloso was released in 1955 after serving just ten years. Maltauro's sentence was later reduced to 29 years.

The Allied Military Government called the massacre a ruthless breakdown of law and a failure of the National Liberation Committee model. The Italian Communist Party's response shifted with the political winds. In 1945, the party newspaper L'Unita blamed the killings on agent provocateurs and Trotskyite agents. By the early 1950s, the PCI was writing sympathetically about the perpetrators, and after 1968, its support became open. For decades, Schio itself said almost nothing. The massacre went publicly unacknowledged until a campaign to place a memorial plaque at the hospital building succeeded in 1994. The compromise wording satisfied no one: victims' families found it inadequate, and a shorter replacement text was eventually installed. The political far-right began holding annual marches at the site, while the National Association of Italian Partisans, ANPI, campaigned to have Bortoloso awarded the Medal of Resistance. The medal was granted, then revoked by the Ministry of Defence in 2016 after public controversy.

Schio's massacre belongs to a chapter of Italian history that resists tidy narratives. The partisans who carried it out had fought genuine evil. Some had lost family to the camps, to reprisal executions, to the casual brutality of occupation. The returning Mauthausen survivor, barely alive, was a living reminder of what collaboration had enabled. But the prisoners they killed included people who had never been charged with anything, women whose connections to fascism were marginal at best, and ordinary people caught in the broad net of postwar suspicion. The killings were not justice. They were not resistance. They were the violence that erupts when institutions fail and rage fills the vacuum. That the perpetrators later received amnesty, medals, and political rehabilitation while the victims' families waited nearly fifty years for even a plaque speaks to the difficulty Italy has faced in confronting this particular intersection of heroism and atrocity.