Ardeatine massacre

• 1. Introduction

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  The Ardeatine massacre claimed 335 lives on the 24th of March 1944, in disused quarry tunnels on the southern outskirts of Rome. Every year on that date, senior officials of the Italian Republic gather at the site. Each of the 335 names is read out, one by one. The ritual insists that what happened was not an abstraction; it was the killing of 335 specific individuals. Who chose the ratio of ten Italian lives for every German soldier killed? Why did the intended death toll of 330 grow to 335 before the day was done? And who were the men taken to those caves? Those questions lead back to the summer of 1943, when Italy's government collapsed under the weight of a losing war. They run forward through a narrow Roman street where, the following March, twelve partisans staged the attack that set the reprisals in motion.

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• 2. Rome Falls

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  In July 1943, Allied forces landed on Sicily, and Rome was bombed for the first time. On the 24th of July, the Fascist Grand Council voted no confidence in Benito Mussolini. That body had not convened since 1939. King Victor Emanuel III had Mussolini arrested the following day and appointed Marshal Pietro Badoglio to lead a new government. Badoglio opened secret surrender talks with the Allies while remaining publicly aligned with Nazi Germany. On the 3rd of September 1943, he signed an unconditional surrender. General Eisenhower made it public on the eve of the Fifth Army's amphibious landing at Salerno, on the 8th of September. That same night, the King and Badoglio fled Rome for Pescara and then, by sea, to Bari. They left no one in command. The Royal Italian Army outnumbered German troops in the city three to one, but it was leaderless and in disarray. A short resistance at the Porta San Paolo and the Pyramid of Cestius collapsed. German forces occupied Rome and declared military law, with summary execution for any violation.

  On the 12th of September, Waffen-SS officer Otto Skorzeny led a commando team to the Gran Sasso and freed Mussolini from his hidden mountain prison. Mussolini was installed as head of the puppet Republic of Salo in northern Italy. In October 1943, the Nazis rounded up Rome's Jewish population and deported them to Auschwitz. Forced mass roundups of male civilians for labour began at the same time. By December, armed Partisan cells had started striking German forces inside the city. A surprise Allied landing at Anzio in January 1944, only 30 miles from Rome, briefly lifted the spirits of the Roman population. The Anzio forces were pinned down by German fortifications built with forced civilian labour. The false sense of safety that followed led many Resistance leaders to lower their guard. The Nazis used that lapse to arrest and torture many of the movement's most important figures. By early 1944, the Partisan cells that survived were planning their most ambitious operation yet.

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• 3. Via Rasella

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  On the 23rd of March 1944, the 11th Company, 3rd Battalion of the SS Police Regiment South Tyrol was marching through central Rome, singing as it followed a prescribed route through the Piazza di Spagna into the narrow street of Via Rasella. The battalion had been raised in October 1943 from ethnic German speakers in the South Tyrol, a northern Italian province that Adolf Hitler had annexed to the German Reich. Many of the men were veterans of the Eastern Front who had chosen service in the SS rather than another tour with the Wehrmacht.

  Watching the column approach were twelve members of the Gruppo d'Azione Patriottica, the Communist-dominated Patriotic Action Group known as GAP. One partisan was disguised as a street cleaner, pushing a rubbish cart that concealed a bomb. The device comprised 12 kilograms of TNT packed in a steel case. That case was placed inside a bag also holding six more kilograms of TNT and iron tubing packed with explosives. The fuse was lit when the column was forty seconds from the cart. The blast killed 28 German SS policemen outright. Two civilians may also have died, among them an eleven-year-old boy named Piero Zuccheretti. Whether Zuccheretti was killed by the explosion or by German soldiers firing in response has never been established. More of the wounded would die in the days that followed. All twelve partisans escaped into the crowd without a scratch. By the next morning, reprisal discussions had already reached the highest levels of German command in Rome.

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• 4. The Killing Order

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  SS Obersturmbannfuhrer Herbert Kappler, the German police attache and Security Police commander in Rome, arrived at Via Rasella within hours of the blast. That evening he was summoned to the headquarters of Luftwaffe Generalmajor Kurt Malzer, the German Armed Forces Commandant in Rome. They agreed on a ratio of ten Italian lives for every German policeman killed. Malzer, who also proposed burning down part of the city, passed the recommendation to General Eberhard von Mackensen, commander of the Fourteenth Army. Mackensen endorsed it. The plan reached the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, the supreme German military command. That night, Adolf Hitler authorised the reprisal and ordered it completed within 24 hours. Generalfeldmarschall Albert Kesselring, the Commander-in-Chief South, interpreted this as an order to execute prisoners already condemned to death.

  Kappler found the numbers impossible to meet from properly sentenced prisoners. His private prison at SS headquarters, at 145 Via Tasso, now the Museum of the Liberation of Rome, held only four men already sentenced to death. He also had 17 others serving long sentences and 167 more he classed as worthy of death. His superior, SS Brigadefuhrer Wilhelm Harster, suggested adding the 57 Jews already in Nazi custody. Jews were already scheduled for death regardless of this order. By noon on the 24th of March, Kappler had assembled a list of 271 names. The German death toll from Via Rasella had risen to 32 by that point, raising the required total of victims to 320. Questore Pietro Caruso, Rome's Fascist police chief, supplied additional prisoners from the Regina Coeli jail. Among them was Maurizio Giglio, one of Caruso's own former lieutenants, who had been exposed as a double agent working for the American OSS. There was no time for a conventional firing squad. The victims would be shot individually in the back of the head at close range. The soldiers of the Regiment Bozen, whose comrades had died in Via Rasella, were offered the chance to carry out the executions. They refused. Twenty-six of those eventually taken to the caves were Jews who had been individually denounced to the Germans by Celeste Di Porto, known in the Roman Ghetto as the Terror.

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• 5. Inside the Caves

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  SS officers Erich Priebke and Karl Hass led the condemned to the Ardeatine caves on the 24th of March. The caves lay in a little-frequented rural suburb near the Via Ardeatina, in old quarries of pozzolana, a soft volcanic rock. The men arrived in truckloads. Kappler had ordered several cases of cognac brought to the site. The killing squad consisted mostly of officers who had never killed before, and the cognac was meant to calm them. The prisoners were led into the tunnels in groups of five, each with his hands tied behind his back and forced to kneel. Officers fired a single bullet directly into the cerebellum, so that one shot per prisoner would suffice. As the killings continued, the cave filled with bodies. Those brought in later were forced to kneel over the dead already piled below them.

  By mistake, 335 men had been transported to the site, five more than the 330 the order required. When the five surplus prisoners were identified during the killings, the decision was made to murder them as well. Allowing them to leave would have revealed the location. German military engineers then detonated explosives to seal the entrance, burying the bodies under tons of rock debris. Robert Katz later described the notification of families as Night and Fog: individual letters, sent with excruciating slowness, designed to confuse, grieve, and intimidate those left behind. The bodies remained sealed inside the quarry for more than a year.

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• 6. The Fallen

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  Of the 335 killed, 75 were Jewish. A widespread misconception holds that Jews formed the majority of the dead, but the record does not bear that out. Jews were included partly because they were already marked for deportation and death. Robert Katz described the range of victims as 'men and teenage boys from every walk of life, and even a man of God.' Some were residents of Via Rasella who happened to be home at the time of the attack. Others had been arrested and tortured for suspected ties to the Resistance. Still others were seized from the street or taken from their homes on tips from Fascist informants. The youngest victim was 15.

  Members of the Bandiera Rossa, the dissident Communist Red Flag movement, constituted the largest single group among the political prisoners. Others came from the GAP, from the Monarchist Clandestine Military Front of the Resistance, and from the ranks of the Roman police. One victim, Padre Pietro Pappagallo, became the model for the character of Padre Pietro in Roberto Rossellini's film Rome, Open City, which Rossellini filmed in 1944. Colonel Giuseppe Montezemolo, an aristocrat aged 44, had stayed in Rome after the King fled. He went underground, disguised as a professor or engineer, to organise and lead the Monarchist resistance. He maintained radio contact with the Badoglio Government until his arrest on the 25th of January 1944. Under torture that included having his nails and teeth pulled out, Montezemolo never spoke. General Simone Simoni, a war hero aged 64, endured torture by blowtorch without betraying anyone. He told his captors, 'My only regret is that I was not younger because there was so much more I could have done for my country.' Neither man ever betrayed his network. Four more generals were among the dead: Vito Artale, Dardano Fenulli, Roberto Lordi, and Sabato Martelli Castaldi. The policeman Pietro Ermelindo Lungaro, a member of the Monarchist Front, was posthumously awarded the Silver Medal of Military Valor by the Italian government.

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• 7. Trials and Evasions

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  Pietro Caruso, the Fascist police chief who had supplied prisoners to fill the reprisal quota, was executed on the 22nd of September 1944, months after Rome was liberated. The other perpetrators faced a far longer and more uneven reckoning. Herbert Kappler was tried and sentenced to life imprisonment in 1947. In August 1977, while undergoing cancer treatment at a Roman military hospital, he escaped from the facility. He died the following year at his home in Soltau, West Germany. West Germany had refused Italian requests to extradite him.

  Erich Priebke's evasion lasted far longer. He escaped from a British prison camp in 1946, fled first to the Tyrol and then back to Rome, and used false papers supplied through a Vatican network to emigrate to Argentina. He lived there for decades. In 1994, ABC television reporter Sam Donaldson identified and interviewed Priebke on camera in Argentina. He was extradited to Italy, and a 1996 court found him not guilty on the grounds that he had acted under orders. A retrial in 1998 sentenced him to life imprisonment. He died on the 11th of October 2013, at the age of 100, while under house arrest at his lawyer's home. Argentina refused his last request to be buried there alongside his wife. The Vatican issued a ban on holding his funeral in any Catholic church in Rome. The Society of St Pius X, a Catholic splinter group, held the ceremony in the city of Albano Laziale. Violent clashes broke out between fascist sympathisers and anti-fascist protesters.

  Rosario Bentivegna, the medical student who had lit the bomb in Via Rasella, received a medal from the post-war Italian government. In 1952, Italy's Supreme Court declared the Via Rasella attack a legitimate act of war, in an appeal brought by Kappler's lawyers. That decision was reaffirmed in 1999, when a Roman prosecutor attempted to hold the partisans responsible for the death of Piero Zuccheretti. The Court granted them immunity from prosecution instead. Karl Hass, who had helped lead the condemned into the caves, was not convicted until 1998. He spent his final years under house arrest and died on the 21st of April 2004.

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• 8. Memory and Argument

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  In 1967, the American journalist Robert Katz published Death in Rome. The book speculated that Pope Pius XII had advance knowledge of the Nazi reprisal plans and did little to forestall them. The charge was immediately disputed. In 1974, Pius's niece, Countess Elena Pacelli Rossignani, sued Katz in the Roman courts. An initial guilty verdict was overturned on appeal, then reinstated on a further appeal on the narrower charge of intention to denigrate Pius XII. The entire case was eventually dismissed under an amnesty dating from 1970.

  In 1980, a document from the Vatican archives was released. Dated the 24th of March 1944, at 10:15 in the morning, it was addressed to the Papal Secretariat. It showed that the Vatican had received intelligence about the German reprisal plans within hours of the Via Rasella attack. The document confirmed that the Germans intended to execute ten Italians for each SS soldier killed. But that information reached the Vatican only five hours before the massacre. The source was vague and gave no indication of time, place, or method. Katz's 2003 book, The Battle for Rome, drew on newly released OSS and Vatican sources. It showed that Eugen Dollmann, Himmler's representative in Rome, had approached the Pope's liaison Pankratius Pfeiffer. German Consul Eitel Mollhausen had made the same approach. Both asked Pfeiffer to urge Pius to intervene and limit the reprisals. According to Katz, the Vatican viewed the Via Rasella attack as Communist terrorism, not a legitimate act of war. The Pope decided against a public protest. His defenders cited a reason: every convent and religious house in Rome was sheltering refugees, Jews, and anti-Fascists. A public statement would have provoked German searches with catastrophic consequences for all those hidden there.

  In the 1990s, the newspaper Il Giornale, owned by Paolo Berlusconi, ran a campaign to relabel the Via Rasella partisans as terrorists. Italy's Supreme Court of Cassation ruled that the attack had been a legitimate act of war. The court ordered the publisher to pay punitive damages of 45,000 euros. Historians Richard Raiber and Istvan Deak have continued to question the moral standing of the partisans' action. In their view, the Via Rasella attack brought foreseeable death to innocent civilians. Patrick Gallo, in For Love and Country: The Italian Resistance, published in 2003, argued the opposite. In his view, the Rome-based Resistance achieved important strategic objectives and was not a futile provocation.

  Nello Aprile, Cino Calcaprina, Aldo Cardelli, Mario Fiorentino, and Giuseppe Perugini won the national competition to design the Fosse Ardeatine memorial. Two sculptors, Mirko Basaldella and Francesco Coccia, contributed major works. Basaldella's massive bronze entrance gate took barbed wire, as it appeared on battlefields and in concentration camps, as its starting point. He wove it into the curling forms of a Tree of Life. The curved lines resolve into a tangle of limbs at the awkward angles characteristic of corpses. Coccia placed a colossal concrete statue of three bound men at the entrance, each representing a different stage of life. Each face carries a distinct expression: despair, half-closed resignation, a resolute distant stare. Each face is directed toward a different element of the memorial: the burial slab, the old quarries, or the forecourt. At the far end of the caves, where the killings actually took place, a final plaque bears a verse from Penitential Psalm 130. 'From the depths,' it reads, 'I have cried out to you, O Lord.' The words appear in both Latin and Hebrew, chosen for their parallel significance in Christianity and Judaism. American composer William Schuman subtitled his Ninth Symphony, composed in 1968, 'Le fosse Ardeatine,' in memory of the victims. Amy Harmon's 2017 novel, From Sand and Ash, gave the massacre a fictional telling. It joined a line of artistic responses that had begun to take shape even before the war ended.

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