FOSSE ARDEATINE
On the morning of March 24, 1944, one of the most infamous – and arguably most overlooked – moments of the war took place just south of Rome. In the Fosse Ardeatine – a cave that once served as an ancient burial ground – 335 Italian civilians were slaughtered by Nazi soldiers, who had occupied Rome at the time. This atrocity had been perpetrated in retaliation to a bombing carried out by a Resistance group against a German regiment the day before.
The Via Rasella Bombing, March 23, 1944
It was the German 11th Company that was attacked on March 23, 1944, by a group of Resistance partisans – more specifically, by 17 gapisti, or members of the underground communist movement GAP – short for Gruppo d’Azione Pattriotica, or “Patriotic Action Group” in English.
The choice of March 23 as the day of attack was a symbolic one – namely, it was the 25th anniversary of Mussolini’s founding of the Fascist movement. The Via Rasella bombing itself took place at 3:45 p.m. that afternoon, and was led by Rosario Bentivegna, a then-21-year-old medical student, and his fiancée, Carla Capponi. The Nazi police regiment regularly marched through the streets of central Rome at 2:00 each afternoon following a prescribed route. This route came down the Via Flaminia in the northern part of the city and through the Porta del Popolo, into the piazza of the same name. From there, the company marched down the Via del Babuino, past the Piazza di Spagna and down the Via dei Due Macelli, which became the Via del Traforo. Because the tunnel under Quirinale Hill, just ahead, was blocked by refugees, they then turned left onto
Via Rasella to cut over to the Via delle Quattro Fontane, which they would take down to the Via Nazionale, where the Questura barracks were located. In preparation for an attack along the route, partisans meticulously examined every aspect of the route, including the number of steps that the Nazis made in the parade, as well as how long it would take a person to walk that distance at normal human speed. Ultimately, Via Rasella was chosen as the site for the attack, due to its quiet and residential character (9). The bomb was planted in a garbage cart that the gapisti had stolen from a maintenance yard near the Colosseum. After one of the partisans lit the bomb, all of them managed to slip into the crowd undetected.
At about 3:45 p.m., the bomb exploded with “such incredible fury that it shook the surrounding area” and broke several nearby windows (12,13,14). In total, 33 Nazi soldiers were killed; of these, 28 of them died in the attack and five more perished later (1).
1. Katz, Robert. “Preface: Open City”. TheBoot.it: Robert Katz’s History of Modern Italy. TheBoot, n.d. Web. 15 Jun. 2015. <http://www.theboot.it/preface_open_city.htm>
One building still bears the traces of the fierce and immediate German retaliation. Germans thought that the bombs had been thrown from these windows.
Photos: Isaac Pasley, 2015
German Soldiers in Via Rasella after the bombing
Photo from ANPI Brindisi Site, click the photo for details
The Massacre, March 24, 1944
Reprisal was practically immediate. Later on the evening of the 23rd, two Nazi officials presiding over Rome – namely, Sicherheitsdienst (SD, or “Security Service” in English) Commander Herbert Kappler and SS Lieutenant General Kurt Mälzer – put forward a retaliation plan, in which ten Italians would be killed for every German killed, to be carried out within the next 24 hoursxvi. The plan was later approved by German 14th Army commander Eberhard von Mackensen. The originally intended targets of the reprisal were political prisoners in Italy who were sentenced to death, but the number available fell far short of Kappler’s quota of 330. As a result, many others, including other political prisoners, Jewish prisoners, known Resistance figures, and ordinary civilians were rounded up for execution the following day. On the morning of the 24th, SS generals Erich Priebke and Karl Hass assembled a group of some 335 Italian civilians (five more than intended) in front of the Fosse Ardeatine (Ardeatine Caves) south of Rome, once the site of an ancient Christian burial ground.
Nazi police led prisoners into the caves with their hands tied behind their backs, where they were made to kneel in rows of fivexxii. In order to save space and time, the soldiers eschewed the normal firing-squad setup; instead, the prisoners were shot at point-blank range. The caves became very crowded, some of the victims were forced to kneel on top of the bodies of those already killed. Due to a clerical error, the Nazis ended up with five extra prisoners over their original quota; Kappler decided that they should be killed anyway so that they could not reveal the secret nature of the operation.
After the killings, the soldiers then detonated explosives to seal off the caves, so as to prevent anyone from knowing about what had happened. Nevertheless, people did know. The atrocities became known to the world when American troops liberated Rome in early June, 1944.
Translation:
German Command Communication regarding the Fosse Ardeatine Massacre:
On the afternoon of the 23 March 1944, criminal elements executed a bomb attack against a German police column crossing via Rasella. As a consequence of this ambush, 32 men from the German police were killed and many wounded.
This vile ambush was executed by badogliani communists. Investigations are underway to discover at what point is anglo-american influence to be blamed for thise criminal acts.
The German command has decided to smash the activites of these wicked bandits. No one can sabotage the recently reaffirmed Italian German cooperation with impunity. The German command has ordered that for ever German killed 10 communist-badoglioni criminals will be killed. This order has already been executed.
Photo: Isaac Pasley, from Museo Storico della Liberazione, Roma Via Tasso
The Aftermath of the Massacre
The Nazi soldiers who perpetrated the Fosse Ardeatine massacre intended for it to divide and alienate the partisan factions on the political left from the rest of the Italian population at largexxviii. Once the brutal event became public knowledge among the Italian population, though, many Italians across the political spectrum were united in horror – in fact, even Mussolini ordered the release of his political prisoners so as to avoid a similar event. However, not all of Italy sided with the partisans.
Most notably, Pope Pius XII was silent in the face of the shooting as a result of his self-professed “neutrality” and anti-communist views, a standpoint which was reinforced by his “Decree Against Communism” a few years later, in 1949. More generally, the anti-communist sentiment that was spreading across postwar Europe, laying the foundation for the Cold War dynamics that would play a major role in European politics for the next four decades thereafter, had caused the victims of the Ardeatine massacre to be largely ignored after the war.
According to Klaus Wiegrefe, a columnist for the German newspaper Spiegel, “ the Christian Democrats [the majority party in postwar Italy] worried that holding new trials could damage Italy's good relations with Germany, its new NATO ally”xxx. In addition, Wiegrefe added that the ruling party in Italy “didn’t want to stir up memories of communist, anti-Nazi resistance”xxxi because such an agenda would conflict with the anti-communist role that NATO played in the postwar European political order.
Sources:
“Ardeatine Caves Massacre”. Holocaust Encyclopedia. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 20 Jun. 2014. Web. 10 Jun. 2015. <http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007940>
Frank J. Korn, “Massacre in Rome: 1944”. The Italian Tribune. Italian Tribune, 27 Mar. 2014. Web. 15 Jun. 2015. <http://www.italiantribune.com/massacre-in-rome-1944/>
Anthony Majanhlahti, and Amedeo Osti Guerrazi. Roma occupata, 1943-1944: itinerari, storie, immagini. Milan: Il Saggiatore S.P.A., 2010. 141. Print.
Robert Katz. “Preface: Open City”. TheBoot.it: Robert Katz’s History of Modern Italy. TheBoot, n.d. Web. 15 Jun. 2015. <http://www.theboot.it/preface_open_city.htm>
“1944: Ardeatine Massacre.” Executed Today. ExecutedToday.com, 24 Mar. 2008. Web. 10 Jun. 2015. <http://www.executedtoday.com/2008/03/24/1944-ardeatine-massacre/>
Klaus Wiegrefe, “Unpunished Massacre in Italy: How Postwar Germany Let War Criminals Go Free.” Spiegel Online International. SPIEGELnet GmbH, 19 Jan. 2012. Web. 10 Jun. 2015. <http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/unpunished-massacre-in-italy-how-postwar-germany-let-war-criminals-go-free-a-809537.html>
Photos: Team 2015 and 2014, Fosse Ardeatine
Given the geopolitical dynamics of the time, such an approach on the part of Italy was completely understandable. However, the unfortunate consequence of those policies, of course, was that for families of the Ardeatine victims, justice would remain elusive for a long time.
In fact, among the main perpetrators of the massacre, only one of them – namely, Kappler – would end up receiving any sort of legal penalty in the years immediately following the war, when he was sentenced to life in prison in 1948. In terms of the other Nazis responsible for the Ardeatine killings, a British military tribunal sentenced both von Mackensen and Mälzer to death in 1945, but both appealed the verdict, and von Mackensen was released in 1952, with Mälzer dying of natural causes in prison the same year.
As for Priebke, he too was initially in British custody, but he managed to flee to Argentina, where he spent the next five decades before being extradited to Italy in 1994 after a high-profile television interview. He was ultimately sentenced to house arrest, a condition under which he lived until his death in 2013. Even with the eventual arrest and/or death of the massacre’s perpetrators, the fact remains that for many Italians, especially the surviving relatives of the victims, the wounds wrought by the Ardeatine atrocity still have not fully healed, more than 70 years later.