Ardeatine massacre
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The Fosse Ardeatine massacre (Italian: Eccidio delle Fosse Ardeatine) was a mass execution carried out in Rome on 24 March 1944 by Nazi German occupation troops during the Second World War as a reprisal for a partisan attack conducted on the previous day in central Rome.
Subsequently, the Cave Ardeatine (also know as Fosse Ardeatine) became a National Monument and a Memorial Cemetery open daily to visitors. Every year, on the anniversary of the slaughter and in the presence of the senior officials of the Italian Republic, a solemn State commemoration is held at the monument in honour of the fallen.
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[edit] The Partisan attack in Via Rasella
On 23 March 1944, a column of German troops from an SS police battalion marching through central Rome on Via Rasella was attacked by partisans. This caused the immediate deaths of 32 soldiers; dozens more were wounded and a 33rd would die later. The unit targeted by the ambush was the SS Police Battalion "Bozen" which was composed mostly of German-speaking natives of the Northern Italian province of Bolzano-Bozen.
[edit] The preparation for the reprisal
Immediately after the attack in Via Rasella, Adolf Hitler is reported to have ordered that within 24 hours, one-hundred Italians were to be shot for each German soldier fallen. German police commander Herbert Kappler in Rome concluded that ten Italians for each dead German would be sufficient and, aided by the chief of the Fascist police, quickly compiled a list of 320 people who were to be killed. Kappler added ten more names to the list when the 33rd casualty died.
[edit] The massacre
In fact, by error, a total of three hundred thirty-five Italian hostages were taken, composed of civilians (including Jews from the local community) who were casually picked up on the city streets, Italian prisoners of war (up to General rank), previously captured partisans and some inmates from Roman prisons. The massacre was perpetrated without prior public notice in what was then a little-frequented rural suburb of the city, inside the tunnels of the disused quarries of pozzolana, near Via Ardeatina (Italian: Cave Ardeatine).
On 24 March, led by SS officers Erich Priebke and Karl Hass, the victims were transported to the Ardeatine caves and then, in groups of five, were put to death inside the caves.
Since the killing squad mostly consisted of officers who had never killed before, Kappler ordered several cases of cognac delivered to the caves to calm their nerves. The officers were ordered to lead the doomed prisoners into the caves with their hands tied behind their backs and then have them kneel down so that the soldiers could place a bullet directly into the cerebellum; thus no more than one bullet would be needed per prisoner.
To save time, soldiers had the prisoners climb on top of those killed just minutes before, so that several orderly piles of bodies were formed. However, as the day went on, the cognac that was sent to calm nerves began to make the soldiers sloppy. More and more bullets went astray and prisoners endured torturous last moments as the soldiers tried to finish them off. During the killings, it was discovered that there were five more prisoners than were supposed to have been taken, but they were killed anyway, in order to prevent news of the location of the place of execution from becoming known.
Some of the Germans involved in the massacre were horrified by the slaughter. One of the officers, who refused to shoot, was personally dragged to the execution site by Erich Priebke, who put his arm around the officer's waist and forced him to kill his victim.
Another, named Amon, testified at the trial of Kappler which was held in Italy in 1948; [1] saying that once he entered the cave and saw the piles of dead bodies, he was so horrified that he fainted and was replaced by a comrade who pushed him aside and shot another victim.
The massacre took most of the day. Some of the victims' heads were blown off by the fire; others were only wounded and may have survived until the explosions intended to seal the caves after the massacre was completed: one youth and his father were found in each other's arms in a corner of the cave galleries which had been not filled with the debris under which most victims had been buried. Some crawled into corners to die.
The bodies of the victims were placed in piles, typically about a meter in height, and then buried under tonnes of rock debris when German military engineers set explosives to seal the caves and hide the atrocity. They remained summarily buried and abandoned for over a year inside the caves. They were eventually found, exhumed and given proper burial only after the Italian capital was liberated by the Allies on 4 June 1944.
[edit] The killed
Popular notions of the Fosse Ardeatine are numerous, and often false. Foremost among these is the notion that the Partisans who attacked in via Rasella should have turned themselves in; this stems from a belief (still cultivated by neo-fascist propaganda) that the Nazis gave warning to the Roman public that a retaliation was imminent. The concept of 'ten Italians for one German' is also frequently applied to this argument, as if the Partisans could or should have realized that their attack would cost 330 Italians their lives. In fact, there were arguments among the Nazi leadership in Rome as well as between Hitler and his commanders as to whether 10, 30, or 50 Italians should be killed for every German.
Although it may be expected (and is frequently claimed) that the victims of the Fosse Ardeatine were predominantly Jewish, this is not so; only 75 of the 335 victims were Jews. Although this was one criterion for the selection of victims the main concern was simply to fill the quota; many of the prisoners at Via Tasso and Regina Coeli prisons who had the misfortune to be in Nazi hands at that moment were also included. Some of these prisoners had simply been residents of Via Rasella who were home at the time of the partisan attack; others had been arrested and tortured for suspected Resistance and other anti-fascist activities. Others had been casually picked up on the streets or arrested at their homes after fascist informants tipped the Germans. Not all of the partisans killed were members of the same group. Members of the GAP, the PA and Bandiera Rossa, in addition to the Clandestine Military Front were on the list of those to be executed. The largest group among the murdered were members of Bandiera Rossa, a Communist military Resistance group. The youngest victim was 15 years old.
The scale and even the occurrence of this retaliation was unprecedented. Since the start of the Nazi occupation of Rome (which had begun on 9-10 September 1943), anti-Fascists and members of the Resistance (including many Italian Military officers) had been organising and practising intense guerilla warfare against the occupiers.
The desperate battle fought on the 8th, 9th, and 10th September 1943 by both Italian Military (without command and control coordination) and civilians at the beginning of the occupation to deny the Nazi armoured units and paratroopers entry to Rome, cost around 700 killed in action and many wounded to the brave but hopeless defenders in and around the capital.
[edit] Legacy
For a number of reasons, including (but not limited to); the large number of victims; the fact that many of them were civilian innocents casually taken only to make up the number of those to be killed; the cruel methods implemented (even by nazi standards) to carry out the massacre; the fact that the reprisal order had come directly from Adolf Hitler (or so has been insistently claimed), and the hiding of the bodies, which were buried summarily instead of being returned to their families, the slaughter became a symbol of the various massacres carried out against civilians in Italy from 8 September 1943 until the German surrender on 8 May 1945.
The cultural and political fallout from the Fosse Ardeatine, and more generally from the Fascist movement after WWII, continues today. In December 2007, Giorgio Bettio, a city councillor of Treviso, Italy and member of the Northern League party, suggested that "With immigrants, we should use the same system the SS used, punish 10 of them for every slight against one of our citizens." in reference to Italy's current debate over immigration policies. This comment was met with public condemnation, and Bettio later said, "I certainly made a mistake in citing the SS." He also claimed the incident had been sensationalized by the media.[2]
[edit] The role of the Vatican
The Vatican's role in the massacre came under particular scrutiny following the publication of Robert Katz's book, in particular his claim that Pope Pius XII had advance knowledge of the Nazi orders and did little to forestall it. As Katz himself makes clear in his update to the book, documents later supported his claim, and none were found to support the Vatican counter-claim that the pope had intervened.
Both Priebke and Keppel sought Vatican assistance after the war (see separate Wikipedia entries for details). Priebke was spirited to Argentina thanks to Bishop Alois Hudal, and Keppel, unsuccessfully, sought asylum within the Vatican.
[edit] Popular culture
The event was dramatized in the 1962 film Dieci italiani per un tedesco directed by Filippo Walter Ratti and starring Gino Cervi, and in 1973 in the feature film Massacre in Rome by George Pan Cosmatos, starring Marcello Mastroianni and Richard Burton.
[edit] Footnotes
- ^ Trial against Herbert Kappler and others for the Ardeatine Massacre, June 12, 1948 hearing
- ^ "Italy politician urges Nazi policies for immigrants", Reuters, December 5, 2007. Retrieved on 2007-12-05.
[edit] References
- Portelli, Alessandro. The Order Has Been Carried Out.
- Katz, Robert. Death in Rome. New York, Macmillan, 1967
[edit] External links
- Fosse Ardeatine Memorial Panoramas
- Catholic League report into Vatican view of the massacre
- Death in Rome - Update
