The Ardeatine massacre, or Fosse Ardeatine massacre (Italian: Eccidio delle Fosse Ardeatine), was a mass killing of 335 civilians and political prisoners carried out in Rome on 24 March 1944 by German occupation troops during the Second World War as a reprisal for the Via Rasella attack in central Rome against the SS Police Regiment Bozen the previous day.
Subsequently, the Ardeatine Caves site (Fosse Ardeatine) was declared a Memorial Cemetery and National Monument 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. Each year, 335 names are called out, a simple roll call of the dead.
Historical background
In July 1943, the Allies landed on the island of Sicily, preparing to invade the mainland, and Rome was bombed for the first time. On 24 July 1943, the Fascist Grand Council, which the dictator Benito Mussolini had not convened since 1939, met and overwhelmingly voted no confidence in Mussolini. The following day, anxious to extricate his country from an unsustainable war, King Victor Emanuel III, the titular head of the Italian state and Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces under Mussolini, appointed Marshal Pietro Badoglio to head a new military government. He then ordered his gendarmerie, the Carabinieri, to arrest and imprison Mussolini.
On 13 August 1943, Rome was bombed again, and the Badoglio government began secret surrender negotiations with the Allies in Sicily, although still outwardly allied to Nazi Germany. In accordance with the Pope's wishes, Badoglio also unilaterally declared Rome an open city, i.e., a demilitarized zone, a declaration the Allies would refuse to recognise and the Germans to respect. The Germans, anticipating an Italian defection, meanwhile began moving more and more troops into Italy (Operation Achse). Foreseeing a German invasion, a coalition of Anti-Fascist parties and Monarchists formed the Committee of National Liberation (CLN). On 3 September 1943, the Badoglio government signed an unconditional surrender, which U.S. General Eisenhower made public on the eve of the Fifth Army's amphibious landing at Salerno (8 September). At the same time, Badoglio issued the Badoglio Proclamation, directing Italian troops to end hostilities against the Allies but to oppose attacks "from any other quarter".
The following day, the German army began moving in on Rome, and that night the King and Badoglio fled the city for Pescara, whence by sea to Bari, leaving a leadership vacuum. The Royal Italian Army, although outnumbering the German soldiers three to one, was leaderless, poorly equipped, and in chaos. After a failed resistance in the working-class neighbourhood at the Porta San Paolo and the Pyramid of Cestius by remaining loyalist soldiers, carabinieri (including a school of cadets) and civilians, the Germans occupied Rome. They announced the imposition of German military law with summary execution for violators.
Three days later (on 12 September), Nazi commandos led by Waffen-SS officer Otto Skorzeny, tracked down and rescued Mussolini from his hidden prison in the Gran Sasso and set him up in the puppet regime of the so-called "Republic of Salò" in Northern Italy. In October 1943 the Nazis rounded up and deported the Jews of Rome for extermination at Auschwitz and also made numerous mass roundups of non-Jewish male civilians for forced labour. Meanwhile, General Mark Clark's Fifth Army in Salerno suffered severe setbacks, and General Eisenhower and other Allied leaders began concentrating their attention on the imminent invasion of France, temporarily neglecting Italy.
In December, the armed Partisan Resistance began to strike German forces in Rome. The Germans responded with raids carried out by mixed Gestapo and Italian Fascist police militias on Vatican institutions, known to be harbouring prominent CLN members and other Anti-Fascists. In January 1944, news of the surprise Allied landing behind enemy lines at Anzio (Operation Shingle), only 30 miles from Rome, created temporary euphoria among the Roman populace along with a dangerous relaxation of caution on the part of Resistance members, that enabled the Nazis to arrest and torture many of its most important leaders. In the meantime, General Clark's attempt to link up the Fifth Army with the Anzio troops was unsuccessful, as the Anzio forces were held back by a line of German fortifications hastily constructed using forced civilian labour.
Partisan attack in Via Rasella
On 23 March 1944, a column of the German 11th Company, 3rd Battalion, Police Regiment "South Tyrol" was attacked by an ambush of Partisans, while marching and singing on a prescribed route that led through the Piazza di Spagna into the narrow street of Via Rasella. Organised by the Nazis to intimidate and suppress the Resistance, the battalion had been raised in October 1943 from ethnic German speakers of the northern Italian province of South Tyrol, a territory that Adolf Hitler had annexed to the German Reich after the September "betrayal" by the Italian government. Many of its citizens had since opted for German citizenship. The soldiers of the battalion were veterans of the Royal Italian Army who had seen action on the Eastern Front and had chosen service in the SS rather than face another tour in the East with the Wehrmacht.
The attack was carried out by 12 partisans of the Communist-dominated resistance organisation Gruppo d'Azione Patriottica ("Patriotic Action Group") or GAP. An improvised explosive device was prepared consisting of 12 kilograms of TNT packed in a steel case. This was inserted into a bag containing an additional six kilograms of TNT and TNT-filled iron tubing. Although reported as having been thrown from a building, the bomb had actually been hidden in a rubbish cart, pushed into position by a Partisan disguised as a street cleaner, while others acted as lookouts. The fuse was lit when the police were forty seconds from the bomb. The blast caused the immediate deaths of 28 German SS policemen and may have killed two civilian bystanders, one of whom, Piero Zuccheretti, was an eleven-year-old boy, although he might well have been killed by the Germans firing in response; it is unknown.
More would die over the next few days. All twelve Partisans, some of whom fired on the German column, succeeded in melting away into the crowd unscathed.
Preparations for the reprisal
The German police attaché and commander of the Security Police in Rome, SS Obersturmbannführer Herbert Kappler was on the scene soon afterwards to supervise the investigation. That evening he was summoned to the headquarters of the German Armed Forces Commandant in Rome, Luftwaffe Generalmajor Kurt Mälzer, who had decided that the killings called for reprisals.
They agreed that the execution of ten Italians for each German policeman killed was a suitable ratio. Mälzer, who also proposed burning down part of Rome, passed this on to General Eberhard von Mackensen, the commander of the Fourteenth Army, whose jurisdiction included Rome. General Mackensen endorsed the recommendation. In turn, the staff of the German Commander-in-Chief South (Oberbefehlshaber Süd), passed this on to the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW). That night, Adolf Hitler authorised the reprisal, stipulating that it be carried out within 24 hours. Commander-in-Chief South Generalfeldmarschall Albert Kesselring, considered this an order, one he interpreted as calling for the execution of Italians who had been previously sentenced to death. He was assured by Kappler that sufficient prisoners were available.
However, Kappler had only four prisoners sentenced to death in his Hausgefängnis (private prison) at SS headquarters in the German Embassy on 145 Via Tasso (now the Museum of the Liberation of Rome); plus 17 serving long sentences; 167 deemed "worthy of death"; and two to four civilians who had been rounded up in the Via Rasella area on suspicion of involvement. Kappler's superior, SS Brigadeführer und Generalmajor der Polizei Wilhelm Harster, suggested making up the numbers from the 57 Jews also in Nazi custody. By noon on 24 March, Kappler had a list of 271 victims, each with his crime listed against his name, except for the Jews, who were simply listed as "Jew". By this time the death toll from the Via Rasella bombing had risen to 32. (One more would die while the reprisal was underway; the death toll eventually reaching 33.) To make up the numbers, Questore Pietro Caruso, chief of the Fascist police in Rome, offered some Italians from his Regina Coeli prison, among them Maurizio Giglio, who had been one of his own lieutenants, before being unmasked as a double agent working for the American OSS in charge of radio communications with the Fifth Army. Because of the time limit that Hitler had imposed, Mälzer and Kappler agreed that the victims would have to be shot in the back of the head at close range rather than by conventional firing squad. The men of the regiment Bozen, the unit which was hit in the attack, were offered the chance to avenge their comrades, but they refused to do it in that way. 26 of the victims shot in the caves were Jews betrayed by Celeste Di Porto, the terror of the Roman Ghetto.
Massacre
The massacre was perpetrated without prior public notice in a little-frequented rural suburb of the city, inside the tunnels of the disused quarries of pozzolana, near the Via Ardeatina. By mistake, a total of 335 Italian prisoners were taken, five in excess of the 330 called for. On 24 March, led by SS officers Erich Priebke and Karl Hass, they were transported to the Ardeatine caves in truckloads and then, in groups of five, put to death inside the caves. Because the killing squad mostly consisted of officers who had never killed before, Kappler had ordered several cases of cognac delivered to the caves to calm the officers' 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 fire a bullet directly into the cerebellum, ensuring that no more than one bullet would be needed per prisoner. Many were forced to kneel down over the bodies of those who had been killed before them because the cave had become filled with dead bodies. During the killings, the existence of the five extra prisoners was discovered, and it was decided to kill them anyway, in order to prevent the place of execution from becoming known.
The bodies of the victims were placed in piles, typically about a metre in height, and then buried under tons 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. Families of the victims were notified with excruciating slowness by an individual letter, if at all, a strategy of cover-up and concealment—"Night and Fog"—designed to confuse, grieve, and intimidate surviving relatives, according to Robert Katz.
Victims
Misconceptions about the Fosse Ardeatine Massacre abound. Foremost among these is the notion that the Partisans responsible for the Via Rasella attack were ordered to come forward and turn themselves over to the SS and wilfully declined to do so.
Although it is sometimes claimed that the reprisal victims were predominantly Jewish, only 75 of the 335 victims selected for death in the caves were Jewish, this having been a criterion for selection (because Jews were known to be marked for death anyway). In fact, the victims comprised, in Robert Katz's words, "rich, and poor, doctors and lawyers, workers and shopkeepers, artists and artisans, teachers and students, men and teenage boys from every walk of life, and even a man of God ... among them". The main concern of the SS had been the speedy fulfilment of the quota. Some were 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, while still others had been casually picked up on the streets or arrested at their homes on the basis of tips from Fascist informants. The youngest of them was 15 years old.