Ardeatine massacre
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.
Ardeatine massacre
24 March 1944
335
Italian political prisoners and civilians
Subsequently, the Ardeatine Caves site (Fosse Ardeatine)[1] 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, to reinforce that 335 discrete individuals symbolise a collective entity.[2]
Massacre[edit]
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,[14] 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.[14]
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.[15]
The monument[edit]
The design of the Fosse Ardeatine monument resulted from a national competition and was a collaboration between five architects (Nello Aprile, Cino Calcaprina, Aldo Cardelli, Mario Fiorentino & Giuseppe Perugini) and two sculptors (Francesco Coccia & Mirko Basaldella). The massive bronze gate by Mirko Basaldella used the ubiquitous barbed wire of battlefields and concentration camps as inspiration, merging it with the moving curlicues of a Tree of Life. The curved lines morph into a tangle of limbs reaching out across each other at those awkwardly bent angles characteristic of corpses. Also at the entrance is a colossal concrete statue by Francesco Coccia of three male figures standing together as one. Hands tied behind their backs, the three ages of man are bound together by ideals and fate—the youngest Fosse victim was 15, the oldest 70. Each face has a distinct expression portraying the range of emotions the men likely felt marching to their deaths in the quarry: despair, eyes half-closed in resignation, a resolute distant stare. Each face on the statue directs its gaze towards an important element of the memorial complex: the burial slab, the old quarries, and the forecourt.[22] The memorial plaque outside the entry to the caves reads:
WAYFARERS THIRSTY FOR LIBERTY – WE WERE ROUNDED UP AT RANDOM – IN THE STREET AND IN JAIL – AS A REPRISAL CAST IN EN MASSE – SLAUGHTERED AND WALLED WITHIN THESE PITS – ITALIANS, DO NOT CURSE – MOTHERS, BRIDES, DO NOT WEEP – CHILDREN, CARRY WITH PRIDE – THE MEMORY – OF THE HOLOCAUST OF YOUR FATHERS – IF OUR SLAUGHTER – WILL HAVE HAD A PURPOSE BEYOND REVENGE – IT IS TO ENSHRINE THE RIGHT OF HUMAN EXISTENCE – AGAINST THE CRIME OF MURDER
Inside the former quarries themselves, there are two more plaques. One in the tunnel:
WE WERE SLAUGHTERED IN THIS PLACE BECAUSE – WE FOUGHT AGAINST INTERNAL TYRANNY – FOR FREEDOM AND AGAINST THE FOREIGNER – FOR THE INDEPENDENCE OF THE HOMELAND – WE DREAMT A FREE, JUST – AND DEMOCRATIC ITALY. MAY OUR SACRIFICE AND OUR BLOOD – SOW THE SEED AND ACT AS WARNING FOR – GENERATIONS TO COME.
And another in the 'cave' at the very end where the massacre actually took place:
HERE WE WERE SLAUGHTERED – VICTIMS OF A HORRENDOUS SACRIFICE – MAY OUR SACRIFICE GIVE RISE TO A BETTER HOMELAND – AND TO LASTING PEACE AMONG THE PEOPLES.
FROM THE DEPTHS, I HAVE CRIED OUT TO YOU, O LORD.
The last phrase, taken from Penitential Psalm 130, was most likely chosen for its parallel significance in Christianity and Judaism, simultaneously speaking for 260 Christians and 75 Jews killed and buried side by side. The text is written in both Latin and Hebrew: "Clamavi ad Te, Domine";"שיר המעלות, ממעמקים קראתיך י-ה".
Legacy[edit]
For a number of reasons, including (but not limited to): the large number of victims; the fact that many of them were innocent civilians 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, 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.
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 claimed the incident had been "sensationalized" by the media.[23]
Controversy[edit]
In 1952, the new Italian Supreme Court declared the Via Rasella attack to have been a legitimate act of war after an appeal by Kappler's lawyers of his conviction of guilt in the Ardeatine Massacre.
This decision was reaffirmed in 1999, when the Italian Supreme Court declared the Partisans immune from prosecution after a Roman prosecutor had unsuccessfully attempted to bring a suit against them for the death of the boy Piero Zuccheretti, who had been killed in Via Rasella.[35] Historian Robert Wolfe finds "persuasive" Katz's characterisation of the Pope's decision to condemn the Partisans for the Via Rasella attack, rather than the Nazis for the reprisals, as evidence of "a moral failure" resulting from one of the "great misreadings of history".[36]
In the 1990s, there was a revisionist campaign by Il Giornale, a newspaper owned by Paolo Berlusconi, brother of former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, to re-label the World War II Partisans responsible for the attack on Via Rasella as "terrorists". In response, the Italian Supreme Court of Cassation officially ruled that the act in Via Rasella had been a legitimate act of war and not a terrorist attack and ordered the publisher to pay punitive damages of 45 thousand euro.[37] Nevertheless, some historians, such as Richard Raiber and István Deák, continue to imply that the Partisans were the equivalent of terrorists and were, moreover, responsible for avoidable suffering, thus offering some support for the official judgment of the Vatican at the time.[38]
Historian Patrick Gallo, however, in For Love and Country: The Italian Resistance (2003), posited that the Rome-based Resistance not only undermined German morale but also achieved important strategic objectives and was hence not a useless provocation, as contended by critics, but an act of legitimate military significance in furthering the Allied victory.[39]
Reviewing Katz's book, The Battle for Rome, István Deák, on the other hand, cautions that although "armed resistance during World War II was romanticised because the Nazis were such an appalling enemy and because in that war the guerrillas' targets were still mainly soldiers", it is increasingly hard to draw the line between freedom fighting and terrorism. In his opinion, Hague Conventions regulating irregular warfare has been "more a failure than success". "What is needed," Deák stresses, "is a recognition of reality, namely that future wars will increasingly consist of civilians shooting at soldiers from hiding and frightened soldiers killing innocent civilians. And what is needed, in the aftermath of such a sobering recognition, is an attempt to create a new international law for the more efficient regulation of this type of horrible warfare." Robert Katz's book, The Battle for Rome, Deák concludes, "provides fine arguments for this necessary debate".[40]
Post-war fates of leading figures in the events[edit]
Immediately after the war Roman Partisan leaders, including Rosario Bentivegna, the medical student who had set off the Via Rasella bomb, were recipients of medals conferred by the post-war Italian government.
Both Priebke and Kappler sought Vatican assistance after the war. Priebke escaped from a British prison camp in 1946 and fled, first to the Tyrol and then back to Rome, whence, using false papers supplied by the Vatican "ratline", he emigrated to Argentina. He was unmasked on camera in 1994 during a television interview by ABC television reporter Sam Donaldson, brought back to Italy for trial, and sentenced to house arrest in the home of his lawyer, Paolo Giachini. He died on 11 October 2013 from natural causes at age 100. His last request to have his remains returned to Argentina to be buried alongside his wife was denied by Argentina. The Vatican issued an "unprecedented ban" on holding the funeral in any Catholic church in Rome.[41] But the Society of St Pius X, a Catholic splinter group often accused of having far-right and anti-Semitic leanings, offered to hold the ceremony in the city of Albano Laziale. During the funeral service, violent clashes broke out between fascist sympathisers and anti-fascist protesters.[41]
Don Florian Abrahamowicz, a priest expelled from the Society of St Pius X for his extreme right-wing views, told Italy's Radio 24: "Priebke was a friend of mine, a Christian, a faithful soldier."[41]
Kappler, a Protestant until his late conversion in life, unsuccessfully sought asylum within the Vatican. Tried by the British and sentenced to life imprisonment in Gaeta, in 1977 he successfully escaped from a Roman military hospital where he had been undergoing treatment for cancer. He died unmolested the following year at his home in Soltau, West Germany, the West Germans having refused Italian requests to extradite him.
Dramatisations[edit]
The event was recreated in the 1962 film Dieci italiani per un tedesco (Via Rasella) (Ten Italians for One German (Rasella Street)) directed by Filippo Walter Ratti and starring Gino Cervi.[42]
In 1973, the feature film Massacre in Rome by George Pan Cosmatos was released starring Marcello Mastroianni and Richard Burton.
American composer William Schuman subtitled his Ninth Symphony, from 1968, "Le fosse Ardeatine" ("The Ardeatine Caves") in memory of the victims.
The 2017 novel entitled From Sand and Ash by Amy Harmon details a fictional account of the massacre.