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 a day earlier in central Rome, and which had claimed the lifes of 33 German soldiers, three-hundred and thirty-five Italian hostages - comprising civilians, Jews from the local community casually picked up on the city streets, Italian prisoners of war (up to the General rank), previously captured partisans and a few inmates from the Roman jails - were shot in groups of five as reprisal for the attack. The massacre was perpetrated without prior notice in what was then an unfrequented rural suburb of the city, inside the tunnels of the disused quarries of pozzolana, near Via Ardeatina (Italian: Cave Ardeatine).
Because of a number of reasons, including - but not limited to - the high number of the victims, the fact that many of them were civilian innocents casually taken only to add up to the number of those to be killed, the cruel methods implemented even by nazi standards to carry out the massacre, the circumstance 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 to the various massacres carried out against civilians in Italy from 8 September 1943 until the German surrender on 8 May 1945.
Subsequently, the Cave Ardeatine (also know as Fosse Ardeatine) became a National monument and a Memorial cemetery open daily to visitors. A solemn State commemoration at the presence of the top officials of the Italian Republic is held at the monument every year in honor of the fallen on the anniversary of the slaughter.
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[edit] The Partisan attack in via Rasella
On 23 March 1944, a column of German troops marching through central Rome on via Rasella was attacked by partisans which immediately caused the death of 32 soldiers[1]; many dozens of soldiers were wounded and a 33rd would die later.
[edit] The preparation of 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 policeman died after the Partisan attack.
[edit] The massacre
On 24 March, led by SS officers Erich Priebke and Karl Hass, the victims were all transported to the Ardeatine caves and forced to wait their turn to be killed while, in groups of five, they 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 the nerves of the officers. 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 the bullet perfectly into the cerebellum so that no more than one bullet was 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 breaths of life as the soldiers tried to finish them off. During the killings, it was found that five more people than were supposed to have been taken to the caves had been brought there, but they were killed in order to prevent news of the retaliation place from spreading.
Even some of the Germans involved in the massacre were horrified by the slaughter being carried out. One of the officers, who refused to shoot, was personally dragged to the execution site by Erich Priebke, who had put his arm around the officer's waist and forced him to kill his victim. Another, named Amon, testified at the trial against Kappler held in Italy in 1948 [2] that once he entered the cave and saw the piles of dead bodies, he was so horrified that he fainted and was hastily replaced by a comrade who abruptly pushed him aside and shot another victim in his place.
The massacre took most of the day and when completed by night, and in order to hide it, part of caves and their openings were sealed by German Engineers who collapsed the vaults by setting off explosive charges.
Some of the victims' heads were blown off by the fire, while others were only wounded and most likely survived even to the explosions intended to seal the caves after the massacre was completed: one son and his father were found in each other arms in a corner of the cave galleries which had been not filled up by the debris under which most victims had been summarily buried. Some crawled their way to other corners to agonize to death.
The bodies of the victims were typically placed in piles about a meter high, and then buried under tonnes of rock debris when the Germans 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 perceptions of the Fosse Ardeatine are numerous, and often false. The foremost among these is the notion that the Partisans who attacked in via Rasella should have turned themselves in; this often stems from a popularly-held notion (still cultivated by the 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. However, it was at the Fosse Ardeatine that any such notion came into being for the first time. In fact, there were arguments among the Nazi leadership in Rome as well as between Hitler and his command over whether 50, 30, or 10 Italians should be killed for every German.
Although it would be expected (and it is frequently claimed) that the victims of the Fosse Ardeatine were predominantly Jewish, this is not so; 75 of the 335 victims were Jewish. Although this was one set of criteria for the massacre, the first goal was to fill the number quota; many of the prisoners at via Tasso and Regina Coeli who happened to be available at the time were sent to their deaths by the Nazis at the Fosse Ardeatine. Some of these prisoners had simply been residents of via Rasella who were home at the time of the bombing; others had been arrested and tortured for Resistance- and anti-fascist-related activities. Others had been casually picked up on the Capital streets or captured at their homes after fascist informants tipped the Germans. Not all of the Partisans who were killed were members of the same Resistance group. Members of the GAP, the PA, and Bandiera Rossa, in addition to the Clandestine Military Front were all on the list of those to be executed. The largest group among the murdered were members of Bandiera Rossa, a Communist military Resistance group. Among the victims, the youngest was 15 and some of the Jews were arrested because actively involved in the Italian Resistance.
Furthermore, the scale and even the occurrence at all 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 organizing and practicing an intense guerilla warfare against their occupiers and oppressors.
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 bar the Nazi armoured units and paratroopers the entry to Rome, costed around 700 killed in action and many wounded to the brave but hopeless defenders in and and around the Capital.
[edit] Legacy
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.[3]
[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
- ^ The police unit targeted by the ambush was the SS Police Battalion "Bozen" which was mostly manned by German-speaking natives of the Northern Italy province of Bolzano-Bozen, then annexed to the in Third Reich).
- ^ 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.
[edit] External links
de:Ardeatinische Höhlen es:Masacre de las Fosas Ardeatinas eo:Masakro de la Ardeaj Kavernoj fr:Massacre des fosses ardéatines it:Eccidio delle Fosse Ardeatine he:הטבח בפוסה ארדיאטינה ro:Masacrul de la Fosse Ardeatine sl:Pokol v Ardeatinskih jamah sv:Fosse Ardeatine
