Allied propaganda urging Italians to join them against the Germans: ‘They’re kicked out of Sicily. Let’s kick them out of Italy.’
Allied propaganda against the Social Italian Republic, which was Fascism raised from the grave, after Mussolini was freed from royal captors at an Apennine ski resort by German parachutists.
The first bad news came on the evening of 18 September when Romans were treated to a moment of unwanted nostalgia. On their radios they heard Mussolini’s voice, praising Hitler, railing bitterly against the king and urging Italians to support him. He sounded so weak that many doubted it was really Mussolini, but it was. He had been rescued a few days earlier in a daring German raid on the Apennine ski resort where he had been held. His escape was bad news for the Romans. He proclaimed himself leader of a new Social Italian Republic and, though he was little more than a German puppet leader, his return provided a rallying point for true believers, and for those who were so compromised that there was no turning back. Fascism, which had seemed dead, staggered back to life. With the example of the Germans beside them, Italy’s desperate new Fascists would prove much worse than the old. In early October they set up their Roman headquarters in Palazzo Wedekind on Piazza Colonna, which they guarded with tanks and machine guns.
As the Germans settled in they became more active. Romans of military age were told to report to the authorities for military service or labour. When hardly any did so the Germans seized some on the street. Roundups had begun. The city already had many in hiding, including a thousand freed British prisoners of war along with large numbers of anti-Fascists, and Italian soldiers and officers, and now the numbers swelled. A popular joke of the moment described a group of tourists who asked their guide where they could find the statue of Moses, only to be told that, ‘For some days he has been staying in the home of friends.’ People hid in convents, in hospitals, and even in the lunatic asylum, causing de Wyss to comment that Rome had never had so many madmen. Most hid in private homes and it became a commonplace that half of Rome was hiding the other half. Large bounties were offered for the surrender of the British prisoners of war and death was threatened to any who concealed them, yet few if any were given up. One elderly Roman woman who hid several British prisoners told de Wyss that she understood the risks but then she thought of how the prisoners each had a mother worrying about them, and she knew she had to keep them.
On 6 October it was the turn of the king’s tall Cuirassier guards to be taken. There was further revenge against the king when the Villa Ada Savoia – where Vittorio Emanuele had had Mussolini arrested – was looted of furniture, paintings, statues, tapestries and even, as Mother Mary reported, bed linen. ‘Everything went, including the nails in the walls.’18 On 8 October the Germans moved against the Carabinieri: the elite police force whose loyalty had always been to the king and who had played a key role in Mussolini’s arrest: 1,500 of them were taken away to Germany, many never to return. Fortunately, word of the arrests spread quickly and another 5,000 escaped capture.
The most terrible roundup, though, was yet to come: of Rome’s Jews. A fortunate few had left Italy before the war began, when the Racial Laws were first introduced, but most had nowhere to go and no money to take them there. News that the Germans were advancing on the city led some Jews to go into hiding and a wise few stayed hidden, but as days passed and nothing happened most re-emerged. They could not afford to stay without work and did not want to keep imposing on their Catholic friends. Besides, they were the world’s oldest Jewish community, who had survived for more than two thousand years and repeated papal attempts to convert them out of existence.
Warnings came. BBC radio broadcast stories of massacres and camps with gas chambers. Rome’s chief rabbi, Israel Zolli, who had been brought up in Eastern Europe and knew about pogroms, urged that the synagogue be closed and that the Jewish community should be told to hide or leave the city. Two Jewish Romans, Renzo Levi and Settimio Sorani, who ran the local branch of an Italian Jewish refugee organization DELASEM, and who knew precisely what was happening to Jews in the concentration camps, urged Jews to go south to Allied-controlled territory. There were also warnings, more surprisingly, from Germans in the city, notably two diplomats, the German ambassador to the Holy See, Baron Ernst von Weizsäcker, and his secretary, Albrecht von Kessel. Neither had any liking for the Nazis – Kessel was strongly outspoken against them and Weizsäcker, who was an old-fashioned aristocrat, despised them – and both were as aware as the two DELASEM officials of the fate of Jews elsewhere in Europe (Weizsäcker had personally seen the minutes of the Wahnsee conference that launched the Final Solution). Kessel asked a Swiss contact, Alfred Fahrener, to have Jewish Romans linked to the Vatican spread the word that the community was in grave danger.
Sadly, few Roman Jews took these warnings seriously. The BBC reports were assumed to be the exaggerations of Allied propaganda and Rabbi Zolli was an outsider and not much liked. Besides, so far the Germans had done nothing aggressive. Most Jewish Romans agreed with their community president, Ugo Foà, who assured them that they were safe enough. They were a relatively small community of about 12,000 people and Foà felt they would be of little interest to the Germans, who would not want to risk trouble with the pope. The important thing, he believed, was that Roman Jews should do nothing to give the Germans cause to act against them. They should keep a low profile and quietly carry on with their lives. The furnishings of the Jewish Temple were removed and hidden but no other precautions were taken.
The first move against Jewish Romans came on Sunday 26 September when the Gestapo chief in the city, SS Major Herbert Kappler, summoned the Jewish community’s two leaders, Ugo Foà and Dante Almansi, to his office at the main German embassy, Villa Wolkonsky. He told them that Rome’s Jews must hand over a ransom of 50 kilograms of gold within two days or 200 of them would be deported. If they paid up, no Jews would suffer any harm. Though some doubted Kappler’s promise, most felt he would keep his word. If this seems naïve, Giacomo Debenedetti, a Jewish Roman writer, had an explanation: ‘Convinced by centuries of experience that their fate is to be treated like dogs, Jews have a desperate need for human sympathy; and to solicit it, they offer it. Will they behave this way with the Germans? Yes, unfortunately.’19 Debenedetti also felt that Jews, thanks to their religious beliefs, had a deep-rooted acceptance of authority and expectation of justice. Nazi beliefs, by contrast, were simpler. Whatever impression Jews might give, all of them were determined enemies of the German people.
The morning after Kappler made his demand a collection point was set up in a room on the second floor of the synagogue complex. At first, few came and a delegation was sent to the Vatican to seek help. Pius XII offered an interest-free loan but in the event it was not needed, as by early afternoon a long queue had formed below the synagogue. Most were poor Jews from the Ghetto area, whose offerings were tiny but when added together soon formed a considerable amount. Rich donors gave generously, and included Christian Romans. When the gold was handed over Rome’s Jews felt relieved, convinced that they were now out of danger. Sadly, they could not have been more wrong. The very day before he first demanded the gold, Kappler had received orders from Berlin that Rome’s Jews were to be rounded up and deported. Evidence suggests that Kappler organized the gold demand – which was wholly his idea – because he knew he would not be ready to round the Jews up for several weeks and wanted to distract them so they would not go to ground. His ploy succeeded. The Jews were dismayed by further shocks. German troops seized all of the community’s documents and later they seized the books of the community’s two libraries, which included priceless ancient volumes that had never been catalogued or studied (and which have never been recovered: they were lost to Allied bombing on their journey north or, as some Jewish Romans believe, remain hidden in Germany). Yet even these shocks caused few to go into hiding.
One man tried to save the community from catastrophe and once again, he was a German. Eitel Friedrich Möllhausen, who was the actin
g German ambassador not to the Vatican but to the Italian state, learned of the roundup order when it first reached Major Kappler. öllhausen at once drove to Frascati to persuade Kesselring that Jews should not be rounded up but should be used as forced labour: an arrangement Kesselring had employed for Tunisian Jews. Kesselring, who had no troops to spare for any roundups, willingly agreed. Unfortunately Möllhausen’s efforts were in vain. The SS in Berlin, realizing that obstacles were being put in their way by local German officials, circumvented them. An SS force under Captain Theodor Dannecker, who had presided over the roundup of Parisian Jews the previous year, was sent to Rome with a detachment of troops.
The first that Rome’s Jews knew of Dannecker’s arrival was in the early morning of 16 October, when inhabitants of the Ghetto were woken by the sound of exploding grenades and shots fired at their windows. The attack, which lasted for several hours, was intended to keep them in their homes, and it succeeded. At five thirty, as autumn rain poured down, soldiers sealed off the area and began banging on doors.
It is hard to conceive that anything good could come from what happened that day but one solitary thing did: a forty-page account by Giacomo Debenedetti, entitled, October 16 1943. Debenedetti’s brief masterpiece recounts the unfolding horror not dispassionately – how could it have? – but with a sense of precise, bitter observation, that included the Germans involved. He portrays them not as purposefully cruel but as hurried, and brutal because brutality helped them complete their task. Thus the SS soldiers were constantly shouting, ‘For no good reason, probably only to maintain an air of terror and a sense of authority, so that they wouldn’t run into any snags and the whole thing would be done quickly.’20 They did what they had been told and, with one or two exceptions, nothing more. They followed the lists of names they had been given – most of which came from a register kept up under Mussolini’s Racial Laws – and banged on doors. To those who answered they gave cards that told them they had twenty minutes to get ready and listed what they must take. Debenedetti imagines their thinking: ‘The good glasses – it’ll be better to leave them at home. And suitcases, where are we going to get one for everybody? The children will just have to share.’21
Some Germans did less than they had been ordered. One woman, whom Debenedetti refers to as Signora S., was warned of what was happening by the shouts of a neighbour. Her leg in a cast from a recent accident, she stumbled down the stairs. Reaching the street she saw two German guards, whom she approached and offered cigarettes, which they accepted. In local legend the two were soon thought of as Austrians:
‘Taking away all the Jews,’ the older of the two answers the woman. She slaps her hand against her plaster cast.
‘But I have a broken leg – going away with my family – hospital.’
‘Ja, ja,’ the Austrian nods and gestures with his hand that she can slip away. But while she waits for her family, Signora S. decides to take advantage of her friendship with the two soldiers and save some neighbours. Now it is she who calls up from the street.
‘Sterina, Sterina.’
‘What’s the matter?’
‘Get out. They’re taking everyone.’
‘In a minute. I’ll dress the baby and be right down.’
Unfortunately dressing the baby was fatal. Signora Sterina, her baby, and her entire family were taken.22
Signora S. rescued her own family and then went back, like ‘nurses who make their rounds during epidemics with a carefree, almost irritating, disdain for prophylaxis, and nevertheless are precisely the ones who get away with it, as if disease had no power over them’.23 Through pure bravado she persuaded other Germans that she was not herself Jewish and then saved four children of a neighbour.
But most were not so lucky. Some who might have escaped if they had fled at once made the mistake of locking themselves into their homes. The Germans broke down their doors: ‘Behind them, stony and stiff as the most frighteningly surrealistic of family portraits, their residents stood in terrified attention – their eyes as if hypnotized and their hearts in their mouths.’ They were led along Via del Portico d’Ottavia towards the Theatre of Marcellus:
Straggling single-file down the middle of the street. SS troopers at the head and tail of each little band are guarding them, keeping them more or less in line, prodding them on with the butts of their machine guns although no one is resisting with anything more than tears, moans, cries for mercy, confused questions … The children search their parents’ eyes for reassurance, comfort the latter can no longer give, and this is even more devastating than having to say, ‘there isn’t any,’ to a child asking for bread.24
The Jews initially assumed the Germans would want men for forced labour, so it was the men who tried to escape, which some managed to do, clambering over rooftops. Others were saved because they were smokers and had got up early to queue for cigarettes at the bar on the Tiber Island. Of those who were taken away in trucks that day, women outnumbered men two to one, and three-quarters were children.
News of the roundup spread rapidly and all across Rome Jews went to ground. Many fled to the homes of friends. Kappler’s report on the operation to his superiors makes it clear that Romans showed no support for the seizures, while many tried to thwart them, hiding Jewish neighbours and blocking solitary arresters. In one instance soldiers knocking at an apartment door were prevented from entering by a Fascist in full Blackshirt uniform who insisted the place was his own. Some Jews were hidden in hospitals and given fake operations. One hid in a hospital morgue.
Many were concealed by the Church. When the monks at Fatebenefratelli hospital on the Tiber Island saw Jews fleeing from the Ghetto they took them in, as did the nuns at the nearby convent of Our Lady of Sion. Some institutions demanded that Jews convert to Catholicism and others required a recommendation from someone known to them, but most took them without question. Many churchmen showed the greatest kindness and sensitivity towards those they gave sanctuary. Jews were hidden by parish priests in rooms by their churches, they were hidden in seminaries, and Jewish children were given places in Catholic boarding schools for negligible payment. Mother Mary wrote proudly that the pope had saved a great number of Rome’s Jews, a claim that would be widely believed after the war.
The truth, though, was rather different. Pius XII knew of the roundup almost immediately. A Roman aristocrat, Princess Enza Pignatelli Aragona Cortes, who knew Pius, heard what was taking place from a friend who lived near the Ghetto. Having no car she borrowed one – from the German embassy – and having seen the dejected crowd waiting beneath the Theatre of Marcellus she went direct to the Vatican where she was quickly able to meet Pius and tell him her story. Taken aback by the news, he made a phone call in her presence, probably to the German ambassador to the Vatican, Weizsäcker. Sadly, that was all he did.
The Jews were unlucky in their pope. As we have seen, for several centuries few popes had shown liking towards Jewish Romans and they showed even less after the Jews became supporters of the unified Italy, yet Pius XII was particularly lacking in sympathy. Born Eugenio Pacelli, of a Roman family closely linked with the Vatican, he made his name as a Church lawyer, quickly rose through Church ranks and at the end of the First World War he was posted to Munich. There he witnessed the excesses of the short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic, which confirmed Pacelli’s belief that Bolshevism – which he saw as a strongly Jewish movement – was the Church’s greatest threat, and one that must be opposed at any cost. Pacelli was not particular as to whom he employed in his struggle against Bolshevism. In 1933, six years before he became pope, he negotiated an agreement between the papacy and the new Nazi state, under which he promised that powerful German Catholic organizations would keep out of politics, thus helping to clear the way for Hitler to assume absolute power.
The war did not change his views and as Germany struggled, Pacelli, now Pope Pius, hoped to arrange peace between Hitler and the Western Allies so Germany could have a free hand against Russia. Pius had n
o wish to do anything that might undermine Germany or set the country against the Vatican. Though it is not easy to prove, evidence suggests that Pius may have held anti-Semitic views, as many in the Vatican did at this time. In 1942, when news of the Holocaust emerged, he refused to speak up about what was happening despite strong pressure from President Roosevelt, who smuggled a special representative, Myron Taylor, to Rome to plead with him to act.
Now the Holocaust had come to Pius. The Jews seized in the Ghetto were temporarily held at the Collegio Militare, which was only a few hundred yards from the Vatican Palace, while some of the truck drivers taking them there, eager to do a little sightseeing, stopped right by St Peter’s Square. The British ambassador to the Holy See, D’Arcy Osborne, managed to see Pius within hours of the roundup and urged him to protest, but was told that the papacy had no complaints against the German authorities in Rome, as they had respected Vatican neutrality, while protests to Ambassador Weizsäcker had led to the release of many Jews. This was not true. Vatican officials had intervened but only on behalf of a handful of Jews who had converted to Catholicism (and without success). Of the 1,250, captives in the Collegio Militare almost a fifth were released, but only because they had managed to convince the SS commander, Theodor Dannecker, that they should not have been seized in the first place. The pope never once protested at the roundup. The Vatican’s only comment came nine days afterwards in the Vatican newspaper, the Osservatore Romano, but this did not mention the Jews and merely lamented the suffering of all innocents in the war.
Once again, German diplomats did much more. Greatly disappointed by papal inaction, the two German ambassadors, Weizsäcker and Möllhausen, embarked on an elaborate plot in which they tried to alarm the authorities in Berlin by claiming the pope was about to denounce what had happened (though they knew he would do nothing of the kind). They concocted a letter supposedly written by a German bishop in Rome, Alois Hudal, to the German commander in Rome, General Stahel (who was also in on the conspiracy), that warned of the pope’s anger, and which was sent to the Foreign Ministry in Berlin with a telegram from Weizsäcker, who again urged that Jews seized in Rome should be released and used as forced labour. It was a forlorn effort. The letter and telegram languished in the Berlin Foreign Ministry for days before being passed on to the SS. The SS were unlikely to have taken any notice and in the event did not need to. By the time Weizsäcker’s telegram finally reached them the seized Roman Jews, who numbered more than a thousand, had reached or were about to reach Auschwitz. Most were gassed at once. Of the thousand only fifteen would survive and return to Rome.
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