Rome

by Matthew Kneale

  Kappler managed to reduce the number of Romans to die for each German to ten but this still left him with the problem of who they would be, which grew greater as ever more soldiers died of their wounds – eventually there were thirty-three – raising the total required. After an increasingly desperate search his eventual selection included a few captured partisans, several dozen Jews awaiting deportation (the youngest was only fifteen), two anti-Fascist priests, three dozen Italian army officers (one of whom was the FMCR chief colonel Montezemolo, who had bravely stood up to weeks of torture without betraying his comrades) and ten unlucky bystanders rounded up after the bombing, among them a barman and two salesmen in a handbag shop.

  The day after the bombing 335 men and boys were driven to a network of cave-like abandoned diggings on the Via Ardeatina just south of the city. It was a chaotic, slipshod massacre, all the more so because nobody wanted to do it. Kappler initially ordered the survivors of the SS unit that had been attacked to do the killings but their commander, SS Major Dobbick, refused, claiming, rather mysteriously, that his soldiers suffered from Alpine superstitions. When the regular army also refused, the task fell on Kappler and his SS staff, most of whom were not soldiers but office workers who had hardly fired a gun. To help them through the ordeal they were given quantities of cognac and became drunk, shooting increasingly wildly. Even the number of prisoners was wrong. Thirty-three soldiers had died in the attack so according to Kappler’s logic, only 330 should have been brought. Five had been taken by mistake, though they would be killed anyway for what they had witnessed.

  The first of the victims, who were tied together in pairs and led into the diggings, put up no resistance, but others did. One was beaten to death. Some were shot repeatedly when the first bullets failed to kill them, and several dozen were executed so inexpertly that their heads were severed from their bodies. Some were not killed at first but suffocated under the weight of corpses piled on top of them. Months later, when the diggings were explored, one body was found some distance away from the rest. The man had still been alive when the Germans blew up and sealed the entrance, and had crawled into a corner to die alone. The killing, which would become known as the Fosse Ardeatina (the Ardeatina diggings), was the worst atrocity of the war in Italy.

  The Germans announced the reprisal, keeping back any details of where it had taken place, claiming that all those killed had been communists or Badoglio supporters. Yet most Romans still felt angrier towards the Allies. When de Wyss questioned people a few days after the killings she found that though they hated the Fascists, most of all they resented the Allies far more than the Germans: ‘People say: “The Germans are good and human. Provided you don’t irritate them they are very kind.” It made me so angry to hear it that I could hardly speak.’31

  At least the main cause of Romans’ anger towards the Allies – their bombing of the city – was largely over. Few raids took place after the Via Rasella attack. Spring finally arrived and the Romans no longer froze, though they were hungrier than ever. Frequently the bread ration failed to materialize and when it did it was hardly nutritious. De Wyss had her tiny daily loaf tested by a chemist friend who told her that, as well as rye, dried chickpeas and maize flour, it contained mulberry leaves and elm tree bark. Mother Mary noticed how starved everyone looked, ‘It gives one a heartache to see it. No longer is it complimentary to allude to loss of weight; on the contrary the subject is tactfully avoided.’32 In early April, she reported that two women who had been brought to the Littorio Hospital in Monteverde suffering from shock after an air raid had died in their hospital beds – of hunger.

  The Vatican tried to bring food into the city, using trucks marked with Vatican colours, but some were unwittingly bombed by Allied aircraft, while matters were not helped when German trucks also used Vatican colours, or drove behind Vatican trucks in the hope that they would be protected. By mid-April, newspapers were filled with personal ads offering valuables for sale as people tried to raise money to buy extortionate black market food. Even dog meat was exorbitant, while the city’s cats had long vanished. Bread riots broke out among Roman women queuing at bakeries. In one incident ten women who attacked a bakery in the Via Ostiense area, which supplied German troops, were taken to the Tiber and shot. By May, even wealthy Romans were going hungry.

  As well as starved, Romans were frightened. Manhunts for forced labour continued. In March one of those hiding out in Mother Mary’s convent, Nello, was seized, to the despair of his family. Several times he managed to avoid being deported, by slipping to the back of a queue of those to be sent north, and when he was sent to clear rubble by the Via Ostiense he managed to dart under a train carriage and escape. Others were less fortunate. In mid-April, after three Germans were killed in the Quadraro borgate, a huge manhunt was conducted there and 2,000 men and boys were seized, of whom 750 were sent north to Germany. Half never returned. Jews continued to be taken, along with members of the Roman resistance and partisan fighters. The Koch gang was now as active as Kappler’s SS and their base, the Pensione Jaccarino on the Via Romagna, near the main railway station, was infamous. Mother Mary heard that it had,

  … the same hideous instruments as the one in Via Tasso; pincers for pulling out teeth and fingernails, whips, rods, and means of heating knives red hot. Some of our friends who live near there and hear the screams and groans, particularly at night, say that it is diabolical … It seems impossible to be writing all this in cold blood, as if they were just a matter of course, but then it is a matter of course; it would be incredible if we were not right up against it. And one is so utterly helpless!33

  Romans were beginning to lose hope. For months the Allied line had hardly moved and people guessed – correctly – that Italy was no longer a priority for the Americans and British, who were now focused on an approaching invasion of France. But then, when it seemed as if nothing would ever change, on 12 May news came of another Allied offensive in the Monte Cassino area. The British commander in Italy, General Alexander, had given himself a large numerical advantage over the Germans by secretly moving troops across from the Adriatic coast, and by giving the false impression that he was planning a new landing north of Rome. His superior numbers told. After several days of fighting, their defensive line was breached and the Germans began to fall back in retreat.

  News of the breakthrough soon reached Rome. As Mother Mary wrote, ‘Rome is tense. The Romans are in high spirits but they dread what the Germans may do before they go.’34 They remembered Naples, where insurrection had left the city extensively damaged and many Neapolitans dead. Already the mood in some parts of Rome was growing ugly and Mother Mary reported that no German now dared go alone into Trastevere. If Romans feared an outbreak of street fighting so did the German commander, General Mälzer, who ordered food to be distributed in the city’s poorest areas. He had no wish to have Romans rise against him when German troops were trying to escape through the city.

  There was no doubt that they would soon be doing precisely that. On 27 May de Wyss saw German trucks loading up: ‘They are going away! They are really going away!’35 That same night a steady stream of German vehicles sped through the city, heading north. Romans queuing by water fountains excitedly told one another that it couldn’t be long now. A small minority were anything but pleased. On 26 May the Allies’ Anzio radio station had broadcast the names of those who had helped the Blackshirts and Germans. The next day Mother Mary wrote, ‘Two of the informers mentioned yesterday by the Anzio wireless are the porter of a house which we know, and his wife. They have specialized in reporting the whereabouts of Jews. This morning they are sitting in their lodge shedding tears; and well they may.’36 It was Italians who had most to fear. One of the nuns’ house guests witnessed an interchange between a German soldier and a Blackshirt that graphically illustrated the Fascists’ predicament: ‘ “Me,” said Jerry, “I do this” – and he held up his hands; “you,” pointing an imaginary gun at the republican’s chest, “poum, poum, pou
m, finish!”’

  It was at this moment that something shameful occurred on the Allied side. US General Clark managed to break out from the Anzio beachhead and so, five months late, his force was finally ready to achieve its original purpose and, in a mini-Stalingrad, cut off the German 10th Army as it fled north. Clark, though, was determined to go down in history as the man who captured Rome. His superior, General Alexander, had ordered him to cut off the Germans at the town of Valmontone, but Clark sent only a token force in that direction while his main force turned north. The retreating Germans would escape. Not that the Romans cared. All they wanted was to be rescued.

  On the night of 3 June, Mother Mary used her diary to try and calm herself, like ‘the small boy who whistled when going down a dark alley’, and she told herself, ‘I do not think that the Germans will make Rome a battlefield. (But the fighting is very close tonight.)’37 Happily, her prediction would be right. As it had been so many times in the past, Rome was lucky. Treasures that had survived Alaric, Totila, Robert Guiscard, Charles V’s Spanish and Lutherans and the French siege of 1849 survived once again. Mother Mary believed that this was the pope’s work and there was no doubting that Pius had urged the Germans to leave his native city untouched, but it is doubtful that he had much influence. Kesselring decided not to make Rome into a battlefield because it made no strategic sense. German troops in the city would be encircled and captured and he had none to waste. Even then Rome did not remain entirely unscathed. On 4 June, as the Germans withdrew from the city, it was rocked by huge explosions. The Macao Barracks in the Castro Pretorio – once home to the emperor’s Praetorian Guard – was blown up, along with the Fiat works on Via Manzoni, the telephone exchange and several railway yards. More would have been destroyed had not quick-thinking Romans disabled explosives. Even trees on the main boulevards had been planted with mines, which, fortunately, the Germans had no time to detonate

  De Wyss went on to a terrace of her building with a pair of binoculars and saw trucks and scores of officers’ cars on the move: ‘There is no doubt. They are retreating! My heart beats. Finally they go away!’ Afterwards she went into the streets of the city to watch:

  There were lorries and wagons so overloaded with soldiers that they all hung around in bunches; carts with soldiers, also soldiers on horseback, peasant vehicles crammed with dead-tired men. Once soldiers passed riding oxen, finally came endless rows of those going on foot. Their faces grey with fatigue, eyes popping out, mouths wide open, they limped, barefoot, dragging their rifles after them … Near Porta Pinciana a German soldier stops me; ‘Is that the right way to Florence?’ he asks. I am taken aback. ‘To Florence? But that is about three hundred kilometres.’ His face is grey. He goes away without waiting for my answer.38

  Mother Mary watched them go too:

  The Germans went on, wild-eyed, unshaven, unkempt, on foot, in stolen cars, in horse-drawn vehicles, even in carts belonging to the street cleaning department. There was no attempt at military formation. Some of them dragged small ambulances with wounded in them. They went, some with revolvers in their hands, some with rifles cocked … Whereas last September they came with machine guns trained on the Romans, it was a different matter now. They were frightened.

  As to the Romans, ‘… unobtrusively and ironically they began to stroll about the streets mainly used for German traffic. They made no remarks, but looked on with Olympian serenity.’ The most piteous sight was that of the Italians who had thrown in their lot with the Germans:

  Some Blackshirt soldiers, members of the pitiable Barbarigo and Nettuno Divisions, were desperately waving to occupants of German motor cars, begging for a lift. The latter … passed on, unheeding … Two of them, who tried to climb up on a gun carriage in Piazza del Popolo, were kicked off by German parachute men.39

  The German soldier who told a Blackshirt, ‘You poum, poum, poum, finish,’ was prophetic. After the war the Fascist police commander in Rome, Pietro Caruso, would be executed, as would Pietro Koch, and of course Mussolini himself, whose corpse was famously strung up by the feet above a Milan petrol station. The Germans involved got off more lightly. Kesselring and Mälzer were both sentenced to death but their killings were cancelled. Kesselring was jailed for six years and released. Kappler was jailed for twenty-nine years before escaping to Germany, where he died the following year. His assistant in the Rome SS, Erich Priebke, who had proved such an enthusiastic torturer, escaped to Argentina using a Vatican-issued Red Cross passport, only to be unmasked by an American television news reporter almost fifty years later. He was extradited to Italy and jailed in 1997 and released some years later. The SS captain responsible for the Ghetto roundup, Theodor Dannecker, was captured by the Americans and hanged himself in his cell.

  The Germans were still withdrawing through the northern outskirts of the city when the Allies began to appear from the south. The first American tanks made their way into the city cautiously, wary of snipers and booby traps. Soon after dusk they reached the Tiber Island, where Romans at first assumed they were German. When they realized their mistake the Americans found themselves overwhelmed by a huge, noisy welcome. The first Mother Mary knew of their arrival was when she was looking out from her convent and, ‘Suddenly, from the direction of Porta Pia, came a burst of wild cheering.’ She had her own first sighting of the Allies early the next morning: ‘Opening a window at about 6 o’clock, I saw one little jeep with four American soldiers in it, making its way slowly and soundlessly along the street. No one else was about. The thing looked so solitary, yet so significant in the cool stillness of the dawn. I had it all to myself for a few seconds.’40

  Allied troops were soon pouring into the city through the southern and eastern gates: Porta San Sebastiano, Porta Maggiore, Porta San Giovanni and Porta San Paolo, where the Germans had broken into Rome nine months earlier. Mother Mary went to Via Veneto, where she saw Romans applauding every car that passed, every plane that flew overhead and laughing and congratulating one another for having survived. Two lines of American soldiers marched down the street:

  They were dusty, battle-worn and unshaven, but they smiled and waved in response to the greetings of the crowd. They had roses in the muzzles of their rifles, and miniature Italian flags which had been thrown to them; they had roses stuck in the camouflage nets of their helmets, and in their shirts. One has read these things in books and accepted them as fiction, never dreaming of witnessing them as we did today.41

  Mother Mary also described how, as if by magic, bicycles appeared from their hiding places – and not only bicycles:

  The population of Rome seemed double what it had been; men who had been hiding for months – patriots, Italian soldiers; Allied prisoners of war who had escaped from their prison camps, young men of military age and persecuted Jews – were out and about.42

  They were many. Of Rome’s 12,000 Jews, more than 10,000 had survived.

  The nightmare was over. To Romans the previous four years felt like a time to forget. As well as hunger and fear they had also experienced humiliation. After Mussolini’s boasts that Italy was a powerful, modern nation the country had been led into a war in which it had been unable to defend itself. Romans had been let down by their leaders and had seen their state and their army disintegrate around them.

  Yet in some ways the nine months of Nazi occupation, terrible though they were, were the Romans’ finest hour. Centuries of cynicism and distrust of authority had borne fruit. In other parts of occupied Europe people assisted the Nazis in their work. The Romans were not all angels and some cooperated with the Nazis, whether for money or short-term advantage, but they were few. Many Roman churchmen and women showed the greatest concern and sensitivity towards Jews. Of ordinary Romans, a Jewish woman, Olga Di Veroli said, ‘They opened their house to us, they gave us their bedrooms. There’s no way around it: the people of Rome opened their hearts to us. Some did so out of self-interest, but a lot of them did it out of pure generosity. What little they had they shared with us
.’43

  The great majority of Romans thwarted the occupiers. They thwarted them with information, gathered through a vast network of people who saved the Allied beachhead at Anzio. They thwarted them with bureaucracy, issuing fake documents. They thwarted them with inaction and disobedience, and by hiding the people that Nazism demonized, at great risk to their own lives. Most of all they thwarted them with their humanity, by refusing to be carried along by an ideology of fear and hatred.

  AFTERWORD

  ROME IS NOW a sprawling metropolis of almost three million people. Today’s pilgrims arrive on high-speed trains and budget air flights. Romans take the motorway ring road to visit out of town shopping malls. The Colosseum, the Pyramid of Cestius and the Circus Maximus each has its own underground station. The Lateran has a superstore. The offices of Mussolini’s Ministry of Africa houses the UN Food and Agricultural Organization. The city’s mayor, Virginia Raggi (Rome’s first female ruler since Marozia in the tenth century), represents a populist party, the Five Star Movement.