A week after speaking with Leslie, Cooper interviewed in his office in Rome a young woman called Neda Solic. She had recently started work in the city on propaganda broadcasts for the Allies, but from January to June 1944 she had been a prisoner in Regina Coeli. ‘The interest of the girl for us is that she knew Armstrong,’ Cooper recorded, ‘and was probably one of the last people to see him.’ Solic, according to Cooper’s notes of the interview, was twenty-one, ‘an ardent communist, and a follower of Tito’. She was Croatian, spoke a host of languages, and had been arrested during a clandestine mission to Italy for the Yugoslav partisans. She also struck Cooper as ‘extremely self-possessed … and spoke with great clarity and firmness. She showed a regard for detail, and seemed sure of everything she said.’ Her story seemed ‘of more than average reliability’.33
Solic told Cooper that, at Regina Coeli, Adler had been ‘more or less free to move about within the Wing for a certain period (1 or 2 hours) each day’. It was then that she had first seen him, passing along the corridor, ‘and as she speaks English she says that they exchanged a few words every now and then. He did not, however, tell her his story, apart from the fact that he was a British officer.’ Cooper’s report goes on:
The real story begins on the 2nd June ’44 when the Germans were preparing to evacuate the prison. At 17.30 hrs. after supper, [Solic], who was under sentence of death, was taken to Via Tasso to be shot … 10 minutes after they arrived in Via Tasso, Armstrong was brought in, with all his personal belongings, and guarded by SS men. The guard said to [her], ‘This man is English. You are forbidden to speak to him.’ They were put up against the wall, and the guards went into the next room.
For some reason they decided to risk talking, which they did very quietly in undertones, and slowly, word by word. In the end the whole story came out. He was using Italian, which, according to [her], he spoke with difficulty, and with a very bad accent. When pressed to describe the accent she said, ‘He only seemed to know some Sardinian dialect.’ She said to him that she had seen him in Regina Coeli, and also exchanged a few words. He said that he recognised her too. He went on to say that he was a British officer who had been in a PW camp in Sardinia. He had succeeded in escaping from there, but had subsequently been recaptured. He was then accused by the Italians of being a spy. Armstrong was wearing a grey green jacket, but he opened it to show her that he was wearing the uniform of a British officer (khaki). He did not tell her for exactly how long he had been in Regina Coeli, but commented that he had been there longer than she …
At 1800 hrs. they were all taken to the cells separately. At 21.30 hrs. 80 former prisoners from Regina Coeli were called for. [Solic] was the only woman among them. All had their hands tied. The roll was called … Armstrong’s name was called with the others. An officer then made them a little speech, saying that they would be taken straightaway to Verona, where they would have to work. If they attempted to escape on the journey, they would be shot on the spot. They were then sent back to their cells once more.
At 2200 hrs. they were assembled once more, and the party was loaded on to trucks. [Solic] IS POSITIVE THAT ARMSTRONG WAS ON ONE OF THE TRUCKS [capitalised in original]. That was the last she saw of him. She herself was removed from the party at the last minute.34
In a subsequent interview, Solic corrected herself, assuring Cooper that it was on 3 June that she and Adler had been removed from Regina Coeli and taken to Via Tasso. But she remained ‘quite positive’ that Adler was among the eighty-strong party that boarded trucks that evening to be transported to northern Italy.
The whole party was seen going out of the courtyard prior to getting on the trucks, which were waiting outside … After a certain amount of commotion had gone on, it was realised that there were not enough trucks for the whole party, and some people were brought back … about a dozen or fifteen … [who] filed back through the courtyard and passed Nedda [sic] in the corridor, and went into the prison. Once again, Nedda is sure that Armstrong was not among them. She therefore assumed that Armstrong had left.
Solic added that about three hours later, at half-past midnight on the night of 3–4 June, she had watched as ‘a special party of 13 or 14 was assembled in the courtyard [with] … their hands tied behind their backs. The party was taken out of the courtyard, and presumably got on the trucks.’ One man, ‘although he had his hands bound … decided that he had nothing to lose and jumped off … He managed to escape, although the Germans fired several shots after him.’ This man’s name was Marcelo Guarcini and Solic told Cooper that she had spoken to him since. Although he had not known Adler, Guarcini had said that no one matching his description had been among the little party on that final truck. ‘Nedda herself,’ Cooper ended his report, ‘is quite adamant in her belief that Armstrong is not dead.’35
A short walk from the Coliseum, Via Tasso is a quiet street of modest apartments built in the 1930s. Inside No. 145 today is the Museo Storico della Liberazione di Roma, a museum dedicated to commemorating the city’s liberation in 1944 and the work of the Italian Resistance. It occupies the floors that housed the headquarters of the Gestapo during the Nazi occupation. Windows, fittings and decor are exactly as they were seven decades ago. Cell walls remain covered in prisoners’ graffiti. ‘5882820 SSM J LLOYD BRITISH ARMY,’ reads one message scratched into the plaster. ‘CONDANNATO A MORTE’ says another.
Above that last inscription is a signature: ‘S.Ten A. Paladini’. An Italian artillery officer who had joined the partisans after the Armistice and later worked as an agent for the American OSS, Lieutenant Arrigo Paladini had been caught in May 1944. Though condemned to death, he was not in fact executed. On the night of 3–4 June, when the Germans were busily evacuating Via Tasso and putting prisoners into trucks, Paladini climbed into one that failed to start, whereupon he was returned to his cell. Hours later, the last Germans left and he found himself free.
By the time that Cooper heard Neda Solic’s account of that night at Via Tasso, many in Rome knew the fate of the ‘special party’ she had seen assembling in the yard and from which Marcelo Guarcini had managed to escape. A few hours after the truck had driven away, farm workers in open countryside north of the city saw a German convoy draw to a halt by the side of the road at a spot called La Storta. Then they watched as a group of men with their hands tied behind them were taken under guard from one of the trucks and led to a nearby barn. ‘In the evening, at dusk, they made them leave the barn,’ remembered one of the workers, a thirteen-year-old boy at the time. ‘They made them fall in line with their hands tied behind their backs and tied together with a long rope … There was a German guard for every three prisoners. At the head of the line was an officer.’ The Germans led them towards a cluster of concealing trees. ‘I was there, I had climbed a tree to see … As they went, one of the prisoners said, “Now you are taking us to die!”’ The prisoners were lined up. Then, ‘one by one … starting from the left,’ they were shot. ‘Everything lasted no more than three minutes.’36
When the Germans had gone, the bodies of fourteen men, all shot through the back of the head, were recovered and transferred to Rome where they were taken to the mortuary of the city’s oldest hospital, the Ospedale Santo Spirito, and laid out for visitors to identify. The first public announcement of their fate appeared in Il Messaggero on 8 June. Three days after that, a funeral service was held in the sixteenth-century Church of the Gesù, on Via degli Astalli, with all fourteen coffins at the high altar. Burials followed in Rome’s Campo Verano cemetery. Thirteen corpses had been identified by then. All thirteen were those of men who had been among the ‘special party’ assembled at Via Tasso. They included Bruno Buozzi, a leading trade unionist and socialist politician. The coffin containing the fourteenth body recovered from La Storta had a placard attached. It stated simply that he was an unknown ‘soldato inglese’.37
Among those who came to identify the bodies was Marcelo Guarcini, the man who had managed to leap from the truck that night and run of
f. Neda Solic would tell Cooper that she had spoken to Guarcini afterwards. Guarcini claimed to have identified every one of the dead as having been on the truck from which he escaped, ‘and Armstrong was certainly not present among these people’.38 Another man who visited the mortuary was Owen Snedden, a young Roman Catholic priest from New Zealand who, in 1940, had found himself stranded in the Vatican when Italy entered the war. Latterly he had helped to conceal and feed Allied ex-prisoners on the run around Rome. To Peter Cooper he described how he had gone to the Santo Spirito hospital to see if the ‘unidentifiable body’ was that of a British escapee whom he had known. The custodian of the mortuary refused to let Snedden see the corpse. Snedden persisted, Cooper recorded, and ‘eventually a second custodian took pity on him and unscrewed the coffin of the unidentifiable body. Snedden says that it was impossible to recognise any features, but that he was of the opinion that the body was slightly taller and a little more robust than that of [the escapee].’ Talking afterwards with the friendlier of the two custodians, ‘Snedden was informed that on 3rd June two Englishmen were in Via Tasso. One of them had been there all the time, and this was quite definitely [the escapee]. The other had been brought from some other place on 2nd or 3rd June, and it was generally understood that this second Englishman had come from Regina Coeli.’39
Cooper, closing his investigation in September 1944, felt that the ‘only credible eyewitnesses’ to Adler’s fate during the final thirty-six hours before Rome’s liberation were Louis Leslie, his cellmate in Regina Coeli, and Neda Solic, who had been with him in the courtyard in Via Tasso. ‘The situation at the moment is therefore that Adler is likely to have been taken to Northern Italy by the Germans, and may, therefore, still be alive.’40 By the summer of 1945, however, with the war in Europe over and all prisons and concentration camps liberated, there was still no news of him. For officers tasked with accounting for SOE’s missing and dead, this did not look good. It was not possible to be definite (there had been ‘much conflicting evidence’ as to his fate in those last hours, one officer noted, ‘and it is not possible to say with certainty what happened’) but it now seemed ‘fairly certain’ that he had been among the party removed from Via Tasso and subsequently shot at La Storta. ‘Most probably he is dead, but this conclusion can only be reached by a process of conjecture, and by eliminating other alternatives.’41
In December 1945, a letter was sent to Gabor Adler’s mother in Budapest explaining that ‘it is greatly feared, in view of the absence of any news of him since the cessation of hostilities, that the chances of this officer being alive are now extremely remote’.42 The following month, her reply reached London. Written in English and carefully typed, it survives among SOE’s files. It also reveals that her missing boy had at least been spared the ordeals of the Holocaust that had overtaken the rest of his family later in the war. ‘First of all may I express my thanks to you for taking so much trouble about my sad case,’ the letter began.
The tragic fate of my son, Gabor Adler, has achieved to brake [sic] a mother’s heart that had already been severely tried by all the tragedies that preceded this. Now I have no more children left, for my elder son, who would now be 30 years of age, was carried away by the German gangsters and I have never heard of him since. Both were extraordinary boys, intelligent, cultured, speaking seven languages. They were the only hope and aim of my life. Now I am all alone without any support. My husband died, all my relatives, my 91 years [old] mother included, were deported and none of them came back … I have got nothing but a room in a flat that belongs to strangers.
Adler’s mother went on to explain that she had a surviving relative in England – ‘my brother’s daughter, married to a British subject’ – and asked for a travel permit to get there, ‘with special permission to pass through Italy and remain there until I have personally searched for my son. As I speak Italian perfectly I would be quite capable of making the necessary investigations. Even if I were only capable of establishing without any doubt the circumstances of his disappearance, I would be satisfied with that.’43 It is unclear from the files whether any support was forthcoming for her appeal for help. She did travel to Italy, however. For the last years of her life she lived in Rome, where she died, aged eighty-eight, in 1976. She is buried in the Cimitero Flaminio, which lies a few miles north of the cemetery at Verano where the remains of the fourteenth body found at La Storta are interred.
Today there seems little doubt that the fourteenth body was that of Gabor Adler. Nothing was heard of him again after June 1944. No other convincing candidate has been proposed for the unidentified body recovered from La Storta. Neda Solic may have seemed a solid eyewitness, but perhaps, in the confusion and terror of that night at Via Tasso, she had simply failed to see him among the special party from which Marcelo Guarcini managed to escape; or perhaps Adler had been shifted to their truck only after it began its journey. Guarcini, too, who never knew him anyway, may have simply failed to spot him. And Father Snedden’s difficulty in discerning the features of a man shot at close range through the back of the head may suggest that Guarcini, when inspecting the dead laid out in Santo Spirito, could not have been certain that Adler was not among them.
A monument stands today at La Storta recording the killings of 4 June 1944. For years, thirteen plaques on surrounding trees carried the names of all but one of the dead. The inscription on a fourteenth plaque read ‘Inglese Ignoto’. Only in 2007, after the release of SOE records, were wartime British sources compared to Italian ones and the conclusion drawn that, in all probability, the ‘Unknown Englishman’ had been Gabor Adler.44 In 2009, the Mayor of Rome unveiled a fresh memorial finally to commemorate the 24-year-old Hungarian Jew who had hidden his true identity so completely.
Notes
1 Report by G. Sarfatti, November 1944, TNA HS 9/1313.
2 ‘Impression of Source’, 2 November 1944, TNA HS 9/1313.
3 J. McCaffery, ‘No Pipes or Drums’.
4 A selection of Sarfatti’s academic writings between 1948 and 1983, collected and compiled by his son, was published in 2011. See G. Sarfatti, Sogni necessari. Ambiente, agricoltura, scienza e società (Borgo San Lorenzo: All’insegna del giglio, 2011).
5 Accompanying de Haan were Captain Freddie White, Sergeant Edward Archibald Case and Corporal Ken Royle. Hailing from Georgetown, British Guiana, the 37-year-old Case was a highly skilled wireless operator who had worked before the war for the West Indian General Post Office. ‘He could operate a morse key at phenomenal speeds,’ remembered Jack Wolstenholme, an SOE officer who ran an SOE signals office in Monopoli, near Bari, where Case later worked. J. Wolstenholme to C. M. Woods, 30 April 1992, Woods papers. Case was also the holder of the Military Medal, awarded for his work with a small SOE team during the Allied landings in Algeria in November 1942.
6 J. Gleeson and T. Waldron, Now It Can Be Told (London: Elek Books, 1954), p. 132.
7 Narrative of the work of SOE’s Italian Section by Lieutenant-Colonel C. Roseberry, July 1945, TNA HS 7/58.
8 Recommendation for an award of the Distinguished Service Order, 28 October 1943, TNA WO 373/94.
9 ‘Interrogation report on Capt. Richard Mallaby’, 12 April 1945, TNA HS 6/873.
10 Paolo Porta to ‘Duce’, February 1945, TNA HS 6/873.
11 Ibid.
12 ‘Interrogation’, 18 February 1945, TNA HS 6/873.
13 Ibid.
14 ‘Detailed Interrogation Report of Foschini, Vittorio, and De Leo, Candeloro’, 15 September 1945, NARA RG 226, Entry A1-215, Box 4, Folder WN#26042.
15 ‘Interrogation report on Capt. Richard Mallaby’, 12 April 1945, TNA HS 6/873.
16 Ibid.
17 Ibid.
18 Lieutenant-Colonel C. Roseberry to Lieutenant-Colonel R. T. Hewitt, 17 March 1945, TNA HS 6/873.
19 Bradley F. Smith and Elena Aga Rossi, Operation Sunrise: The Secret Surrender (New York: Basic Books, 1979), p. 68.
20 ‘Interrogation report on Serra, Salvatore’, 27 May 19
45, TNA HS 9/1343/1.
21 Ibid. These claims were quickly checked. Interviewing ex-internees from San Martino, SOE heard two Englishwomen describe Serra as ‘a very mysterious man’. He had arrived from a prison in Mantua, they said, and had not only claimed to be English but also to know their cousins in Staines. He had also ‘refused to be photographed when anyone was taking snaps’. A Chilean priest remembered Serra’s claim to be a British Army officer and recalled that he had later escaped and joined a band of Italian partisans, the 42nd Brigata Patria; the priest had actually seen Serra with the brigade and had ‘a very high opinion of his courage, resourcefulness and devotion to the patriotic cause’. Appendix A to ‘Interrogation report on Serra, Salvatore’, 27 May 1945, TNA HS 9/1343/1. The commander of that brigade confirmed for SOE that Serra had escaped from internment in November 1944 and joined the partisans, and had claimed to be an Eighth Army major. He added that Serra had done useful work (gathering information on local enemy and friendly forces and assisting in the rescue of two downed American airmen), but had also seemed somewhat odd. A British major called Leach was working with nearby partisans, but Serra had seemed anxious to avoid meeting him. As the partisan commander explained: ‘there were many favourable opportunities for a meeting and it seemed strange to everyone that an officer of the 8th Army should have no wish to meet a colleague’. Appendix B to ‘Interrogation report on Serra, Salvatore’, 27 May 1945, TNA HS 9/1343/1. According to SOE records, Major D. G. Leach commanded its ‘Erwood’ mission in the Alessandria area from March to May 1945.
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