Fosse Ardeatine Massacre

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Involved Unit

14^th Army headquarters; Außenkommando of the Security Police and SD, Rome

Culprits

SS Obersturmbannführer Herbert Kappler, SS Hauptsturmführer Erich Priebke, and others

Victims

335

Investigations and processes

1944: Rome Chief of Police Pietro Caruso and his colleague Roberto Occhetto stand trial. Caruso is sentenced to death, Occhetto to 30 years in prison.

1946: Trial of Kurt Mälzer, Military Commander of Rome, and Eberhard von Mackensen, Commander-in-Chief of the 14^th Army. Both men sentenced to death; later commutation to life in prison.

1947: The Allied Military Court in Venice sentences Albert Kesselring to life in prison, on account of responsibility, as Commander-in-Chief of German forces in Italy, for the massacres perpetrated by the German Army. These include the Ardeatine Massacre.

1948-1953: Trial of Herbert Kappler, head of the Rome Außenkommando; sentenced to life in prison.

1995-1998: Erich Priebke is discovered living in Argentina and extradited to Italy. He stands trial and is sentenced to life in prison.

Armed forces

SD
Security Police

The massacre

• Allied landing in Anzio and first fighting

  On 22 Jan. 1944 the Allies landed in Anzio, around 50 kilometres south of Rome. They overwhelmed a portion of the German troops that had taken up positions on the Gustav Line and were caught up in fighting in the Cassino area. However, the insertion of some Wehrmacht divisions placed a check on the Allied advance. Over several months, fighting repeatedly broke out south of Rome.

  The transfer of German troops to Anzio after the Allied landing diminished the German military presence in Rome. But German authorities maintained control of the capital and now began to react more severely to attacks by the GAP partisan brigade. During an attack near one of the city’s bridges, a German soldier was killed, and another soldier wounded. In response, on 31 Jan. ten imprisoned partisans were murdered.

• The attack in the Via Rasella

  The most spectacular GAP operation was carried out on 23 March, with an attack on soldiers of the 11^th Company of the III. Battalion of the SS Police Regiment ‘Bozen’, part of the Ordnungspolizei. The battalion had arrived in Rome in Feb. 1944 to reinforce the garrison after the Allied landing in Anzio.

  This unit has a special history: the SS Police Regiment ‘Bozen’ was set up in October 1943 in the South Tirolian city of the same name; recruited to that end were older men from the area’s German-speaking population—men no longer allowed to serve in the Wehrmacht or Waffen-SS. Members of the Südtiroler Ordnungsdienst (South Tirolian Security Force) also were called on; this was an illegal paramilitary organisation that had placed itself at the occupation forces’ disposal after 8 Sept. The South Tirolian personnel were mainly between 30 and 45 years old and had served in the Italian army in the 1920s and 1930s. This was one reason soldiers of the ‘Bozen’ regiment were supplied with Italian weapons.

  Both the regiment’s commissioned and non-commissioned officers were members of the German Ordnungspolizei. The commander, Major Johann (or Hans) Dobek, was a Nazi officer from Vienna. He had been promoted because of party service and made a name for himself in 1942 and 1943 in anti-partisan fighting in Carniola, Slovenia. The ‘Bozen’ Battalion was sent to the front in early June 1944 and suffered heavy losses, many of the men then tried to return to their Southern Tirolian homes. Subsequently, the battalion was sent to Northern Italy and participated in many anti-partisan operations in Lombardy, Piedmont, and finally Cadore. Major Dobek died in unexplained circumstances in July 1944, in the Brescia province.

  On 23 March 1944 GAP partisans attacked 156 soldiers of the 11^th Company during their daily movement from the barracks to the Castro Pretorio district, exploding a bomb placed in a dustcart as the soldiers marched past in the Via Rasella. Twenty-seven battalion members died in the attack itself, seven additional men later from their injuries, the last one on the morning of 24 March. In total 34 German soldiers were killed.

Die Fotografien

• The German reaction

  Immediately after the attack, the German commander of Rome, Generalleutnant Kurt Mälzer, and Consul General Eitel Friedrich Moellhausen went to the place where it had occurred. Moellhausen reported that at the sight of the dead and wounded police-regiment members, Mälzer was ‘highly upset’ and expressed the intention to dynamite the surrounding buildings and execute people. The consul also reported that on the way to Via Rasella headquarters in the Via Tasso, he met Herbert Kappler and asked him to dissuade Mälzer from his plans. According to reconstructions of the events, following arrival in the Via Rasella Kappler nevertheless saw to gaining authorization for the reprisal operations. 

  During his trial, Kappler testified that residents of the Via Rasella had meanwhile been forced to leave their houses, men and women then being separated before the gates of the Palazzo Barberini. At Mälzer’s instructions, Kappler had all these persons brought to an Italian police barrack. Around 17:00, he indicated, in the central office of the Rome command he phoned Mackensen and discussed possible reprisal measures. During the conversation he described the arrangement arrived at with SS Brigadeführer Harster (commander of the Security Police and SD with main office in Verona): those selected were to be persons already sentenced to life imprisonment or death, or else liable for execution on the basis of police investigations. If the decision had been Mackensen’s, ten Italians would have been shot for every German soldier killed, Kappler continued. But he would have also “been content” with Kappler and Harster simply choosing a number of people for execution. 

  Kappler asserted that he had those arrested in the Via Rasella screened in the Roman police headquarters. Back in his own office, he stated, he received a phone call from Major Böhm, the Ia-officer in the staff of General Mälzer. Böhm told him that General Field Marshall Kesselring had issued the order to have ten Italians shot for each of the killed German soldiers within 24 hours. Kappler then contacted Kesselring’s headquarters, where he was informed that the decision came from an even higher authority. According to findings of the Rome court, in a conversation of 24 March Mälzer told Kappler that the order for the reprisal operation came from Hitler.

• Selection of the victims

  Reconstruction of the selection of victims is likewise based on witness testimony during the trial. According to that testimony, around 21:00 Kappler told Harster that he had circa 290 men available for shooting. But many did not correspond to the agreed-on categories, being Jews awaiting deportation. In addition, only a few of those arrested in the Via Rasella were sentenced criminals or persons accused of a crime. For that reason, most of these persons were released the next morning. 

  Kappler then asked the German military court in Rome for permission to place some prisoners in the Regina Coeli prison on the list: 3 had already been sentenced to death, 16 had prison sentences, and 23 were awaiting trial. In the night of 23-24 March, Kappler and his associates continued inspection of their files. 

  The next morning Kappler spoke with Rome’s police chief, Pietro Caruso, and the head of a new section of the secret police, Leutnant Pietro Koch. Caruso approved Kappler’s request to add additional prison inmates to the list; he intended to prepare a list with the names of 50 prisoners in Regina Coeli before 13:00. Meanwhile the number of deaths from the bombing had risen to 32. With the fifty prisoners made available by Caruso, the total number now corresponded to the planned 1:10 ratio for the mass shooting. However, a few hours later, Kappler received news from his deputy, SS Hauptsturmführer Carl Schütz, head of Section IV (Gestapo) and Section V (Kripo [criminal-investigation police]) of the Rome Außenkommando, that an additional soldier had died from the bombing. To the list, he now added ten more Jews who had been brought into jail that morning. In the end, the total number of German casualties in the attack was 34, with one last South Tirolian soldier succumbing to his wounds at 9:00 on 24 March, as reports of losses by the Ordnungspolizei in the archives make clear.

• The mass execution

  The men under Kappler’s command not only selected the victims but also carried out the mass executions. Major Johann Dobek, commander of the III. battalion of the ‘Bozen’ regiment, apparently refused to allow his men to carry out the killing. But the arrangements made with the Wehrmacht command in any case specified that reprisals were the responsibility of the Security Police anyway. The 14^th Army thus had no objections to the police organising and carrying out the mass shooting.

  The Rome military court’s reconstruction shows that the selected men were transported on the early afternoon of 24 March in truckloads to the Ardeatine Caves, subterranean tuff quarries in the area of the Via Appia Antica.

  In the caves, five SS men forced the same number of prisoners, their hands shackled, to kneel down, before each received a shot in the back of the head from an SS man standing behind him. The SS men then left the quarry to get five more prisoners for shooting. SS Hauptsturmführer Erich Priebke, member of Section IV (Gestapo) of the Rome Außenkommando, was responsible for registering the prisoners in the Via Tasso. During the massacre, he called out the victims’ names and crossed out those killed from the list. 

  In the caves, SS Hauptsturmführer and Gestapo head Carl Schütz gave the orders and supervised the shootings. All SS men of the Außenkommando participated, the SS leaders –including Kappler, Priebke, and Schütz – shooting first. The South Tirolian Hauptsturmführer Reinhold Wetjen, then serving with the SS, initially declined the command to shoot but was eventually persuaded to do so by Kappler himself.

  The killings ended around 20:00. Afterwards the entrance to the quarries was dynamited to hide the corpses of the 335 men who had been shot to death.

• The trial of Police chief Caruso in September 1944

  Over a roughly fifty-year period, a number of trials were held against those responsible for the murders in the Ardeatine caves. The first trial took place before the end of the war. Between 18 and 21 Sept. 1944, Pietro Caruso, former police chief of Rome, faced a court together with his colleague Roberto Occhetto; both men were charged with collaboration and violation of the extraterritoriality of the Papal Basilica of Saint Paul Outside the Walls:

  In Feb. 1944, with Caruso’s participation some Italian soldiers and Jewish persons who had sought shelter, there had been arrested. In connection with the massacre in the Ardeatine Caves, Caruso was also accused on account of handing over the 50 additional prisoners to the German Security Police. He was sentenced to death and executed on 22 Sept.; Occhetto was sentenced to 30 years in prison.

• The trial of Mälzer and von Mackensen 1946

  The first trial of German soldiers on account of the massacre in the Ardeatine Caves took place in 1946. Kurt Mälzer and Eberhard von Mackensen were sentenced to death by a British military court on 20 Nov. 1946. In the view of historian Paolo Pezzino, this measure was a sign of severity vis-à-vis German generals held responsible for war crimes. The sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment, to be served in the Werl military prison. Mälzer died in prison on 24 March 1952; Mackensen was pardoned and freed on 2 Oct. 1952.

• The Trial of Kesselring 1947

  The trial of Albert Kesselring before the Allied military court in Venice took place between Feb. and March 1947. As commander-in-chief of German forces in Italy, Kesselring was charged with both being primarily responsible for the escalation of the anti-partisan fight in Italy in the summer of 1944 and for the Ardeatine Caves massacre. He was found guilty on both counts and sentenced to death. The sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment in the Werl prison; in 1948 that sentence was reduced to 21 years. Four years later, he was pardoned and freed.

• The trial of Kappler (1948-1953)

  In 1948, the trial of Herbert Kappler began before the Rome military court on account of the Ardeatine Caves massacre and the extortion of 50 kilos of gold from the Jewish Community of Rome.

  The court first pronounced Kappler not guilty of the killing of 320 persons, since it could not be proven that he had been aware of the illegality of the shootings. In addition, the judges thought that Kappler had acted on the orders of his superiors. However, the court found that the shooting of the remaining 15 persons was on Kappler’s initiative; he was thus sentenced to life in prison for these murders, plus an additional 15 years for extortion of the gold. The judges found that as the occupying power in Italy, Germany had a basic right to respond to the attack with a reprisal measure; at the same time, it pointed to the especially heinous nature of the shootings. The executions themselves were cruel, the victims being forced to crawl over the corpses of those already killed. In addition, the judges observed, that the number of victims was in no way proportionate to the number of soldiers killed in the attack. Furthermore, the increase in the number of those meant to be shot from 320 to 335 was at Kappler’s initiative.

  Kappler’s appeal was turned down on 25 Oct. 1952 by Italy’s Supreme Military Court and on 19 Dec. 1953 by the Court of Cassation. But a few days before the latter judgment, Kappler himself abandoned his appeal. He served his sentence in the Gaeta military prison, from where he was transferred to the Celio military hospital in Rome because of worsened health. He was able to escape from the hospital on 15 Aug. 1977 and return to Germany. He died in Soltau on 9 Feb. 1978

• The trial of Priebke (1995-1998)

  Erich Priebke’s participation in the Ardeatine Caves massacre became known immediately after the war. But he had fled to Argentina in 1948 and was only tracked down and extradited to Italy in 1995. After a laborious and controversy-laden trial, he was sentenced to 15 years in prison. Otherwise as was the case with Kappler, the court was not convinced that Priebke was unaware of the illegality of his actions and was only following orders. On 7 March 1998, the military court of appeals lengthened the sentence to life in prison; the Italian Court of Cassation confirmed the sentence on 16 Nov. Erich Priebke died in Rome in 2013.

Memory

• The mausoleum in the Ardeatine Caves

  Immediately after the liberation of Rome in 1944, a competition was held for the design of a gravesite and memorial in the caves and surrounding area. The victims’ corpses were exhumed, and efforts at identification were initiated. Opened in 1949, the mausoleum was designed and realized by two groups of architects headed by Mario Fiorentino and Giuseppe Perugini in cooperation with sculptors Mirko Basaldella and Francesco Coccia. A path leads through the caves past the site of the executions to a large hypogeum, covered with an enormous cement block, where the remains of the victims are interred in 335 stone tombs. In addition, there is a monument dedicated to all the victims of Nazi massacres in Italy.

• The museum in the Via Tasso

  The building that served as Gestapo headquarters during the German occupation has been preserved; since 1955 it houses the Museum of the Liberation of Rome.

• Visit of German Presidents

  In 1957, West German President Theodor Heuss visited the site of the massacre. He was followed by Richard von Weizsäcker in 1991. In 2017, for the first time an Italian president, Sergio Mattarella, visited the Fosse Ardeatine mausoleum together with his German counterpart, Frank-Walter Steinmeier.