More would die over the next few days. Families of the victims were notified with excruciating slowness by individual letter, if at all, a strategy of coverup and concealment – "Night and Fog" – designed to confuse, grieve, and intimidate surviving relatives, according to Robert Katz. We would like to thank The Crown and Goodman Family and the Abe and Ida Cooper Foundation for supporting the ongoing Due to time previously served, authorities released Hass and reduced Priebke's sentence. As the group assembled at the cave, Priebke and Hass discovered that they had inadvertently gathered 335 prisoners, rather than the 330 prescribed in the order. Priebke and his attorneys appealed this verdict. 0000033798 00000 n Instead they instructed shooters to choose a victim and shoot him at close range, saving both time and ammunition. 23 17 The Security Police officers therefore added prisoners serving jail sentences, many of them for political offenses, as well as individuals known or suspected of having engaged in resistance activities. Following the Allied invasion of Sicily in July 1943 and the subsequent vote of no-confidence against Mussolini at the meeting of the Fascist Grand Council on July 25, King Victor Emmanuel III had the Fascist dictator arrested and appointed an emergency government under Marshal Pietro Badoglio. The Ardeatine Massacre, or the Fosse Ardeatine Massacre, ... By noon on March 24 Kappler had a list of 271 victims, each with his crime listed against his name, except for the Jews, simply listed as "Jew".

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 a bullet directly into the cerebellum, ensuring that no more than one bullet would be needed per prisoner. 23 0 obj They remained summarily buried and abandoned for over a year inside the caves. Von Mackensen was released from custody in 1952. The telecast galvanized officials both in Argentina and Italy to re-open the case against him and fellow SS officer Karl Hass. The resistance operatives, who had ties to Italy's underground communist movement, dispersed into the crowd of bystanders and evaded capture.

That night, Adolf Hitler authorized the reprisal, stipulating that it be carried out within 24 hours.

Because of the time limit that Hitler had imposed, Mälzer and Kappler agreed that the victims would have to be shot in the back of the head at close range rather than by conventional firing squad. Washington, DC 20024-2126 Political prisoners included members of the GAP, the PA, and the Monarchist Clandestine Military Front of the Resistance (FMRC), which included many policemen. ���N����c��Qw���iQ@�,�OÀ��mF��H)>�_PҤ��u�m/ĞDҶ��|�*-����O����$�<5����L�"�.�ҟ��Ǔ�v+%�.������Q����Y�T��>|�G��ﻋ��3�Ҍ�Ｚ������l�����V�R*�އ�+�����?��cF@$9j�_���D'Q?8zu�5�s�Hr}��D딓�$�?^�$�D�V}� The Fosse Ardeatine, or Ardeatine Caves, were the remnants of ancient Christian catacombs, and served as a convenient venue to carry out the reprisal shootings in secrecy and to conceal the bodies of the victims. Following the shootings, Priebke and Hass ordered engineers to seal the mouth of the cave through the detonation of explosives, killing any victims who had managed to survive and entombing the dead. The fuse was lit when the police were forty seconds from the bomb. Find topics of interest and explore encyclopedia content related to those topics, Find articles, photos, maps, films, and more listed alphabetically, Recommended resources and topics if you have limited time to teach about the Holocaust, Explore the ID Cards to learn more about personal experiences during the Holocaust. The site of the massacre at the Ardeatine Caves outside Rome has become a national memorial in Italy. Whatever Hitler's actual level of involvement, Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, Commander-in-Chief South, presumably interpreted Hitler's initial reaction as a guideline and authorized the reprisal plan as originally suggested. During the killings, the existence of the five extra prisoners was discovered, and it was decided to kill them anyway, in order to prevent news of the location of the place of execution from becoming known. The men of the regiment Bozen, the unity which was hit in the attack, were offered to avenge their comrades but they refused to do it in that way. WBMQ~�-�pP��L͗�nH|�d|6�N��Z����j���f��F��9|�L�I� �t"�WPmRO��*����*�F�`�w�Wݰ���D��I�����x�x����Yu"xc|�v߿�d?�e�ߏA~A���(F�.+����JWdW���\g�S%H����&�//���P��.E���'�S\z˭��*�g����x�ެ�e���i-� #�Ar~��|�?����%��uv�` ���J>��|�z����ݗ���S���┤�hw� ����~�C�?�I���`�)Q���. /Contents 26 0 R Only 323 corpses out of 335 have been identified. The soldiers of the battalion were veterans of the Royal Italian Army who had seen action on the Russian Front and had chosen service in the SS rather than face another tour in the East with the Wehrmacht. The youngest of them was 15 years old. 0000009520 00000 n The Massacre at the Ardeatine Caves, 24 March 1944 Research & Writing by Tom W. Glaser Contact the Author. Main telephone: 202.488.0400

The eldest of the hostages was in his seventies; the youngest fifteen. Upon hearing of the attack on the policemen that evening, Adolf Hitler reportedly suggested the destruction of Rome. After the war, Allied authorities tried some of those responsible for the Ardeatine Cave Massacre. 24 0 obj In 1947, a British court in Venice sentenced Field Marshal Kesselring to death for the shootings at Ardeatine and for incitement to kill civilians. In turn, the staff of the German Commander-in-Chief South (Oberbefehlshaber Süd), passed this on to the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW). 0000009583 00000 n Commander-in-Chief South Generalfeldmarschall Albert Kesselring, considered this an order, one he interpreted as calling for the execution of Italians who had been previously sentenced to death. In 1977, Kappler's wife succeeded in smuggling her husband, who had been diagnosed with terminal cancer, from a prison hospital in Rome back to Germany. <]/Prev 94204>> 0000000964 00000 n endobj By noon on March 24 Kappler had a list of 271 victims, each with his crime listed against his name, except for the Jews, simply listed as "Jew". 0000051584 00000 n Priebke and Hass had received orders to select the victims from prisoners who had already been sentenced to death; but the number of such prisoners fell well short of the 330 deaths required to meet the quota of the German reprisal plan. As the killing proceeded, the German police officials forced the hostages to kneel on top of the bodies of those who had been previously shot, to conserve space. It did so on 8 September 1943, the day General Dwight David Eisenhower announced the unilateral capitulation to the Allies. Download our mobile app for on-the-go access to the Jewish Virtual Library, © 1998 - 2020 American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise.

As a result, an Italian military appeals court initiated a new trial in 1998, in which Priebke received a life sentence.

Many of its citizens had since opted for German citizenship.

startxref By this time the death toll from the Via Rasella bombing had risen to 32. Officials of the Federal Republic of Germany refused to extradite Kappler on grounds of ill health, and he died the following year. Foremost among these is the notion that the Partisans responsible for the Via Rasella attack were ordered to come forward and turn themselves in to the SS and wilfully declined to do so. Many were forced to kneel down over the bodies of those who had been killed before them because the cave had become filled with dead bodies. x��]�o��q�%���I�,�d[�|���,�}���ɓ4-�o)��~J� r@���̒�Ikm�>n� gS�43;�����2K ]f���?���뿫�_��8[�����:e��Z��?�m��_�z)S���/�Yj��T�*YR�S����T��;N޽{�>�t{apt�Q'z��8����a��a��u� �w����������s��_����)1�Q5�#��&�=�T.%�t*Ւg��P���>��1����2���!Y�~�y*�.ޯ������DJ��\P\�hn��pxq����H+i���2����T�E��XĘT/�R)�9�rJu;GQw������� ����c�� �?�FA��c|�Џ�t�#|J�rHi��a���'v˦X�BV>�*��(~%E The Ardeatine Massacre, or the Fosse Ardeatine Massacre, was a mass killing carried out in Rome on March 24, 1944 by German occupation troops during the Second World War as a reprisal for a partisan attack conducted on the previous day in central Rome against the SS Police Regiment Bozen. He served the remainder of his sentence under house arrest, until his death in October 2013. The targeted police unit, a battalion of the 11th Company, Police Regiment Bozen, was largely composed of German-speaking Order Police personnel from the former South Tyrol, annexed by Italy from Austria under the Treaty of St. Germain in 1919 and reannexed to Germany when the Germans occupied Italy in 1943. Ezine; Great Italians; Traditions; Online store; Learn Italian. The blast caused the immediate deaths of 28 SS policemen and may have killed two civilian bystanders, one of whom, Piero Zuccheretti, was an eleven-year-old boy, although he might have been killed by the Germans firing in response; it is unknown. Fleeing to a provisional seat in Bari on the southern Adriatic coast, Badoglio concluded a cease-fire with Allied forces on September 3, 1943, and announced Italy's surrender to the Allies on September 8. Neither man ever talked or in any way betrayed their network. After initial proceedings, in which it was ruled that the statute of limitations had elapsed on the crime, Priebke and Hass finally faced trial in Italy in 1997. Colonel General Eberhard von Mackensen, the commander of the Fourteenth Army, whose jurisdiction included Rome, approved the proposal. 0000010963 00000 n 26 0 obj This was inserted into a bag containing an additional six kilograms of TNT and TNT filled iron tubing. Another was General Simone Simoni (it), a war hero aged 64, who had endured torture with a blowtorch. On the following day, March 24, 1944, personnel from the headquarters of the Security Police and SD in Rome, led by SS Captain Erich Priebke and SS Captain Karl Hass, assembled 335 Italian male civilians near a series of man-made caves on the outskirts of Rome on the Via Ardeatina. The German police officials brought the victims into the cave and forced them to kneel in rows of five.

Reprisal at the Ardeatine Caves: The Victims. Ferdinando Agnini.jpg 250 × 331; 17 KB. A German officer, named Amon, testified at Kappler's trial, which took place in Italy in 1948; claiming that once he entered the cave and saw the piles of dead bodies, he fainted and was replaced by a comrade who pushed him aside and shot another victim. The main concern of the SS had been speedy fulfillment of the quota. In 1995 German and Italian justice authorities cooperated to facilitate Priebke's extradition to Italy. 0000010264 00000 n General Mackensen endorsed the recommendation. The shooters then killed each one with a shot at close range to the base of the skull. It holds the 335 graves and was officially presented on 24 March 1949, on the 5th anniversary of the massacre. stream Mälzer died in prison that same year. <> endobj Genealogy. Colonel Giuseppe Montezemolo's incredible courage under torture that included having his nails and teeth pulled out, became legendary. After 76 years, victims of Nazi massacre in Italy identified through DNA testing Two of those who died in 1944 Fosse Ardeatine massacre, in which 335 were killed in … Misconceptions about the Fosse Ardeatine Massacre abound. Popes Paul VI and John Paul II each visited the memorial once during their respective reigns, as did Pope Benedict XVI on March 27, 2011. The old soldier had replied to his captors, "My only regret is that I was not younger because there was so much more I could have done [for my country]".

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