of a building on the junction of the Bowling Alley and the sunken road. Message carrying was an extremely dangerous occupation, as any movement would attract German fire. There was never any room left in the GIs’ foxholes along the sunken road, and so, in between running errands, Ray and his colleagues would take whatever cover they could between the tanks and the dirt bank. As he was well aware, Anzio was an easy place to get yourself killed.
The one consolation was that the Allies were firing greater amounts of ordnance at the Germans than the Germans were firing at them, and it was for this reason that, as the partisans’ bomb shattered the spring calm in Rome, Feldmarschall Kesselring agreed to call a halt to any further offensive action along the Anzio front.
So it was that on that March day, a renewed stalemate developed along the two fronts. The Germans had achieved a victory of sorts during the third battle at Cassino; the Allies at Anzio. For Ray Saidel and Hans-Jürgen Kumberg, and for the many thousands of other troops opposing one another, this merely meant a lessening in the intensity of the fighting. They still had to keep their wits about them and do their best to make sure they survived this war of attrition. And that meant concentrating on what was happening immediately around them. Their war was one being fought on a very narrow front; and the lives of innocent men – whether Italian or German – far away in distant Rome were of no concern to them at all.
It was, however, of great concern to Feldmarschall Kesselring as he arrived back at his headquarters north of the capital at around seven o’clock that evening. The terror attack at the Via Rasella that afternoon had caused fury and outrage among the German occupiers. It had also given an ugly foretaste of the menace the guerrillas would present from that day until the end of the war. Miraculously, not only had Carla and Paolo safely escaped, so too had the other eleven Gappists involved in the Via Rasella attack. The SS troops had suffered 60 per cent casualties. Twenty-eight had been killed immediately in the initial attack and during the following day that figure would rise to thirty-three. As an effective unit, the 11th Company of the 3rd Battalion SS Police Regiment Bozen had ceased to exist. Two civilians, a middle-aged man and a thirteen-year-old boy, had also been killed. The street itself was now wrecked by a massive thirty-foot crater and littered with debris.
The German response was swift. Moreover, the conversations that followed between Rome, Germany, and the German command in Italy late that afternoon and evening of 23 March were to have far-reaching consequences for the remaining fourteen months of the war in Italy.
It was General Kurt Mälzer, the German Commandant of Rome, who had first informed German Supreme Command South-West (SW) of the attack, even though the SS troops had been policemen and therefore came under the direct command and jurisdiction of General Karl Wolff, the senior SS officer in Italy. Since Kesselring and his Chief of Staff, General Siegfried Westphal, were still not back from the Anzio front at this time, Mälzer had spoken to a staff officer at Supreme Command SW, Oberst Dietrich Beerlitz. He had then informed the German High Command in Berlin, the OKW, who in turn informed Hitler.
The Führer had been spending the day quietly at the Wolfsschanze (‘Wolf ’s Lair’) – his underground bunker complex near Rastenburg in East Prussia – when he was interrupted with the news soon after the attack had taken place. He flew into a rage and demanded the kind of retribution that would ‘make the world tremble’. He would, he vowed, destroy an entire quarter of Rome with everyone in it; a moment later he demanded the shooting of at least thirty Italians for every German killed. During the same rant this figure rose to fifty Italians to be shot for every slain SS man.
Hitler’s reaction reached Beerlitz before Kesselring and Westphal’s return and so he rang Generaloberst von Mackensen at AOK 14 headquarters. Mälzer, Beerlitz and von Mackensen all recognised that the Führer’s demands were excessive, but they also realised that something drastic and urgent had to be done. Partisan actions in Rome had, until then, largely targeted Neo-Fascist Italians rather than Germans. Neither these nor earlier German casualties had prompted any form of reprisal, but there was a feeling now that anti-partisan measures had been too lenient. Moreover, the events of that afternoon seemed to signal a departure from previous partisan activities: this attack had been more violent and destructive, and it was close to the front line. A strong and speedy display of force was necessary. But what did von Mackensen consider was necessary? Beerlitz asked him. Mälzer had suggested shooting Italians at a ratio of 10:1; and now von Mackensen agreed, but stipulated that only those already sentenced to death and awaiting execution in prison should be proceeded against. Beerlitz duly reported this decision back to OKW in Berlin, who in turn presented the suggestion to Hitler.
When Kesselring finally reached his headquarters based at Monte Sorrate, a mountain north of the capital, he was quickly informed of the news and then spoke with SS Obersturmbannführer Herbert Kappler, the head of the Sicherheitsdienst (SD) – the SS intelligence service – in Rome, and asked him whether he had enough people awaiting execution to fill the ten to one criterion. Both Kesselring and Beerlitz, who was listening in, heard Kappler say that yes, he did have enough prisoners already condemned to death. The Field Marshal then received a call from the High Command in Berlin stating that Hitler definitely wanted ten Italians shot for every German killed that afternoon in Rome, and that that was a direct order. Later, some time between ten and eleven o’clock that night, Westphal spoke with General Jodl, Hitler’s Chief of Operations, in Berlin. Jodl repeated Hitler’s order, and stressed that the executions were to be carried out by the SD under Kappler’s supervision. ‘The Führer wishes that thorough action should be taken this time,’ Jodl told Westphal. ‘Tell that to your Feldmarschall.’1 The implication was clear: Kesselring’s Wehrmacht officers could not be trusted to carry out such a brutal reprisal. Soon after this conversation, Kesselring confirmed the order: ten Italians would be killed for every German soldier killed in the Via Rasella, and the executions were to be implemented immediately, within twenty-four hours.
The die had been cast.
The problem for Kappler was that despite his claim to the contrary, he did not have anything like 280 prisoners already awaiting execution and certainly not the 330 that were needed by the following afternoon. In fact, there were only three prisoners in the whole of Rome already sentenced to death. A looser classification was then hastily adopted: candidates would be drawn from those ‘worthy of death’, but this still only produced sixty-five Jews and a handful of known Communists. Other criminals were rounded up, as were men from the Italian armed forces who had been detained after the German occupation of Rome the previous September. During the day more were frantically added to the list, including a priest and a number of people detained by Neo-Fascist authorities on largely spurious charges.
The dazed and disorientated prisoners were taken in butchers’ lorries to the Ardeatine Caves, just south of the city near the ancient catacombs on the Appian Way. The first arrived shortly before 3.30 on the afternoon of Friday, 24 March. The men, in groups of five, were then taken deep into the dark caves, told to kneel and turn their heads to one side. They were then shot.
To begin with, the executions were carried out with some semblance of order, but as the bodies began to mount and the caves began to fill with corpses, discipline, made worse by the amount of drink the executioners had taken to help steel themselves for the task, began to waver. The firing grew wild; moreover most of the executioners were clerks rather than soldiers, and members of the SS and SD, who, like Kappler, had only limited military training. Nearly forty of those killed were completely decapitated by the wayward firing. Others were beaten to death. More still were not killed instantly and were left to die through suffocation and loss of blood. Somehow, an extra five men had been rounded up earlier that day. As witnesses to the executions they could not be spared, and so they too were shot, making the final tally of those slain that afternoon 335.
The massacre at the Ardeatine Caves was the first reprisal carried out by the Germans against the Italian people. It would not be their last; rather, it signalled the start of a policy to counteract
