The Battle for Rome: The Germans, the Allies, the Partisans, and the Pope, September 1943-June 1944

by Robert Katz

Overview

In September 1943, the German army marched into Rome, beginning an occupation that would last nine months until Allied forces liberated the ancient city. During those 270 days, clashing factions — the occupying Germans, the Allies, the growing resistance movement, and the Pope — contended for control over the destiny of the Eternal City. In The Battle for Rome, Robert Katz vividly recreates the drama of the occupation and offers new information from recently declassified documents to explain the intentions of the rival forces.
One of the enduring myths of World War II is the legend that Rome was an "open city," free from military activity. In fact the German occupation was brutal, beginning almost immediately with the first roundup of Jews in Italy. Rome was a strategic prize that the Germans and the Allies fought bitterly to win. The Allied advance up the Italian peninsula from Salerno and Anzio in some of the bloodiest fighting of the war was designed to capture the Italian capital.
Dominating the city in his own way was Pope Pius XII, who used his authority in a ceaseless effort to spare Rome, especially the Vatican and the papal properties, from destruction. But historical documents demonstrate that the Pope was as concerned about the Partisans as he was about the Nazis, regarding the Partisans as harbingers of Communism in the Eternal City. The Roman Resistance was a coalition of political parties that agreed on little beyond liberating Rome, but the Partisans, the organized military arm of the coalition, became increasingly active and effective as the occupation lengthened. Katz tells the story of two young Partisans, Elena and Paolo, who fought side by side, became lovers, and later played a central role in the most significant guerrilla action of the occupation. In retaliation for this action, the Germans committed the Ardeatine Caves Massacre, slaying hundreds of Roman men and boys. The Pope's decision not to intervene in that atrocity has been a source of controversy and debate among historians for decades, but drawing on Vatican documents, Katz authoritatively examines the matter.
Katz takes readers into the occupied city to witness the desperate efforts of the key actors: OSS undercover agent Peter Tompkins, struggling to forge an effective spy network among the Partisans; German diplomats, working against their own government to save Rome even as they condoned the Nazi repression of its citizens; Pope Pius XII, anxiously trying to protect the Vatican at the risk of depending on the occupying Germans, who maintained order by increasingly draconian measures; and the U.S. and British commanders, who disagreed about the best way to engage the enemy, turning the final advance into a race to be first to take Rome.
The Battle for Rome is a landmark work that draws on newly released documents and firsthand testimony gathered over decades to offer the finest account yet of one of the most dramatic episodes of World War II.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780743258081
Publisher:	Simon & Schuster
Publication date:	07/01/2004
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	448
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Robert Katz is the author of twelve previous books, including the international bestseller Death in Rome. His writing has appeared in numerous publications, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Esquire, and Military History Quarterly. A fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, he lived in Rome for nearly twenty years and now lives in Tuscany in Italy.

Read an Excerpt

Preface: Open City

To describe the emotions of the mind and the crowd of ideas that arise on entering this "mistress of the world" is impossible. All is confusion and agitation. The eye moves rapidly from side to side, eager to grasp every object, but continually diverted by some new scene; all is wonder.

— Washington Irving, who arrived in Rome in 1805

Rome today is centuries of history piled one atop another. Move about this eternal city, as they call it, and like it or not you roil the dust of time. Turn any corner, catch a play of amber light, listen not to the din that surrounds you but to what the stones have to say, and you've opened the pages of a robust tale.

On a shining spring day while writing this book, I walked down the Via Rasella. It is a short, narrow, and, considering how central it is, relatively quiet street. It descends from the Barberini Palace on a slope of the Quirinal, one of the seven hills of classical Rome. As an icon of a singular event of the 270-day German occupation of Rome during World War II, the Via Rasella has haunted three generations of Romans and has helped shape the very character of the present-day city. "When people hear me say that I live on Via Rasella," someone nearing sixty who is a lifelong resident said recently, "...they hear 'Via Rasella' and they say, 'Oh, where that thing happened...' 'What thing?' I say — I make them say it first. 'You mean you live there and you don't know what happened?' they say. 'Oh, I know, all right,' I say, 'and where do you think my father is?'" The "thing" that happened in Via Rasella was an attack of unprecedented proportions carried out by the Roman Resistance against the occupation forces. It was a clash that led to Rome's Ardeatine Caves massacre, a pivotal episode in World War II in Italy. The Via Rasella is the place where the disparate worlds of nearly all the characters in this story collide.

I know the Via Rasella probably as well as any visitor, but I was drawn there again that day. I wanted to visit the street as one might call on an aging, lifelong friend. I feared it had suffered physically in all the refurbishing that took place prior to the Holy Year 2000. Rome, behind a seemingly endless screen of scaffolding, had scrubbed itself to the bone in preparation, sandblasting into oblivion the grime, in some cases, of two thousand years, bathing its incomparable beauty in a sea of sienna and ocher paint. It looked stunning when it came out for the Jubilee, but by now Romans were beginning to miss not the grime but the truth-telling texture of plain old wear and tear.

Decades earlier, I had written of the signs that were still visible twenty years after the Via Rasella attack — mostly bullet-riddled building facades. There were ugly pockmarks in the stucco, with no commemorative plaque or other indication of how they got there. That only added to the mystique when you discovered what they were and understood what they represented. Now well over a half-century had gone by, and though I had seen those bullet holes many times in the interim, I wondered how they had fared in the big spruce-up.

The nature of the street had changed considerably, even in my time. As Italy had grown to become one of the world's leading economic powers, Via Rasella, like all of Rome's centro storico, or "historic center," had gentrified. What used to be a block that housed families rich and poor, aristocrats shoulder to shoulder with the popolani, had become well-to-do, single, professional, chic. The first difference that caught my eye were the computer-generated notices slapped on the walls. "The residents of Via Rasella," the signs proclaimed with rather charmless sarcasm, "thank their kind dog owners for the expressions of thoughtfulness they leave on the street every day." The walls themselves were freshly painted and I despaired. But farther down the street, where the Via del Boccaccio intersects, a building that had escaped the ubiquitous makeover displayed the very same spray of bullet holes that I had first noticed so long before. Some days later I learned that permission for the owners of that building and others to fill and cover the holes had been denied by the Belle Arti, the fine-arts authority that looks after the permanence of the nation's historical treasures. Some owners cheated, I know, just as some Romans have long sought to still the voice of the Via Rasella, but on a few buildings that violence frozen in time was undisturbed. I was reassured. Ghosts never sleep.

It was the boldest and largest Resistance assault, unequaled by the Partisan movements in any other of the German-occupied European capitals. At 3:45 on the afternoon of March 23, 1944, a heavily armed column of 156 SS police marching through Rome was attacked in the Via Rasella by ten Partisans, nine men and one woman, most of them students in their twenties. The target, the 11th Company of the 3rd Bozen SS Battalion, was a new, anti-Partisan police formation. The Partisan strike force was made up of members of the central unit of GAP (Gruppi di Azione Patriottica, "Patriotic Action Groups"), the military arm of the clandestine Communist Party.

As the police column proceeded up the street, one of the Partisans, in the guise of a municipal street cleaner, lit the fuse of a homemade bomb concealed in his trash can and walked away. Some fifty seconds later, twenty-four men were blown apart in an earthshaking explosion. Other Partisans engaged the dazed rear guard with grenades and gunfire, and as nine more SS men, and two hapless civilians, lay dead or dying, they disappeared into the hideaways of the Roman underground.

Notified at his headquarters in East Prussia within minutes of the attack, Hitler shrieked for revenge, demanding a reprisal that would "make the world tremble." His bile alone set in motion a hastily assembled killing machine in Rome that would overcome even internal opposition from the occupiers themselves. The next day, 335 men and teenaged boys — a near-perfect cross section of the male half of Rome, not one of them even remotely connected to the attack — were seized from various parts of the city, trucked to an abandoned labyrinth of caves in Via Ardeatina, near the Christian catacombs of ancient Rome, and slain in groups of five. It was the first wartime atrocity and one of the worst perpetrated on Italian soil.

The Via Rasella attack had been timed to coincide with twenty-fifth anniversary celebrations of the founding of Fascism to signal that the end of the long nightmare was near. It was designed to represent a dramatic escalation of the Partisan movement's battle for Rome and to galvanize the population for a general uprising. But other powers in Rome had differing designs on the Eternal City. The Resistance was the bane not only of the occupiers but also of the Vatican and to some extent the Allies. None of them, like the Resistance itself, was free of dissension and intrigue. No one, with few exceptions, wished to harm Rome. Good intentions, to repeat the proverb, paved this hell.

The dramatic story of Rome under the German occupation (September 8, 1943-June 4, 1944) remains largely untold, particularly outside of Italy. No English-language work on the subject has appeared in the last twenty years, leaving untapped a wealth of significant primary material that has since become available. Between 2000 and 2002 the CIA released the so-called crown jewels of America's wartime intelligence — hundreds of thousands of long-classified documents of its predecessor agency, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). The declassified diplomatic papers of the Vatican archives relating specifically to the occupation of Rome have barely been skimmed, likewise those of the Italian archives; similarly underreported — and entirely unpublished — is the mass of material generated in the mid-90s by the two Rome trials of former SS officer Erich Priebke, as well as documents from trials in the late 70s and 80s, including my own. Thus, earlier books about the occupation did not have the benefit of the now nearly complete and nuanced big picture.

Consider that big picture.

On the evening of September 8, 1943, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of the Allied forces in the Mediterranean, went on the air and stunned the world, and Rome most of all, by announcing the signed capitulation of Italy — the first of the Axis powers to surrender unconditionally. What happened over the next few hours still astonishes more than half a century later:

• For the Allies: Timed to Eisenhower's announcement was the launch of World War II's first full-scale invasion of the European mainland. Landings on the shores of Salerno, south of Naples — and later Anzio — initiated Churchill's "soft-underbelly" strategy of penetrating what would prove to be an imaginary weakness in Hitler's "Fortress Europe." They would lead to one of the bloodiest military campaigns in U.S. history, not to speak of the devastation of Italy.
• For the Germans: Hitler regarded the Italian defection — which had followed the arrest of Mussolini some weeks earlier — as an act of treachery that had to be punished draconically. His Supreme Commander in the south, Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, was momentarily caught off guard, however, by the September 8 surrender, and began a tactical retreat from the capital. But when Kesselring learned that the Allied landings, which he had expected to take place just north of Rome, were actually happening 160 miles to the south, he made a lightning-quick decision to turn back and seize Rome. His task was greatly facilitated by one of the most craven acts in Italian history, the predawn flight from the capital by the King and his new government, abandoning the city and leaving no one in charge. Courageous but ragtag opposition to Kesselring's onslaught by the disoriented Italian army and some civilians was quickly crushed, leaving the Germans as the masters of Rome. But at the same time this opposition breathed life into a strategy whose time had come: armed resistance.
• For the Vatican: Vatican City was ringed with Wehrmacht troops, its lifeline to the outside world dependent on Hitler's whim (part of which included a threat to kidnap the Pope). Until now Pope Pius XII had labored assiduously to be seen by both the Western Allies and Germany as an authentic neutral. In this way he hoped to spare Rome from the havoc of war and to play a decisive role as a peacemaker. He was convinced that Stalin's Russia was a greater evil than Hitler's Germany, and he had been hoping to broker a general rapprochement between the Western Allies and Germany to contain if not roll back godless Communism. Moreover, that strategy of "neutrality" lay behind his already controversial policy of silence in the face of the Holocaust. Now, in occupied Rome, the most crucial test of that silence was at hand. He had not protested the distant slaughter of Europe's Jews, but should the Nazis lay the terror at his front door, could he still ignore it?
• For the Italians: An ignoble war fought abroad that was nominally over was now about to come home with a vengeance. Rome would awake that morning of the first day to find itself a prisoner of the Third Reich. Yet the Allies were heading its way, and the vision of Rome as eternal, somehow shielded from the "excesses" the Germans had visited upon the other cities of Europe, seemed intact. Before long, however, that vision would shatter.

In the days leading up to Italy's surrender, the government that had deposed Mussolini had declared Rome an "Open City" — a demilitarized zone — thus hoping by this measure to preserve its countless wonders from the ruins of war. Reaffirmed but not respected by the German occupiers or the Allies, this Open City proclamation would from the outset be a sham. In a matter of weeks Rome would become a mockery of an open city, a city whose walls would shake under the roar of German military traffic to the front and the thunder of Allied bombs. It would swell to nearly twice its usual size, hosting, but ever more frugally, a million refugees from the countryside. Rome would be a city of spies, double agents, informers, torturers, fugitives, hunted Jews, and hungry people.

A resistance movement would arise in this atmosphere, only to become sundered by internal crises. The six anti-Fascist parties in Rome, awakened from a forced hibernation of twenty years, would form a timid, clandestine union, but only the new generation of young men and women, the Partisans, would prove capable of striking militarily against the German occupiers. They would create an armed, insurrectional threat within Rome, hoping to discourage the Germans from attempting to hold the city. The overriding danger — indeed, Hitler's plan should the Allies try to take Rome — was a fierce engagement in street-by-street combat. For a city with its nerves worn thin and desperately short on food, such warfare would bring calamity, ruin, and a tremendous loss of civilian lives. It could even mean the destruction of everything treasured and beautiful about Rome.

This Open City was thus a tinderbox of four conflicting parties, each incompatible with the others: the Allies, trying to capture Rome as their first shining prize of war but discovering impregnable opposition instead; the Germans, trying to throw the intruders back into the sea, holding Rome hostage and using it rapaciously as a staging ground and a supply line to the front; the Pope, trying to bring the West and the Germans to terms to save the world from "Communism" and to save Rome and Vatican City from physical destruction; and, finally, the Partisans, trying to redeem Italy's honor by making Rome untenable for the occupiers.

What a change this was from the start of that summer of 1943.

Copyright © 2003 by Robert Katz

Table of Contents

Contents

Cast of Characters

Preface: Open City

SUMMER

One Twenty Angels over Rome

Two The Pyramid

Three Rome Fever

AUTUMN

Four Kappler's Game

Five The Möllhausen Telegram

Six Paolo Meets Elena

Seven Under His Very Eyes

Eight First Blood

WINTER

Nine Christmas in Captivity

Ten Churchill's Cat

Eleven My Curious Hideout

Twelve Hupf, Mein Mädel

SPRING

Thirteen Via Rasella

Fourteen The Roar of the Wolf

Fifteen Il Gran Rifiuto

Sixteen Via Ardeatina

Seventeen The Smile

Eighteen Rome Must Starve...

Nineteen Shimmering City

Twenty Rome Eternal

• Epilogue
• I — Justice Postponed
• II — Defensor Civitatis, the Unfinished Story
• Chronology
• The Value of the Lira
• Pacelli v. Katz et al.
• Sources and Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
  

Editorial Reviews

Pat Conroy Robert Katz has written a fascinating, illuminating, and definitive history of the fall of Rome to the Allies in World War II. The Battle for Rome tells us what the Germans were thinking, what the Partisans were plotting, when the Allies were coming, and what the Pope was failing to do. It is a work both of great history and art.

Michael Phayer author of The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 1930-1965 The Battle for Rome combines exhaustive historical research with literary talent. A great read.

Susan Zuccotti author of Under His Very Windows: The Vatican and the Holocaust in Italy With his customary lively and graceful prose, Robert Katz provides a sweeping yet detailed and well-documented description of the battle for Rome during the Second World War. All the players are here: the Allied forces slowly plodding north; the German army defending with fearful determination; cruel and vicious Nazi and Fascist fanatics; young Italian partisans and the American and British agents sent to support them; Jews caught in a deadly trap; and German diplomats and Vatican prelates, including Pope Pius XII, anxious for different reasons to preserve the Eternal City. This is a book that is difficult to put down.

From the Publisher