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

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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.

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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...