Ardeatine Massacre - Legacy

Legacy

For a number of reasons, including (but not limited to): the large number of victims; the fact that many of them were innocent civilians casually taken only to make up the number of those to be killed; the cruel methods implemented (even by Nazi standards) to carry out the massacre; the fact that the reprisal order had come directly from Adolf Hitler, and the hiding of the bodies, which were buried summarily instead of being returned to their families, the slaughter became a symbol of the various massacres carried out against civilians in Italy from September 8, 1943 until the German surrender on May 8, 1945.

The cultural and political fallout from the Fosse Ardeatine, and more generally from the Fascist movement after WWII, continues today. In December 2007, Giorgio Bettio, a city councillor of Treviso, Italy and member of the Northern League party, suggested that "With immigrants, we should use the same system the SS used, punish 10 of them for every slight against one of our citizens" in reference to Italy's current debate over immigration policies. This comment was met with public condemnation, and Bettio later said, "I certainly made a mistake in citing the SS." He also claimed the incident had been sensationalized by the media.

The Vatican's role in the massacre came under particular scrutiny following the publication of Robert Katz's first book, Death in Rome (1967), in which he speculated that Pope Pius XII had advance knowledge of the Nazi orders and did little to forestall it. This was vigorously disputed by the Pope's defenders. In an update to his book, Katz cited a document released by the Vatican in 1980 – a message dated the 24rd to the Papal Secretariat from one Ingegnere Ferrero warning of imminent bloody reprisals – in support of his claim. According to Katz, the Vatican has yet to release exonerating documentation, if any such exist. Katz elaborated on this in 2003 in The Battle for Rome: The Germans, The Allies, The Partisans, and The Pope, September 1943–June 1944, using evidence from recently released OSS and Vatican sources that certain German diplomats, notably Eugen Dollmann, Himmler's representative in Rome and German Consul Eitel Möllhausen had gone to Pope Pius's personal liaison to the German occupational authorities, Pankratius Pfeiffer, asking him to urge the Pope to intervene and limit reprisals on the grounds that they would inflame the Roman population and make the occupation (and negotiations for a separate peace with the Allies they all fervently wished for) even more difficult.

According to Katz, the Secretariat of the Vatican believed that "the attack on Via Rasella had been undertaken to provoke the occupiers into an excessively repressive act and increase the people's hatred of the Germans. "This was what the Pope's liaison Padre Pancrazio had been told in the Vatican the night before . It was also the opinion held by Dollman and Möllhausen. None of them seemed to believe that the Partisans meant to hurt the Germans as never before to extend the popularity of the Resistance" nor did they view the Via Rasella attack as a legitimate act of war. Instead, they viewed it as a tragic act of terrorism by Communists, as did the Vatican, and as some of its defenders still do. According to Joseph Lichten, author of a monograph defending Pius XII written after the publication of Rolf Hochhuth's play, The Deputy:

In the aftermath, Pope Pius XII debated whether to protest the massacre but decided not to, because, as one of his defenders reported, "all the convents, all the religious houses of Rome were full of refugees, Communists, Jews, democrats and anti-Fascists, ex-generals, etc. Pius XII had even suspended the rules for the cloister. If Pius XII had made a public protest, there would have been searches in all these houses and catastrophe would have ensued". Instead, a special editorial entitled "The Deeds in Via Rasella" appeared in the "semi-official" Vatican newspaper, the Osservatore Romano, deploring the violence of the Partisans, whom it termed "the guilty parties who escaped arrest" and urging Roman citizens to continue to exercise restraint to prevent further sacrifices of innocent people. "In the face of such deeds every honest heart is left profoundly grieved in the name of humanity and Christian sentiment. Thirty-two victims on the one hand, and on the other, three-hundred-and-twenty persons sacrificed for the guilty parties who escaped arrest." Subsequently, the Nazi Occupation forces stepped up their hunt among Roman civilians for suspected Resistance supporters, whom it rounded up and tortured.

Immediately after the war Roman Partisan leaders, including Rosario Bentivegna, the medical student who had set off the Via Rasella bomb, were recipients of medals conferred by the post-war Italian government. In 1952 the new Italian Supreme Court declared the Via Rasella attack to have been a legitimate act of war after an appeal by Kappler's lawyers of his conviction of guilt in the Ardeatine Massacre. This decision was reaffirmed in 1999 when the Italian Supreme Court declared the Partisans immune from prosecution after a Roman prosecutor had unsuccessfully attempted to bring a suit against them for the death of the boy Piero Zuccheretti, who had been killed in Via Rasella. Historian Robert Wolfe finds "persuasive" (in his words) Katz's characterization of the Pope's decision to condemn the Partisans for the Via Rasella attack, rather than the Nazis for the reprisals, as evidence of "a moral failure" resulting from one of the "great misreadings of history". Reviewing Katz's book, The Battle for Rome, István Deák, on the other hand, cautions that although "armed resistance during World War II was romanticized because the Nazis were such an appalling enemy, and because in that war the guerrillas' targets were still mainly soldiers", it is increasingly hard to draw the line between freedom fighting and terrorism. In his opinion, the Hague Conventions regulating irregular warfare has been "more a failure than success." "What is needed," Deák stresses, "is a recognition of reality, namely that future wars will increasingly consist of civilians shooting at soldiers from hiding and frightened soldiers killing innocent civilians. And what is needed, in the aftermath of such a sobering recognition, is an attempt to create a new international law for the more efficient regulation of this type of horrible warfare." Robert Katz's book, The Battle for Rome, Deák concludes, "provides fine arguments for this necessary debate".

Both Priebke and Kappler sought Vatican assistance after the war. Priebke escaped from a British prison camp in 1946 and fled, first to the Tyrol and then back to Rome, whence, using false papers supplied by the Vatican "rat line", he emigrated to Argentina. He was unmasked on camera in 1994 during a television interview by ABC television reporter Sam Donaldson, brought back to Italy for trial, and sentenced to house arrest. Kappler unsuccessfully sought asylum within the Vatican. Tried by the British and sentenced to life imprisonment in Rimini, in 1977 he successfully escaped from a Roman military hospital where he had been undergoing treatment for cancer. He died unmolested the following year at his home in Soltau, West Germany, the West Germans having refused Italian requests to extradite him.