In October 1936, Adolf Hitler received Italian Foreign Minister Galeazzo Ciano in Nazi Germany, where the two regimes announced a closer partnership. Benito Mussolini was quick to describe their alliance as an axis around which the rest of Europe would revolve. The two dictators shared enemies, ambitions, and a belief that war could reshape the continent, though their relationship was never truly equal.
Over the following years, Italy grew increasingly dependent on German military power. When Mussolini was removed from office in July 1943 and Italy signed an armistice with the Allies two months later, German forces occupied Rome and much of the country.
Among those who took control of the former Allied capital was an SS officer who had arrived years earlier as a police liaison officer and had built close ties with Italian authorities. Under the occupation, he became one of the most powerful German officials in the city, managing the persecution of Jews and resistance members, as well as selecting the prisoners killed in the Ardeatine Caves in March 1944. His name was Herbert Kappler.
Herbert Kappler was born on September 23, 1907, in Stuttgart, then part of the German Empire. He grew up in a middle-class Protestant family and studied mathematics at Stuttgart University of Applied Sciences. After earning his degree, he worked as an electrical engineer for various companies.
He joined the Nazi Party on August 1, 1931, and in 1933, the year Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany, Kappler joined the SS, the Nazi paramilitary organization. The following year he married Leonore Jantsch, a typist at the Nazi Party office in Stuttgart. Their relationship remained cold and distant, and after they were unable to have children, the couple adopted a boy from Lebensborn, part of a Nazi program created to raise children considered racially desirable.
In January 1936, Herbert Kappler was transferred to the Gestapo headquarters in Stuttgart, and in 1937 he qualified as a criminal commissioner at the police academy in Berlin. In 1938, during the Anschluss, the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany, he helped run a campaign to strip Austrian Jews of their property and expel them from the country.
In the spring of 1939, Kappler, who was fluent in Italian, was sent to Rome as a police liaison officer, where he also managed the work of the SS intelligence service, the SD. World War II began on September 1, 1939, when Nazi Germany invaded Poland. Italy stayed out of the fighting for the first nine months and did not join the war alongside Germany until June 1940.
During the early years of the war, Kappler worked closely with the Italian police, building networks of informants and pursuing enemies of the regime in the capital of an allied state. That arrangement ended in the summer of 1943.
In July, the Grand Council of Fascism, the highest body in Mussolini's own movement, voted against him, and King Victor Emmanuel III dismissed Mussolini from office and ordered his arrest. In September, the new government led by Marshal Pietro Badoglio, a veteran military commander and former chief of the general staff, signed an armistice with the Allies, a ceasefire that took Italy out of the war.
In response, Nazi Germany decided to invade Italy and disarmed Italian army units. On September 12, German commando forces freed Mussolini from captivity and installed him at the head of the Italian Social Republic, a puppet fascist state in the north.
When Nazi Germany occupied part of Italy, Kappler was appointed commander of the security police and the SD in Rome and the surrounding area. He was, in effect, the master of German police terror in Rome.
His first major action was directed against the Jews of Rome, one of the oldest Jewish communities in Europe. On September 26, 1943, he summoned their leaders and demanded 50 kilograms of gold within 36 hours, threatening to deport 200 heads of Jewish families if it was not paid. The gold was collected and handed over, but it was of no use.
A few weeks later, on the morning of October 16, the arrest of Rome's Jewish residents began. It was not organized by Kappler but by SS officer Theodor Dannecker, a deportation specialist sent from Berlin with his special unit. Kappler assisted in these operations as Dannecker's men and Kappler's men sealed off the old Jewish quarter of Rome and searched the rest of the city, arresting 1,259 people.
Those who could prove they were not Jewish were released. The remaining 1,023 people were held for two days and then loaded onto a train bound for Auschwitz, the largest Nazi death camp in occupied Poland. Only 16 people survived the war, 15 men and one woman.
Kappler even sent a letter to the commandant of the Auschwitz extermination camp, Rudolf Höss, informing him that he would receive a shipment of more than 1,000 Italian Jews around October 22 or 23, and demanding that he prepare to give them special treatment, which in Nazi German language meant extermination in the gas chambers. In the months that followed, another 800 Jews from Rome were tracked down and deported, with many betrayed by Italian informants and arrested by Kappler's men.
Not everyone in Rome was within Kappler's reach. Across the city, a network of clergy led by Monsignor Hugh O'Flaherty, an Irish priest based in the Vatican, hid thousands of Jews and escaped Allied prisoners of war in monasteries and private homes. They were protected by the neutrality of the Holy See, the governing authority of the Catholic Church.
Vatican City had been a sovereign state in the heart of Rome since 1929, and German police could not enter it. Unable to touch the priest inside Vatican territory, Kappler devised a plan to assassinate him, but O'Flaherty continued to move through the occupied city in disguise and was never caught.
Kappler's worst crime took place in the spring of 1944. By then, the front had drawn closer to Rome, with an Allied beachhead near the coastal town of Anzio only 50 kilometers to the south, and the armed resistance was growing bolder.
At midday on March 23, 1944, partisans of the Gruppi di Azione Patriottica, urban resistance units dominated by communists, detonated a bomb hidden in a garbage cart on the narrow Via Rasella in central Rome. The target was a regiment of the Bozen police, a German police unit recruited largely from German-speaking residents of South Tyrol, in what is now northern Italy. Thirty-two of its men were killed immediately, and one died of his wounds within a day.
The German response was immediate, and Adolf Hitler even suggested destroying Rome. On the evening of March 23, 1944, Herbert Kappler and Lieutenant General Kurt Mälzer, the German military commander in Rome, recommended a reprisal in which 10 Italian civilians would be shot for every policeman killed in the attack. They suggested that potential victims be chosen from individuals already sentenced to death and awaiting execution.
General Eberhard von Mackensen, commander of the German Fourteenth Army, whose jurisdiction included Rome, approved the proposal. The plan was to execute 330 people, 10 men for each of the 33 dead, but Kappler had nowhere near that number of prisoners under sentence of death.
He made up the number from men already in the grip of the Germans and Fascists, including prisoners awaiting trial, resistance suspects, ordinary criminals, and 75 Jews, as well as civilians taken from the streets. On March 24, 1944, the prisoners were taken by truck to the Ardeatine Caves on the southern edge of the city.
There the Germans discovered that a calculation error had brought five more men than the quota, making the total 335. Instead of releasing them, Kappler ordered them executed with the others because they had already seen everything.
They were taken into the tunnels of the abandoned quarries in groups of five, forced to climb over the bodies of those already killed, and then shot. The executions were carried out by Kappler's own officers, among them Erich Priebke, who checked names as the condemned were brought in. When it was over, German engineers blew up the entrances to hide the bodies.
Rome was liberated by the Allies on June 4, 1944, and Kappler withdrew north with the retreating German forces. He remained in northern Italy until Germany surrendered on May 8, 1945. The next day, Herbert Kappler surrendered to British military police in Bolzano, a city in northern Italy.
He was handed over to the Italian authorities in 1947, and in 1948 an Italian military court in Rome sentenced him to life in prison for his crimes. He served the first four years of that sentence in solitary confinement. He was held in the military fortress at Gaeta, a coastal town between Rome and Naples.
In prison, Kappler's life took an interesting turn. His first wife divorced him during his sentence, and his most loyal visitor became, ironically, Monsignor Hugh O'Flaherty, the priest he had once hunted through the streets of Rome.
It was Kappler who first wrote to him, and O'Flaherty visited him regularly for most of that period, the only visitor Kappler had, and the two men talked about literature and religion. Under his influence, Kappler, who had been raised Protestant, entered the Catholic Church and was baptized by O'Flaherty.
It is impossible to say whether his conversion reflected genuine remorse, because he never publicly admitted guilt for the massacre or expressed regret for the dead. In 1972, Kappler married a nurse named Anneliese after a long correspondence. The wedding took place inside the prison.
In 1975, Kappler was diagnosed with terminal cancer, and the following year he was transferred to a military hospital in Rome. His wife and the West German government demanded his release on humanitarian grounds, but their requests were rejected. For Italy, the Ardeatine Caves massacre remained an open wound.
Illness had weakened Kappler, and the nursing training his wife had received gave her almost unrestricted access to his room. In August 1977, according to a widely told but not fully verified account, Anneliese Kappler smuggled her husband out of the hospital inside a large suitcase. By then he weighed less than 50 kilograms, about 110 pounds.
The account soon changed, however. Italian Defense Minister Vito Lattanzio stated publicly that the suitcase story was completely unfounded, partly because of the physical dimensions of the hospital exits and the elevator. Anneliese Kappler later claimed that her husband was lowered from a third-floor window using a rope and then hidden in a car and driven toward West Germany. Investigators reportedly found a tie point near the window and traces of a rope.
The West German government refused to extradite him and refused to try him again, citing his poor health. Kappler's escape and West Germany's refusal to hand him over to the Italian authorities caused widespread anger in Italy.
Although Herbert Kappler spent his final months as a free man, history remembers him for his actions in occupied Rome. He extorted Rome's Jewish community before its members were deported to Auschwitz, ran German police terror in the Italian capital, and selected the prisoners killed in the Ardeatine Caves.
He later presented himself as a soldier who was only following orders. Yet it was Kappler who prepared the lists, added victims when the numbers did not match, and personally oversaw the massacre. Herbert Kappler was 70 years old when he died in the West German city of Soltau on February 9, 1978.