In October 1936, Adolf Hitler received Italian Foreign Minister Galeazzo Ciano in Nazi Germany, and the two nations announced a closer partnership between their regimes. Benito Mussolini quickly described their alliance as an axis around which the rest of Europe would turn. The two dictators shared enemies, ambitions, and a belief that war could reshape the continent, but their relationship was never truly equal.
Over the following years, Italy became 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 and built close ties with Italian authorities.
Under the occupation, he became one of the most powerful German officials in the city. He managed the persecution of Jews and resistance members, and he selected prisoners who were killed in the Ardeatine caves in March 1944. His name was Herbert Kappler.
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 the University of Stuttgart. After earning his degree, he worked as an electrical engineer for various companies.
He joined the Nazi Party on August 1, 1931. In 1933, the year Hitler became chancellor, 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 could not have children, the couple adopted a boy from the Lebensborn program, a Nazi initiative created to raise children considered racially desirable.
In January 1936, Kappler was transferred to the Gestapo headquarters in Stuttgart. In 1937, he qualified as a criminal commissioner at the police academy in Berlin. During the Anschluss in 1938, the Nazi annexation of Austria, 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 spoke Italian fluently, was sent to Rome as a police liaison officer. 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 only joined the war on Germany’s side in June 1940.
During the early years of the war, Kappler worked closely with the Italian police, building networks of informants and hunting 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 voted against Mussolini, and King Victor Emmanuel III dismissed him and ordered his arrest. In September, the new government led by Marshal Pietro Badoglio signed an armistice with the Allies, taking Italy out of the war.
In response, Nazi Germany decided to invade Italy and disarmed Italian army units. On September 12, German commandos freed Mussolini from captivity and placed him at the head of the Italian Social Republic, a fascist puppet state in the north. When Germany occupied part of Italy, Kappler was appointed commander of the Security Police and 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 Jewish heads of households if it was not paid. The gold was collected and delivered, but it did not help.
A few weeks later, on the morning of October 16, a roundup 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 own unit. Kappler assisted in the operation as Dannecker’s men and Kappler’s men surrounded 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, 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 Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss, informing him that a shipment of more than 1,000 Italian Jews would arrive around October 22 or 23, and asking him to prepare to give them special treatment, which in Nazi language meant extermination in the gas chambers. In the months that followed, another 800 Jews from Rome were tracked down and deported, 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 planned to assassinate him. But O’Flaherty continued to move through the occupied city in disguise and was never captured.
Kappler’s most notorious crime took place in the spring of 1944. By then, the front had moved closer to Rome, with an Allied beachhead near the coastal town of Anzio, only 50 kilometers to the south. Armed resistance was growing bolder.
On the afternoon of March 23, 1944, partisans from the Groups of Patriotic Action, 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 the Bozen police regiment, a German police unit largely recruited from German-speaking residents of South Tyrol in what is now northern Italy. Thirty-two of its men were killed instantly, and one more died from his wounds within a day.
The German response was immediate. Hitler himself 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 operation in which 10 Italian civilians would be shot for every policeman killed in the attack. They suggested that potential victims be selected from individuals already sentenced to death and awaiting execution.
General Eberhard von Mackensen, commander of the German Fourteenth Army, approved the proposal. The plan was to execute 330 people, 10 men for each of the 33 dead, but Kappler did not have nearly that many prisoners under death sentence. He filled the number with men already in German and fascist custody, 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. Only there did the Germans discover that a calculation error had brought five more men than the allotted quota, bringing the total to 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, including Erich Priebke, who checked off 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 Italian authorities in 1947. In 1948, an Italian military court in Rome sentenced him to life in prison for his crimes. He spent the first four years in solitary confinement and was held in the military fortress at Gaeta, a coastal city between Rome and Naples.
In prison, Kappler’s life took an interesting turn. His first wife divorced him during his sentence, and his most devoted visitor became, ironically, Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty, the priest he had once hunted through the streets of Rome. Kappler wrote to him first, and O’Flaherty visited him regularly for most of that period. He was Kappler’s only visitor, 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 ceremony was held inside the prison. In 1975, Kappler was diagnosed with terminal cancer, and the following year he was moved to a military hospital in Rome. His wife and the West German government requested his release on humanitarian grounds, but their requests were refused.
For Italy, the Ardeatine caves massacre remained a bleeding wound. The disease weakened Kappler, and his wife’s nursing training gave her almost unrestricted access to his room. In August 1977, according to the story that became famous but was never fully verified, Anneliese Kappler smuggled her husband out of the hospital inside a large suitcase. By that time, he weighed less than 50 kilograms, about 110 pounds.
The story soon changed. Italian Defense Minister Vito Lattanzio publicly stated that the suitcase account was completely unfounded, partly due to the physical dimensions of the hospital exits and elevator. Anneliese Kappler later claimed that her husband was lowered from a third-floor window using a rope, then hidden in a car and driven toward West Germany. Investigators reportedly found a rope attachment point near the window and traces of 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 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 the Jewish community of Rome before deporting its members 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.
But it was Kappler who prepared the lists, added victims when the numbers did not match, and personally supervised the massacre. Herbert Kappler was 70 years old when he died in Soltau, West Germany, on February 9, 1978.