On March 23, 1944, sixteen members of the Italian Resistance concealed themselves along the Via Rasella in Rome. They were well armed with machine pistols and revolvers hidden under their clothing as they mingled with the Roman crowds. One of them pushed a rubbish cart along the road, occasionally stooping to pick up discarded rubbish.
The trap was set and about to be sprung. From down the street came the ring of jackboots on the cobbles, marching in unison. The heavily armed SS troops of the 11th Company, Third Battalion, Police Battalion Bozen clanked along, their rifles and equipment jangling.
They were the arrogant overlords of Rome, the SS military police who did the bidding of their Gestapo masters in maintaining order in the Italian capital and in hunting down the enemies of the Reich. Ironically, most of the SS troops were German-speaking Italians who had been born in the border province of Bolzano and had served in the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front. To avoid another tour of duty in the East, these hardened combat veterans had volunteered to join the SS police in October 1943.
As the SS troops marched up the street toward the concealed partisans, the one disguised as a street cleaner surreptitiously lit a fuse on a bomb and disappeared into the crowd less than a minute before the column of troops passed his cart. Inside the cart was an improvised explosive device consisting of 12 kilograms of TNT carefully packed into a steel case, placed inside a bag containing a further 6 kilograms of TNT as well as explosive-filled iron tubing.
The timing of the attack could not have been better. As the marching column drew level with the rubbish cart, there was a huge explosion. Windows in the surrounding buildings imploded from the blast wave, and a great gout of fire and black smoke filled the street. Human body parts littered the pavement or hung from burning trees beside the road.
As the smoke began to clear, the concealed partisans opened fire with their small arms on the surviving SS men. The rattle of machine guns and revolvers echoed off the surrounding buildings. After a few minutes, the firing trailed off as the partisans quickly hid their weapons and disappeared into the confused and terrified crowds.
Twenty-eight SS police lay dead on the Via Rasella, and many others had been severely injured, including five who sustained what proved to be mortal wounds. Two Italian civilians had also been killed accidentally during the confusion.
Within minutes of the attack, the head of the SD, the Sicherheitspolizei and the Field Police in Rome, 36-year-old SS Obersturmbannführer Herbert Kappler, had arrived on the scene to begin an investigation. Kappler's job involved exporting Nazi terror into the heart of Rome, a role that included rounding up Jews and other enemies of the state and putting them on trains to the camps. He was also responsible for suppressing the various partisan groups that operated in the city.
Later on the evening of March 23, Kappler met with the military governor of Rome, Luftwaffe Major General Kurt Mälzer. The German governor was outraged by this attack on the Reich's troops in the very center of Rome and demanded that reprisals be taken at once. Kappler had no compunction about agreeing wholeheartedly with this illegal order, and between the two of them they decided that 10 Italians would be executed for every German soldier killed.
General Mälzer then went one step further and even suggested that, as a further reprisal, the section of the city of Rome should also be burned down. Mälzer's staff passed on these proposals to the headquarters of the German Commander-in-Chief South, who had responsibility for Italy, Luftwaffe Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, whose staff duly passed the request up the chain of command to the OKW in Berlin. That very night, Adolf Hitler himself decided that the reprisal would go ahead within 24 hours, and the Führer order was transmitted to Kesselring.
So the order to illegally murder hundreds of innocent Italians trickled down the German chain of command. Kesselring considered the order to be directly from Hitler himself and that it must be obeyed without hesitation or question. However, Kesselring had been led to believe that the men who were going to be shot were Italian criminals who were already under sentence of death for other crimes. Kappler himself had lied and told Kesselring that he had sufficient criminals at hand, which was a case of wishful thinking.
Kappler required 280 Italians in total to execute, and he had a grand total of just four men who had been condemned to death and were actually sitting in local jails in Rome. Kappler turned to one of his subordinates, 30-year-old SS Hauptsturmführer Erich Priebke. The young officer from Hennigsdorf in Brandenburg was ordered to create a death list of those to be shot.
In addition to the four condemned criminals, SD prisons contained another 17 men who were serving long sentences and 167 who were noted by the SD as being worthy of death. The SD had also managed to round up a couple of suspected partisans from the scene of the bombing to add to the total, but it was still not enough.
"The whole of that night we searched the records and could not find a sufficient number of persons to make up the number required for execution," recalled Priebke at his interrogation by the British Army in 1946. SS Brigadeführer and Generalmajor of Police Dr. Wilhelm Harster suggested making up the numbers by including a group of Jews being held in Gestapo jails in the city. The suggestion was seized upon with alacrity by Kappler and Priebke.
By noon on March 24, Kappler and Priebke had assembled a list containing 271 men. By now the death toll from the bombing had risen to 32 as the wounded Germans succumbed in hospital. More Italians were now required to be shot as per Hitler's express order. To make up the numbers of the condemned, the chief of fascist police in Rome, Pietro Caruso, offered some prisoners from his own jails. Mistakenly, the Germans actually ended up with 335 hostages, which was five too many.
Kappler called a meeting of the SS officers who would take part in the massacre. "He told us that the commander of the police regiment whose men had been killed declined to carry out the execution, that the men from the headquarters at Via Tasso were to be the executioners," recalled Priebke. "He said that this thing was a horrible thing to do and to show the men that they had the backing of the officers, all the officers were to fire a shot at the beginning and a further shot at the end."
The SS transported the condemned men, who ranged in age from the elderly down to teenage boys, to a quiet rural suburb of Rome. Inside disused quarries at Fosse Ardeatine near the Via Ardeatina, the two officers charged with conducting the massacre inside the caves were Priebke and 32-year-old SS Hauptsturmführer Karl Hass.
In groups of five, the hostages were led into the cave and each was shot at close range in the back of the head by SS troops, the idea being to use only one bullet per Italian. Most of the SS men had never killed anyone before, so Kappler had taken the step of ordering a large quantity of Dutch courage in the form of bottles of cognac, and the officers and men of the execution squads freely imbibed.
To save time, the soldiers forced the prisoners to climb on top of those who had been killed just minutes before, so that oddly piles of bleeding corpses were created. However, a combination of nervousness and alcohol meant that many of the executions were botched, and several men and boys dragged themselves off deeper into the cave system to die of their wounds, including a father and his son who were found in a death embrace a year later by Allied investigators.
During the executions, which dragged on for several hours, Erich Priebke encouraged his men and forced several to shoot victims. Armed with a Beretta machine pistol, the SS officer personally killed two victims. Toward the end of the day, Priebke realized that he had five too many hostages, and instead of releasing the men, he ruthlessly ordered that they too be shot with the others, to leave no Italian witnesses to the terrible crime that had been perpetrated.
German Army engineers arrived to set charges at the entrance to the caves and then detonated them, entombing the bodies inside. The Germans then packed up, boarded their trucks, and drove back to their barracks, confident that they had carried out Hitler's order to the letter.
Rome was liberated by the Allies on June 4, 1944, just two days before the Normandy landings in France. Like rats off a sinking ship, the SD and Gestapo officers who were still in the city tried to escape from justice. Herbert Kappler fled to Vatican City, then as now a tiny independent and neutral nation, and begged for refuge. The Vatican wisely refused Kappler permission to enter, and he was soon captured by the Allies.
In the meantime, Priebke had fled and gone to ground elsewhere in Italy. Erich Priebke was arrested by the US Army on May 13, 1945, while he was living with his wife and two young sons in Bolzano, close to the Austrian border.
"My wife was with me and there was a knock on the door," Priebke recalled in an interview with British writer Guy Walters in Rome in 2007. "An American soldier said in half an hour come down with one suitcase and one blanket. They let my wife and children stay but I was sent off in a big truck. As we went along some Italian shouted 'Tedeschi' at us and made throat-slitting gestures."
Priebke was an inmate in several POW camps. On August 28, 1946, he was interrogated by the British at Camp Afragola outside Naples about the Ardeatine Caves massacre, during the course of which Priebke fully admitted his role in the planning and execution of the crime, including his personal murder of two Italian hostages.
Priebke knew that it was only going to be a matter of time before the Allies turned their attentions on him and a prosecution was made. At the time, Priebke could have expected the death penalty for his war crimes. This prospect undoubtedly led him to escape from his camp and become a fugitive from justice. He would be on the run for nearly 50 years.