2023-10-04 16:31:23
Time.news – The raid and deportation by the Carabinieri were necessary in order to proceed with the rounding up and sending of the Roman Jews to the extermination camps. And in fact, with the deep-rooted presence of the Carabinieri in the capitalthe operation originally scheduled for 26 September 1943 had been postponed to October by the Obersturmbannführer Herbert Kapplercommander of the Sicherheitsdienst, the German police and the Gestapo in Rome, the SS who had played a leading role in the intelligence that had led to the liberation of Mussolini on September 12 from the Campo Imperatore hotel-prison.
Kappler had also created the seizure and sending to Germany of the Bank of Italy’s gold reserve and he had conceived and brought it to fruition the ignoble blackmail of the Jewish community to have 50 kilos of gold delivered within 36 hours and thus avoid deportation, which will instead take place on 16 October. This was his plan B, triggered on September 26, with a criminal deception, not being able to immediately get his hands on the approximately 12,000 Roman Jews of the Portico d’Ottavia ghetto until the Carabinieri had been removed from the half.
The German forces were in fact numerically scarce, the fascist supporters too, while the soldiers of the Army were openly on the side of the population, as well as faithful to the oath of loyalty to the King: they had in fact refused to participate in raids and reprisals, and on the Jews they had an attitude that was not that of the Nazi authorities. Fearing, rightly, that they would oppose the roundup, Kappler had bought time to allow the authorities of Italian Social Republic as soon as it was founded by Mussolini in Salò they made their moves in agreement with the Reich.
Revenge on the “traitors”
On 6 October an order sheet with confidential protocol 296 from the Marshal of Italy and Minister for National Defense of the RSI Rodolfo Grazianiin underlining with annoyance the «numerical, moral and combative inefficiency» of the Carabinieri, addressed General Casimiro Delfini, acting general commander, and General Umberto Presti commander of the Italian Africa Police (PAI), ordering their disarmament , delivery to the barracks and the ban on removal from the Rome Carabinieri departments.
Officers who did not comply were liable to be shot and their family members subject to arrest, according to the barbaric Sippenhaft adopted by the Third Reich, the objective family responsibility which is repudiated by any criminal system that recognizes only personal responsibility. Control of the barracks in Rome then passed to the soldiers of the PAI who were also assigned the security service in the Open City, and it was clear that it was on behalf of the Germans, waiting for them to be able to do it themselves. The next day, 7 October, the German paratroopers collected the weapons and were ordered to shoot on sight anyone who attempted to escape.
The Carabinieri are then taken to the railway station and made to board the trains, claiming that they will have to take service in the barracks in northern Italy, when in fact it has already been established that they will cross the Brenner Pass and have as their final destinationact nazii, where they will swell the already monstrous ranks of the IItalian military interneesthe soldiers disarmed and locked up after the armistice of 8 September: the IMI are a lexical invention of Hitler, who can thus take revenge on the “traitors” and not apply the international conventions for the protection of prisoners who can also be used as a hand of forced labor in the factories of the Reich.
The resistance of the Army
We do not know the exact number of Carabinieri deported, a figure that varies between 1,500 and 2,500, since the documentation from German sources has been lost, but it is clear that some news on what would have happened had filtered on the eve of the crime to allow them to escape the traps Germans. It is no coincidence that a good part of the Carabinieri had already made their choice of side, ethical rather than military.
On 25 September in Bosco Martese, in the Teramo area, the first pitched battle of the anti-German Resistance was led by Captain Ettore Bianco. The young reserve officer Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa, serving in the Marche region, sentenced to death by the Germans for his activities, immediately went into hiding, placing himself at the head of “bands of patriots” and responsible “for entire civilian populations”; and, with them, just under 200 officers who distinguished themselves in the War of Liberation.
The disconnect between the Army and the reborn republican fascist regime is demonstrated by the decision to neutralize the Carabinieri in northern Italy by disbanding them on 8 December 1943 into the National Republican Guard, a party army modeled on the SS. In the Nazi concentration camps, as recalled by the now centenarian Abramo Rossi who on 7 October 1943 was deported from Rome together with his fellow soldiers, «when they asked us if we wanted to be freed in exchange for the oath to Mussolini, we Carabinieri all replied no».
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