2024-03-24 14:42:46
by MICHELA PONZANI
Procedural documents, testimonies, documents: «Disputes over a massacre», published by Solferino, restores the historical truth
«If they had looked for me, of course I would have presented myself, but in my own way, with weapons in hand and ready to fight, not like a sacrificial lamb. But no: not a word, not a statement, other than that terrible order has already been carried out.” These words, pronounced before his death by Rosario Bentivegna (1922-2012), a fighter in the Roman Resistance, would be enough to extinguish the chorus of poisons, false myths and endless controversies about the Fosse Ardeatine massacre.
It was March 24, 1944 when the lieutenant colonel of the Rome SS, Herbert Kappler, ordered the massacre of 335 defenseless hostages near some abandoned pozzolana quarries on the outskirts of Rome, on the Via Ardeatina. They are anti-fascists, draft dodgers, fighting partisans of all political groups, men of all ages (the youngest is a 14-year-old boy), Jews and Catholics, soldiers and civilians (even Austrian and Hungarian deserters), detained for some time in the Regina Coeli prison or in the torture chambers of via Tasso. Among them there is Manlio Gelsomini, the doctor from San Lorenzo who treats the inhabitants of the neighborhood for free, who fell into a raid by the fascist police due to a spy, who pretends to have a sick daughter, or Pilo Albertelli, the history professor and philosophy at the Umberto I classical high school, already confined and under special surveillance. There is the tenor of the Opera Nicola Ugo Stame: when they take him to die, the Nazis have already broken his chest with blows and kicks. They were not condemned by any military tribunal, but for the Nazis they were Todeskandidaten (literally “candidates for death”), to be exterminated for revenge. Because the Ardeatine massacre is not a legitimate reprisal but a massacre, a war crime, a cowardly and criminal retaliation carried out in the utmost haste and with the utmost secrecy, to punish one of the most militarily important acts of the Resistance, among those carried out in a European city under Nazi occupation: via Rasella.
These are the many (too many) controversies over a massacre, those recounted by Dino Messina in his latest, documented work, published by Solferino eighty years after the events. The author recovers sources, digs through the trial documents, listens to memories and testimonies, enters the depths of the mind of those who decided that “butcher’s shop”, with the victims “forced to climb up and kneel on the bodies of their companions in misfortune to receive the blow of grace.” And he is not afraid to face the short circuit in the memory of Italians: the one that overturns the rights and wrongs, that points the finger at the murderous partisans, cowards, terrorists, culprits who have escaped arrest, showing pity (and even solidarity) for the criminals of Nazi war, basically just “poor soldiers, forced in their youth to obey superior orders”.
Rome was a rebellious city, with an average of eight partisan attacks per day (Kappler will say) and in via Rasella, on 23 March, the Gappists annihilated a column of 162 men of the XI company, III battalion SS Polizei-Regiment Bozen. It is said that they are South Tyrolean, not German (as if having betrayed Italy by wearing the uniform of the SS did not make them less guilty); they march through the streets of Rome singing but they are not musicians or even old reservists. And their comrades from the 101 regiment have already stained themselves with infamy by massacring the civilian population on the eastern front. Same classification, same training, same function. They will return to raid, hang, and “reclaim” the territory from rebel gangs (not sparing women and children), in the Biois valley, in Cadore, in August 1944.
Republican Italy celebrates its martyrs with a grandiose mausoleum (a new Altar of the Fatherland) in “honor and glory of the sacrifice of its children”; but it does not claim the partisan choice of that best youth, ready to outlaw themselves in order to settle the score (even with weapons and if necessary with the use of violence) against the Nazi-fascists who use violence a thousand times more. The country should show gratitude to those who have revived the fortunes of the homeland, thrown into the mud by Mussolini’s wars, overwhelmed by shame and dishonor after the flight of the king and the high command of the army on 8 September 1943. But the debate public is poisoned by distortions and manipulations of memory, by sensational fake news, still in circulation today. Like that of the posters that would have invited the partisans to hand themselves over to avoid reprisal. Too bad those posters never existed.
Not even twenty-four hours after the Gappist attack (without carrying out investigations, issuing radio communications or putting up posters), the commander of the XIV Army, General Eberhard von Mackensen, had ordered Kappler to shoot “ten Italians for every German killed”. A completely discretionary proportion, not foreseen by any military criminal code of war (except by the customs already adopted by the German army in other anti-partisan police operations in Europe or in the rest of Italy).
Via Rasella and the Fosse Ardeatine are “an Italian tragedy” (as the book’s subtitle states), but the weight of guilt and responsibility cannot be shared between victims and executioners. And those who are on the run are precisely the Nazis like Kappler, tried and sentenced to life imprisonment by the Military Tribunal of Rome in 1948 (mysteriously escaped in 1977 from the Celio military hospital in circumstances which have never been clarified); or Erich Priebke, discovered in the 1990s by an American television station in Argentina, in Bariloche, where he had lived undisturbed for 50 years, brought back to Italy after a very long extradition process.
It will be the screams of the Jewish community of Rome, under the door of the military court, that will prevent the Nazi criminal from getting away with it. Priebke had felt offended in his honor as a “gentleman” and as a “German officer”, but it was precisely the testimonies of the relatives of the Ardeatine victims (forced to relive the trauma) that nailed him to his responsibilities. Children and grandchildren of those killed in the massacre, animated by the same dignity as those widows, mothers, sisters ready to fight in the post-war period even against the allied authorities, to give a worthy burial to the bodies piled up in the Ardeatine quarries; remains of a massacre mercifully welcomed by the pathologist Attilio Ascarelli, called to exhume them and give them back an identity. Remains of a sepulchral monument, which is today a place of remembrance little frequented by the Romans and almost forgotten.
March 24, 2024 (modified March 24, 2024 | 3:14 pm)
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