2023-10-14 21:16:14
Time.news – For the Germans, October 16, 1943 was the Saturday strike, the Saturday hit; for the Roman Jews that word meant the prelude to the Holocaust. The blow is struck on Shabbat day, on a livid and drizzly dawn 80 years ago. The patrols ofPublic order police he was born in Security servicethe political police under the orders of lieutenant colonel SS Herbert Kappler assisted by specialists fromTask Force of the captain SS Theodor Danneckealready from 4.30 am they patrol the access roads to the Ghetto of Rome and the main roads.
At 5.30 the operational order comes into force. In groups of two to six militiamen they traveled the length and breadth of the Jewish quarter to flush out families still asleep from their homes. The SS have precise typed lists, they go without fail, they know exactly who is inside each apartment, and when they don’t know they pick everyone up, so as not to make mistakes. The former admiral Augusto Caponfather-in-law of Enrico Fermi (who went into exile in the United States because his wife Laura is Jewish), waves a letter from Benito Mussolini but the Nazis consider him waste paper: he will be killed on October 23rd, as soon as he arrives Auschwitz.
Everything happens in a few hours, “under the windows of Pope Pius XII”, as the German ambassador writes Ernst von Weizsäcker in a worried letter to Berlin, Sunday 17. He fears that the Holy Father may speak out against Germany, he advocates that the Jews remain in Rome or in any case in Italy, perhaps with forced labor, as also suggested by the military commander general Rainer Stahel both by the consul Eitel Moellhausen.
However, Berlin does not understand this and the Vatican remains silent. On October 16, 1,259 Jews remained in the hands of the Nazis. In the capital there are many more, but despite the secrecy of the German authorities something certainly filtered through, there was a leak of information and the Roman population was not just watching; Kappler complains about it in a detailed report where he speaks of passive resistance and open help to “the Jews”, with sensational episodes that even had fascists as protagonists. He didn’t even want an Italian policeman or a fascist to support that operation in the Open City, because he knows – and writes – that he cannot trust them.
© DPA / dpa Picture-Alliance via AFP
Herbert Kappler
For this reason, on 7 October he preceded the roundup of the Jewish quarter with the arrest and deportation of over two thousand Carabinieri, because he feared that they might take up arms and forcibly prevent the Samstagschlag. The SS lieutenant colonel at the top of the Sicherheitsdienst in Rome can have just 365 men, sufficient only if the Carabinieri branched out across the territory are not involved. He has already seen what the Italians’ attitude towards the Jews is, because the Racial Laws of 1938 wanted by Mussolini, with discrimination, are one thing, the mass extermination according to what was decided in the Wannsee Conference of 20 January 1942 from Reinhard Heydrich.
Like Hitler, Kappler reproaches the Italians for the usual “sentimentality” that from 1940 until the armistice of 1943 had prevented them from handing over the Jews to the Germans in the territories under occupation of the Royal Army in France, Yugoslavia and Greece. He, however, had no scruples about blackmailing the community on September 26th and having 50 kilos of gold delivered with the false promise that he would not deport anyone. The blitz in the Ghetto ends around midday: the objective of the operation, until then to be kept in the utmost “secrecy” to carry out with “lightning” the capture of “all the Jews of Rome, without distinction of nationality, age, sex and condition”, is to bring them into the Reich and “liquidate” them. The “Final Solution”, in short, which has as its destination the extermination factory, Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Those arrested were locked up in the Military College in Via della Lungara and then separated: men on one side, women and children on the other. During the night, 252 people were released, belonging to mixed families, or because they were “Aryan” staff serving Jewish families, roommates, Vatican citizens. The remaining 1007, including a Catholic nun, are taken to the Tiburtina station on Monday 18th under the escort of just 30 SS men, where they will fill three freight trains, with 50-60 people for each wagon, without food or water.
Someone, on the way north, he can write notes and throw them out hoping for compassionate hands that will inform relatives and friends. They can’t even imagine their fate, they know what they read on a mimeograph in approximate Italian delivered at the time of the roundup, that is, that they have to carry food for eight days.
The trains are headed to Auschwitz. When they arrive at their destination, on the 22nd and 23rd, those deemed by the SS doctors to be able to work are placed in one row, while the others, women, the elderly and children in another; whoever stays in this room is sent to take a shower. Finished gassing with Zyklon Bthe corpses are burned in the crematorium ovens after having torn the gold teeth from the mouth with pliers.
Of the 1007 rounded up in the Samstagschlag, just 15 men and one woman, Settimia Spizzichino, will return home. The total number of Roman Jews deported to the extermination camps during the nine months of Nazi occupation was 2091 (1067 men, 743 women, 248 children): just 73 men and 28 women survived the Shoah.
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