Rome

by Matthew Kneale

  The Ghetto roundup was the cruellest episode of the occupation yet, but it would be far from the last terrible event. By late October Romans’ predictions that the Allies would appear in two weeks or less seemed sadly optimistic. Naples had been liberated early in the month, after Neapolitans flung the Germans out in a furious insurrection – at great cost to both the city and themselves – but the Allies were then halted by a formidable German defensive line south of Monte Cassino at the Volturno river. The war had stalled. By November bitter graffiti was appearing on Roman walls: Russians hurry up! The Allies are waiting for you on the Volturno.

  Little by little, life in Rome grew worse. Buses and trams became rarer and more overcrowded. Taxies vanished altogether. Shops bricked up their windows and doors to avoid being looted, giving streets a sinister look, while those that were not boarded up had little on display: shoe polish, insect powder or a few wooden bottles and plates. Luxury jewellery shops sold cheap tin ornaments. The only lively places were cafés, while even here there was little to eat or drink.

  By November, as the weather grew cold, all food was in short supply, as were salt and matches, and gas for cooking came on briefly three times per day. Tea and coffee were almost unobtainable and Mother Mary was reduced to drinking coffee substitute made from barley, and tea made from lime leaves, blackberry leaves or dried orange peel. Though the lira was almost worthless, free enterprise found new opportunities. As food grew scarce the black market boomed and for those who had the money it was possible to send a letter and receive a reply from Naples, across Allied lines. For a larger sum one could send oneself.

  Posters announced ever-growing lists of forbidden activities. Sabotage, desertion, failing to fulfil labour obligations and possessing a radio transmitter were all punishable by death, as was harbouring Jews or Allied prisoners of war. By now, they were not the only people trying to make themselves scarce. De Wyss told of a Roman woman who was concealing several Italian army officers and was horrified to see a German parachutist marching into her house. It turned out to be her gardener: a German had held him up at gunpoint and forced him to exchange clothes so he could desert. De Wyss also told of two German officers who asked to stay the night in the home of some elderly Italians. The next morning the Germans had vanished, leaving their attaché cases and their uniforms neatly folded on their beds, along with a note that read, ‘Thank you for having helped us stop fighting.’ De Wyss spoke German and many soldiers told her that all they wanted was to go home to their families.

  Occasionally there was a welcome piece of news. On 28 November the Gestapo and members of the Italian African Police raided the headquarters of Rome’s Fascists. The Fascists were widely detested for their corruption and aggression: threatening tram conductors with hand grenades to avoid paying the fare, or throwing them at cinema screens because they disliked the film. One of their chiefs, Pollastrini, went too far when he threatened an opera audience with a machine gun because they failed to stand up when the Giovinezza was played. Some of those present had been German. The raid uncovered torture chambers, three torture victims, quantities of stolen goods and a live cow, presumably to provide fresh milk for the Fascists’ cappuccinos. Yet Romans’ delight would be short-lived. The Blackshirts were soon replaced by others who would prove less braggartly, more efficient and much more dangerous.

  At the beginning of November the Germans requisitioned the best hotels on the Via Veneto for their headquarters. They were clearly expecting to stay for some time. Yet they were about to find life more difficult. Early on in the occupation two rival resistance organizations had formed in Rome, the royalist FMCR and the republican CLN. Neither achieved much in themselves, beyond scheming against one another, but from the CLN there emerged several partisan groups which had already blown up a Fascist barracks, assassinated a number of Blackshirts and scattered roads with four-pronged nails, causing havoc to German convoys. In mid-December one of the partisan groups, the communist Gruppi di Azione Patriottica or GAP, decided to target German forces so that they would no longer feel safe in the city. During the second half of December they launched a series of sudden, daring attacks. They killed eight Germans dining in a trattoria in the Prati district and then a further eight getting into a truck. They threw bombs through the windows of one of the Via Veneto hotels used by the Germans, the Flora, with devastating results. They attacked the guardhouse of Regina Coeli prison, and three Germans on the Mazzini Bridge were killed by a bomb hurled by a cyclist, who then escaped, pedalling furiously.

  Romans may have been pleased that the Germans now had to look over their shoulder but the attacks made their lives harder too. The city had long been subject to a curfew – it had first been imposed by Badoglio – but now it was greatly extended and began at 7 p.m. Bicycles, which had become the best way of getting round the city, were banned and anyone seen cycling would be shot without warning. Streets quickly became filled with tricycles, which were still permitted and became Rome’s new trucks, pulling home-made trailers full of goods.

  As the partisans grew more active so did the city’s Blackshirts. A new force of them had arrived, led by half-Italian, half-German Pietro Koch, who had been given authority by Mussolini to root out those in hiding and members of Rome’s resistance. His Reparto Speciale di Polizia, which Romans called the Banda Koch (Koch’s band) proved very useful to the Germans. Until then they had been reluctant to search Church buildings for fear of making trouble with the pope. Now Koch could raid them – with German assistance – and the SS could disclaim all responsibility. On the night of 21 December three Church institutions were struck and more than fifty people were discovered and taken.

  Church properties no longer seemed safe and many left them. Jews went where they could, moving from place to place. A few hid out for a time in their old homes in the now deserted Ghetto. Since the October roundup they had been left largely in peace but now searches and arrests resumed. The authorities offered rewards of 5,000 lire for a Jewish man and 2,000 to 3,000 for women and children. Some Romans – though not many – took the money. There could even be danger from fellow Jews, and a young Jewish woman, Celeste di Porto, gained infamy by helping the Germans. Nicknamed La Pantera Nera (the Black Panther) she would stand on the Tiber Island bridges near the Ghetto and point out Jews she recognized. As thanks for her betrayal the Germans later freed her brother, who was due to be executed, but he was so ashamed of his sister that he turned himself in again and was killed.

  Romans had an occupied Christmas. Midnight masses were cancelled because of the curfew. The pope’s Christmas speech urged Romans to abstain from violence, while avoiding any mention of the crimes that were taking place all around him. By now the city had a new commander, General Mälzer: a heavy drinker who tried to improve his country’s battered image by providing Christmas dinner at the Hotel Regina on Via Veneto Hotels for 150 British prisoners of war. A new year began. On 13 January 1944, Romans were distracted from their hunger by the sight of dogfights over their city. Spectators included Mother Mary:

  One Allied airman met his enemy coming head on: the German plane was cut in two, and the American came down as well. In all five American planes came down, but their crews bailed out safely; on landing they were taken prisoners, of course… To those who had never seen anyone bail out before, the parachutes looked like great white blossoms floating earthward.25

  And then just a few days later there was miraculous news. Mother Mary wrote on 21 January,

  It seems too good to be true. We haven’t many details yet, but we are so delighted that nothing seems to matter beyond the fact that they are so close to us, at last. It is as if a cloud had lifted from the city. People in the streets look happier than they have for a long time.26

  Allied forces had landed at Anzio just thirty miles from Rome. Once again German diplomats hurriedly prepared to leave and there were chaotic scenes at the railway station, where the German transport officials did not know whether munitions should be unloaded or se
nt back north. Trucks were confiscated and at night de Wyss heard machine guns rattle, as cars roared through the city and planes flew overhead.

  Days passed and nothing happened. There was no pounding of guns. De Wyss could not understand: ‘The Allies don’t advance,’ she wrote. ‘Why? Why? The way to Rome lies open.’27 She was quite right, the way to Rome was open, or at least it had been. The Anzio landing remains a controversial subject. An Allied force of 50,000 troops and 5,000 vehicles landed on a stretch of coast defended by 100 Germans. In Rome the Germans had two police battalions that totalled only 1,500 men. The Allied commander General John Lucas could have swept into the city with ease and seized the Alban Hills, which he had also been ordered to occupy. Instead he stayed in his bridgehead and dug in.

  Lucas would be widely reviled for his caution. Yet he may have had a point. The last Allied landing at Salerno had been met with such a furious German counter-attack that it was nearly driven back into the sea. Lucas’ landing was to have been combined with a breakthrough by the main army below Monte Cassino, but the attack failed. Fifty thousand troops may seem like a large force but by 1944 standards it was modest. By the time de Wyss was wondering why the Allies were not in Rome, Kesselring had already raced reserves down from northern Italy and his forces outnumbered those of the bridgehead army by two to one. If Lucas had advanced on Rome he might have turned the city into battleground. Instead he turned Anzio into a graveyard where 11,000 Allied troops would die.

  Rather than being Rome’s salvation the landing was a disaster for the city. From the start of the occupation the Germans had declared Rome to be a demilitarized open city, yet this was disingenuous and they used the city centre, which was comparatively safe from Allied air attack, as a vast car park for their guns and tanks. With the war now just thirty miles away, German military traffic through Rome tripled and the city centre became packed with military equipment. Since the devastating raid of 19 July Rome had suffered relatively little bombing. Now, as the Allies struggled to defend their beachhead they struck the city almost daily, targeting railway yards, stations and gasworks. Rome is not usually thought of as a city that greatly suffered from bombing during the Second World War, and the centre was little touched, but the outskirts were extensively damaged, and an estimated 7,000 Romans died in air raids. Usually there was little warning as the Germans, insisting that Rome was an open city, did not sound a siren. When a raid began trams and buses stopped where they were and people were ordered into shelters, which Mother Mary described as ‘death traps, flimsy and ineffectual’, and ‘full of a more or less hysterical crowd’.28 She preferred to trust her luck in a church.

  Bombs fell on the borgate districts of Quadraro and Centocelle where Mussolini had dumped anti-Fascists and the poor. On 17 February the Protestant cemetery was hit and the graves of Keats and Shelley were torn open; on 14 March a raid on the railway workers’ district of San Lorenzo struck women queuing for water at a street pump – many died and one was decapitated by the blast; and on 18 March the university hospital area of Policlinico was hit together with a tram crammed with passengers. All the attacks were day raids and so early each morning crowds of Romans made their way to St Peter’s Square and spent the day camped out beneath the colonnades before going back to discover if their homes were still standing. Some brought their cows. The Allies’ constant bombing and their failure to liberate Rome when it seemed they had had the chance made them increasingly loathed. De Wyss wrote that, ‘The bitterness against the Allies is so acute that it is difficult to show one’s pro-Allied feelings. Admiration for the Germans grows … One needs a strong character indeed not to lose one’s faith in future big Allied successes.’29

  The Anzio landing was also a disaster for the Roman resistance. In the first few months of the occupation members of the FMCR and the CLN, knowing that lines were tapped, had scrupulously avoided communicating by telephone but when they heard of the Anzio landing, assuming that they were hours from liberation, they rang one another freely with the good news. Kappler’s SS squads and Koch’s gang enjoyed a spree of arrests. Among many others, Colonel Montezemolo, the leader of the FMCR, was captured and his organization soon became a broken force. Word leaked out of terrible tortures endured by captives at the Gestapo’s headquarters, on Via Tasso, where Kappler’s second in command, SS Captain Erich Priebke, became an enthusiastic self-taught torturer. The headquarters’ floors were said to be littered with pulled teeth.

  Yet if the Anzio landing had done little for Rome, Rome did a great deal for the soldiers on the beachhead, as they endured pouring rain, shellfire and First World War style trench warfare. Shortly before the landing took place an American agent, Peter Tomkins, was smuggled into Rome to help organize an insurrection to link with an Allied attack on the city. When it became clear that his role was redundant, Tomkins turned his energies to relaying information on German movements. His source was a remarkable information-gathering network improvised by the Socialist Party activist, Franco Malfatti. Malfatti’s network was impressively well connected and included Italian officers and officials who had access to the highest German decision-making, doctors who talked to wounded German soldiers, and many scores of people whose homes or farms lay between Rome and Anzio and who watched German movements. Audaciously, Malfatti set up his office in the back room of a German bookshop directly across the road from the German-sequestered Hotel Excelsior on the Via Veneto. Here was brought information on the Germans’ attack plans and the precise location of their tanks, gun emplacements and ammunition dumps. All was given to Peter Tomkins, who had the most important details passed to a hidden radio transmitter which then sent them to Allied command. In the middle of February the Anzio battle reached its height and the beachhead came perilously close to being overrun. That it survived, as both Marshal Kesselring and the US General Donovan readily admitted afterwards, was largely down to intelligence: Malfatti’s Socialist Information Service.

  None of this was known to any but a few Romans. For most, life was an unheroic business of enduring cold – on 6 March it snowed – and trying to find food and a means of cooking it. Mother Mary’s nuns began taking in relatives and friends of the convent’s servants and by the end of January they had twenty people hiding out. People on the streets looked frozen and hungry and some young children were barefoot. The distant sound of guns at Anzio seemed to taunt Romans. All that they wanted was peace.

  Yet peace was still far away. On the late of afternoon of 23 March M. de Wyss went to visit a photographer who developed her films, and who lived on Via Rasella near Piazza Barberini:

  I am still shivering … there was a terrific explosion, then screams and yells. Then wild machine-gun fire made me spin round and run for my life, while out of the corner of my eye I saw the Germans catching people who tried to escape. I doubled like a hunted hare and stopped only in the Piazza di Spagna. A boy of about twelve stood near me, panting. He told me that he had been caught already, but had ducked under the German soldier’s arms and slipped away. He didn’t know what had happened. He was in the street, playing. Then a terrific explosion threw him on to the pavement. He heard shouts, groans, machine-gun fire and saw people running away and did the same.30

  Rome’s partisans had staged a spectacular. The 23rd of March was the 25th anniversary of Fascism’s foundation and they had initially intended to strike at a grand parade and rally by the city’s Blackshirts, but the Germans, who worried that such an ostentatious display would be resented by hungry Romans, had insisted the Fascist celebrations be reduced to a meeting in the heavily guarded Fascist headquarters, which was now in the old Ministry of Corporations on Via Veneto. The partisans changed their plans. Unwittingly, the Germans had put themselves in the firing line.

  The target was around 150 military police of the 11th company of the SS Polizeiregiment Bozen, who for the past few mornings had marched north across Rome to practise at a firing range, returning to their barracks near the Via Nazionale in the afternoon. As it ha
ppened, these soldiers were newly German, as they came from the bilingual northern Italian city of Bozen, or Bolzano, that had been annexed by Hitler from Italy only a few months earlier. Two groups of Roman partisans, the Gappisti and the socialist Matteotti Brigade decided to combine their forces in a grand attack that broke the rules of partisan warfare. Partisan assaults worked best when they were small, simple and sudden, as they had been until this point. This attack, which was to take place on the narrowest street on the Germans’ route – Via Rasella near Piazza Barberini – involved no fewer than seventeen people, a bomb hidden in a wheeled litter bin and a further action with mortars and machine guns. Yet the operation could hardly have gone more smoothly. The bomb exploded, leaving a huge crater in the road amid dead and injured soldiers. The surviving Germans, when they were hit by the partisans’ mortars, thought they had been attacked from the rooftops above and began firing furiously at windows. All seventeen partisans managed to slip away. With more than half its men killed or wounded the SS company was effectively destroyed.

  Yet if the men and women of GAP Central and the Matteotti Brigade had got away scot-free, others would not be so fortunate. The city’s commander, General Mälzer, who was on the scene within moments, and had been enjoying a heavy drinking lunch, demanded that all the houses in the vicinity be blown up and that 200 bystanders who had been rounded up – none of whom had had anything to do with the attack – must be shot. The SS chief, Kappler, the acting German ambassador Möllhausen and also Eugene Dollmann – who we last saw by Alaric’s supposed tomb in Cosenza, and who was now an SS colonel and Himmler’s personal representative in Italy – all tried to calm him down, but before long an even angrier voice joined the fray. News of the incident reached Hitler in his East Prussia command centre, where, unluckily for the Romans, he was enjoying a quiet day and so could devote his full attention to what had happened. Breaking into one of his famous rages he demanded that a whole neighbourhood of the city must be razed to the ground and that for every German who had been killed, thirty or fifty Romans must die.