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By Root 1401 0

at Hitler’s behest, with Kesselring’s endorsement, under the direction of Rome’s Gestapo chief, Lt. Col. Herbert Kappler. On 23 March 1944, partisans attacked a marching column of the Bozen Police Regiment in the Via Rasella. Gunfire and explosives killed thirty-three Germans and wounded sixty-eight, while ten civilians were also killed. In reprisal, Hitler demanded the deaths of ten Italians for each German. Next afternoon, 335 prisoners were taken from the Regina Coeli prison to the Ardeatine Caves. They were a random miscellany of actors, lawyers, doctors, shopkeepers, cabinet-makers, an opera singer and a priest. Some were communists, and seventy-five were Jews. Two hundred of them had been seized in the streets near the Via Rasella following the partisan attack, though none was involved in it. In batches of five they were led into the caves and executed, the bodies left where they fell. Though the Germans used explosives to close the shaft in a half-hearted attempt to conceal the massacre, this was rendered ineffectual by the stench that soon seeped forth. The caves became a place of pilgrimage and tears.

Elide Ruggeri was one of a handful of survivors of another massacre, in the churchyard at Marzabotto, a picturesque little town at the foot of the Apennines, where in September 1944 Waffen SS troops exacted a terrible revenge on the civilian population for local partisan activities. ‘All the children were killed in their mothers’ arms,’ she later recounted. Though herself badly hit, she lay motionless under the dead. ‘Above and beside me were the bodies of my cousins and of my mother, whose stomach had been ripped open. I lay motionless all that night, through the next day and the night following, in rain and a sea of blood. I almost stopped breathing.’ At dawn on the second day, Ruggeri and four other wounded women crawled out from beneath the heaped corpses. Of her own family, five had been killed. In all, 147 people died at the church, including the priests who had been officiating when the SS arrived; twenty-eight families were wiped out. At nearby Casolari a further 282 victims perished, including thirty-eight children and two nuns. The final local civilian toll was 1,830, and moved Mussolini to make a vain protest to Hitler. It is bizarre that Kesselring, under whose orders the SS acted, was reprieved from execution at Nuremberg.

If the Allied invaders never matched such horrors, they were parties to lesser crimes against humanity: French colonial troops, especially, committed large-scale atrocities. ‘Whenever they take a town or a village, a wholesale rape of the population takes place,’ wrote a British NCO, Norman Lewis:

Recently all females in the villages of Patricia, Pofi, Supino and Morolo were violated. In Lenola … fifty women were raped, but – as these were not enough to go round – children and even old men were violated. It is reported to be normal for two Moroccans to assault a woman simultaneously, one having normal intercourse while the other commits sodomy. In many cases severe damage to the genitals, rectum and uterus has been caused. In Castro di Volsci a doctor treated 300 victims of rape … Many Moors have deserted, and are attacking villages far behind the lines. Today I went to Santa Maria a Vico to see a girl said to have been driven insane as the result of an attack by a large party of Moors … She was unable to walk … At last one had faced the flesh-and-blood reality of the kind of horror that drove the whole female population of Macedonian villages to throw themselves from the cliffs rather than fall into the hands of the advancing Turks.

Such Allied excesses, matched by the effects of air and artillery bombardment through the long struggle up the peninsula, ensured that few Italians gained much joy from their ‘deliverance’. Two soldiers of 4th Indian Division were chasing a chicken around a farmyard when a window of the adjoining house was thrown open: ‘A woman’s head appeared, and a totally unexpected English voice called out ‘— off, and leave my —ing ’ens alone. We don’t need no