Fosse Ardeatine Memorial in Rome

Mausoleo delle Fosse Ardeatine

On March 24, 1944, a mass execution of 335 people was carried out in the Ardeatine Cave as part of »retaliation measures« of German occupation forces. The cave was subsequently blown up and sealed. The victims are buried there until this day - a memorial and a museum recall their fate.

History

Since September 1943, when Italy had surrendered to the Allies and the king had fled, the country had been occupied by the German Wehrmacht. In the spring of 1944, the Allies were advancing towards the capital. At the same time, Italian resistance against the German occupation and Fascism was growing in strength, though many of the resistance movements were in conflict with one another.
On March 23, 1944, a communist partisan group carried out a bomb attack in Via Rasella during which 33 German policemen were killed and 67 more injured. Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Himmler immediately demanded carrying out brutal reprisal measures. As a result, Herbert Kappler, commander of the security police and security service (SD) in Rome, ordered the shooting of 10 Italians for every killed German. Kappler initially wanted to execute prisoners of the SD who had been sentenced to death for supporting resistance groups or were still awaiting their sentences, yet there weren't enough to fulfil the ratio, so Kappler additionally gathered political prisoners from Italian prisons as well as Jews who had until then been exempt from deportation. An Italian prison accidentally brought five prisoners too many, so the final number of victims reached 335. They were tied up, loaded onto trucks and transported to the Ardeatine Cave, a disused quarry in the south of Rome. There, they were shot in the back of the neck by a firing squad led by Carl Schütz, which consisted of 80 to 90 members of security service. Herbert Kappler too participated in the killings, which took several hours. The cave tunnels were subsequently blown up. Some of the victims were most probably only injured and only died after the explosion by bleeding out or suffocating.
In June 1944, Rome was liberated by the Allies.

Rome, 1944, Arrest of passers-by after the bomb attack, ANFIM

Rome, 2000, Entrance to the mausoleum, Mario Setter

Victims

195 of the 335 victims were prisoners of the security service, 55 were political prisoners from Italian prisons, 75 were selected for execution due to their Jewish background. 10 men had been randomly arrested on the street.
322 of those shot could later be identified. The oldest victim was 74, the youngest was 15 years old. They were of all social classes and pursued various professions. None of them had participated in preparing the Via Rasella bomb attack; only few of them were communists.

In 1922 the Kingdom of Italy became a dictatorship under the »Duce« (leader) Benito Mussolini (1883–1945) and his fascist party. Until the mid-1930s there was barely any evidence of public anti-semitism in Italy; discriminatory measures were not introduced until 1938. At the time, around 46,000 Jews were living in Italy. During this period, the Italian state also included the Istrian peninsula and a number of islands that are now part of Greece, such as Rhodes, which had a Jewish community rich in tradition. The Italian government was a close ally of the German Reich but was not involved in the mass deportations of Jews to German extermination camps until autumn 1943. It was only following the occupation of the north of the country by the German Wehrmacht (the south had already been liberated by American and British troops) that the German SS and police began to implement plans to systematically deport the Italian Jews. The Jews were initially held in detention camps and then transported halfway across Europe to Auschwitz, where many were killed in the gas chambers on arrival. Between 7,000 and 8,500 Jews from Italy (excluding Italian-occupied territory) were murdered or died as a result of brutality. Tens of thousands of Italian Jews and Jewish refugees were able to survive by emigrating or going into hiding with the help of non-Jews. The Allied liberation of southern Italy spared over 2,000 Jews from deportation by the German regime. The period 1943 to 1945 saw violent conflicts between the German occupation forces and Italian partisans from the communist-dominated resistance movement »Resistenza«. German troops responded with horrific reprisal measures and massacres, for example in Marzabotto and in the Ardeatine Caves near Rome. More than 400,000 Italians – soldiers, civilians and partisans – died during the Second World War. Once the war was over, the partisan campaign became a key feature of Italian national identity and the Italian culture of memory cultivated the myth that the country had liberated itself from fascism. There was barely any confrontation with the widespread Italian support for Mussolini. The best-known sites of memory such as the former concentration camp at Risiera di San Sabba near Trieste or the memorials at Marzabotto and the Ardeatine Caves are dedicated to the resistance, as are many museums. However, there are few memorial sites at former detention camps for Jews and where these do exist they tend to commemorate the liberators rather than the victims. One example is Villa Emma in Nonatola, where Jewish children were able to survive in hiding. One feature linking many of these sites is their focus on human rights education for the present and future. In recent years, the memory of the deported and murdered Jews has become more prominent. In 2013, the Memoriale de la Shoah di Milano opened in Milan’s central railway station, and in 2023, the decision has been made to create a central holocaust memorial in Rome.

Remembrance

On March 24, 1949, on the fifth anniversary of the massacre, a memorial was dedicated at the historic site. It was designed by architects Giuseppe Perugini, Nello Aprile and Mario Fiorentini as well as sculptors Mirko Basaldella and Francesco Coccia. At the heart of the memorial is a mausoleum which contains the sarcophagi of the victims, all covered with identical granite slabs. There is a total of 336 sarcophagi: one of them represents all those who died fighting against the occupation regime and against Fascism. The cave tunnels have for the most part, aside from the necessary security measures, been kept in the state in which the Germans left them after the blasting operation. A small museum, which deals with the history of resistance from the end of Fascism until Rome's liberation by Allied troops on June 4, 1944, completes the memorial. The ANFIM association (Associazione Nazionale Famiglie Italiane Martiri – National Association of Italian Families of the Martyrs) has for decades been organising guided tours through the memorial complex.
The Ardeatine massacre was the subject of several criminal trials after the war. In 1948, Herbert Kappler was sentenced to life-long imprisonment before an Italian military tribunal. The case of SS-Hauptsturmführers Erich Priebke, who probably checked the death list during the shootings, drew international attention in the 1990s. In 1998, he too was sentenced to life imprisonment.

Rome, 2000, Memorial with victims' graves, Mario Setter

Rome, 2007, Monument in front of the entrance to the mausoleum, Frattaglia

Possibilities

Museum, brochures in several languages, guided tours conducted by victims' relatives

Open

Monday to Friday 8:15 a.m. to 3:15 p.m.
Saturday and Sunday 8.15 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Closed on January 1, Easter Sunday, Easter Monday, May 1, August 15, December 25.

Contact

http://www.mausoleofosseardeatine.it/

info@mausoleofosseardeatine.it

+39 06 6795629

Via Ardeatina 174
00186 Roma

Rome, 2009, Sarcophagi in the mausoleum, Xavier der Jauréguiberry

Rome, 2000, Entrance to the Ardeatine Cave, Mario Setter

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