dpa
Rome
Italy commemorated a massacre by German occupying troops on the outskirts of Rome during World War II with a memorial service on Sunday, exactly 80 years since the atrocity.
Soldiers from Nazi Germany shot a total of 335 men in the Ardeatine Caves in the south of the capital on March 24, 1944, in retaliation for an attack by Italian partisans in Rome the day before that killed 33 members of an Nazi’s SS police regiment.
German Culture Minister Claudia Roth attended the memorial service on behalf of the German government and spoke of a “monstrous crime” in her remarks.
At the beginning of the war in 1939, Italy’s fascist dictator Benito Mussolini allied his country with Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime in Germany.
After Mussolini was overthrown in a revolt in July 1943, Italy was partially occupied by German troops, who battled against Italian anti-fascist partisans. The capital Rome was liberated by the Allies in June 1944.
After the liberation, the bodies of the victims of the massacre were exhumed. Today there are 335 sarcophagi in a mausoleum.
The leader of the massacre, SS-Obersturmbannführer Herbert Kappler, was sentenced to life imprisonment in Italy after the end of the war. In 1977, he managed to escape from a military hospital in Rome. He died in 1978 in West Germany.
Kappler had ordered that 10 Italians were to be shot for every SS soldier killed in the ambush. The victims of the Nazi reprisals included 75 Jews who were already scheduled for transportation to Nazi extermination camps. The massacre, in which the men aged between 15 and 74 were shot in the back of the neck, lasted several hours. The caves were then blown up.
Italian President Sergio Matterella commemorated the victims at an event on Friday, and many Italian newspapers commemorated the crime with special sections in the weekend editions.
