The Battle for Rome by Robert Katz
Cohen, Richard
BOOKS A pope of many silences The Battle for Rome The Germans, the Allies, the Partisans, and the Pope, September 1943-June 1944 Robert Katz Richard Cohen The nine months in which German...
...Thirty-three Germans died and many more were wounded...
...Rome fever, indeed...
...Pius XII was not evil...
...It is a breathtaking piece of realpolitik...
...Thus we learn that Pius was one of the first to learn of the massacre at the Ardeatine Caves...
...and he did hate Hitlerism...
...Eventually a total of 335 men were taken secretly to the Ardeatine Caves on the city's outskirts and massacred...
...Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, Hitler's supreme commander, gains important victories at Salerno, later at Anzio and Cassino...
...BOOKS A pope of many silences The Battle for Rome The Germans, the Allies, the Partisans, and the Pope, September 1943-June 1944 Robert Katz Richard Cohen The nine months in which German troops occupied Italy is a terrible if highly readable story, but also a complicated one...
...But neither man is the main target...
...The Allies are riven by competing agendas-the American Fifth Army keen to enter the capital first but having to fight off British, French, and New Zealand rivals...
...Outside Rome are the Axis leaders-a ranting, vengeful Hitler, a rescued but diminished Mussolini-while many of the Germans within are infected with what Katz calls "Rome fever," an enthusiasm for the city and its people that makes them reinterpret their instructions, or subvert them altogether...
...Katz is determined to show that time and again Pius abandoned his people, yet the extent and occasions of his silence have never been fully realized...
...His silence in the autumn extended beyond Rome's Jews to his silence in the winter of Rome's Nazi repression...
...Katz is a gifted reporter and something of a brilliant sleuth himself...
...he did not hate Jews or love fascism...
...Robert Katz, who for many years has lived in Italy, has to describe the military struggle for control of the country, with Rome the jewel...
...The trouble lies in the central conundrum," Katz contends, "attempting to understand the silence in terms of the Holocaust...
...In the last three years various Vatican and CIA files have become available, while Katz has landed extraordinary interviews with Peter Tompkins, the head of OSS operations in Rome, and two members of the Resistance, Rosario Bentivegna (codenamed "Paolo") and Carla Capponi ("Elena"), who not only fall in love during the occupation but are the cause of its major outrage...
...After that, matters improve quickly...
...Move about this eternal city, as they call it, and like it or not you roil the dust of time...
...This is familiar territory, already well covered by, among others, Susan Zuccotti in her Under His Very Windows (2000...
...the Germans had miscounted, and five prisoners, though surplus to the requirements, were killed simply because they were awkward witnesses...
...This final section is unsatisfactory, yet it asks the right questions...
...In the subsequent war crimes tribunal, it was the manner of the execution as much as any other detail that made the guilty verdicts inevitable...
...An incensed Hitler called for a reprisal that would "make the world tremble": for every SS man killed, fifty Italians would be shot...
...Rome today is centuries of history piled atop one another," Robert Katz begins his book...
...Soon Katz's purpose becomes clear...
...From Hochhuth on, virtually every researcher, sooner or later, feels obliged to set sight on German-occupied Rome and examine the pope's reaction to the round-up and deportation of his Jews, under his own windows....But the history of the full nine months of the German occupation of Rome, as this book attempts to show, reveals a pope of many silences with multiple variations...
...This unpromising start follows a six-page supplement listing twelve separate groups that populate the story that follows...
...Even here, the tone is not promising: one German officer is "a bungler and a lout who rightly feared retribution," another a "gourmand, alcoholic, self-styled 'King of Rome,'" a third a "brilliant sleuth turned chief of the Gestapo...
...He was affectless, but not, arguably, a coward...
...Finally, there is Eugenio Pacelli, Pius XII, frantic to preserve Rome from destruction, preoccupied with the threat of communism and determined to act as a broker between the various parties, yet a prisoner in his own palace...
...Some victims, not killed instantly, died from the weight of the dead above them...
...The Battle for Rome charts such a passage...
...Although there have been many books on the period, he has unearthed important new material...
...Until then there had not been any reprisals in Italy, and the German authorities in Rome reduced their leader's command to ten Italians for each German death...
...Katz concludes: "The papal obsession with protecting the physical integrity of the Vatican City-State by any means, against enemies less real than imagined, was fulfilled in exchange for papal silence, not one silence, but one following another, a whole range of silences for the whole range of Nazi and Fascist brutality in Rome...
...Fifth Army, Lieutenant General Mark Clark, is shown as vain and overreaching...
...On March 23,1944, a "sacred" day commemorating the twenty-fifth anniversary of fascism in Italy, Paolo and Elena were the principals in the most conspicuous Resistance attack to date, disrupting a column of SS police as they marched along the Via Rasella in the center of Rome...
...While he keeps his various themes and characters in balance (although there are annoying loose ends: Mussolini fades away from the story too quickly...
...One ends this book angry and shocked...
...At another level, Field Marshal Kesselring is presented as a war criminal (to my mind, on insufficient evidence) for having declared after the killings in the Via Rasella that he would "protect any commander who exceeds our usual restraint in the choice of severity of the methods he adopts against Partisans...
...The caves became a human abattoir, with victims made to stand on those already dead, their murderers having to crawl over the carnal heap to be in position to fire their pistols...
...Paulo, covered by Elena, ignited a homemade bomb hidden inside a refuse bin before disappearing into the crowd...
...The next day the Os-servatore Romano published an editorial overseen by the pope in which it is not the Germans who are blamed but the Partisans, "irresponsible elements," "the guilty parties who escaped arrest...
...Katz has others on his list of villains, to be sure...
...and we never learn what happens to the most treacherous of double agents, an unprepossessing burglar turned Partisan named Guglielmo Blasi), it is Pius XII who is really his protagonist...
...and the local Resistance forces, covering nearly every political hue, yet harnessed together by their hatred of the occupying power...
...In a sixteen-page epilogue, Katz reviews the changing fortunes of Pius XII, from the years of postwar acclaim through Hochhuth's 1963 play, The Deputy, to more recent writings by the egregious John Cornwell, Susan Zuccotti, and Daniel Goldhagen, and the continuing battle over canonization...
...Yet there comes a time when great insensitivity passes into wickedness...
...Richard Cohen is the author of By the Sword: A History of Gladiators, Musketeers, Samurai, Swashbucklers, and Olympic Champions (Vintage...
...The affair was supposed to have been meticulously planned by the Gestapo, but ended in tragic fiasco...
...Katz has earlier described how, in October 1943, the first train of Holocaust victims left Rome on its way to Auschwitz, the 1,007 men and women who were parked in trucks just 250 yards away from the pope's study...
...He was silent in the spring of the Ardeatine Caves massacre of his children, his fellow Catholics, and in the summer of liberation, the season when his silence had been emptied of any meaning...
...There is a small, harassed group of OSS spies, forever guarding against infiltration...
...The commander of the U.S...
Vol. 130 • November 2003 • No. 20
