The Raid of the Ghetto of Rome took place on 16 October 1943. A total of 1,259 people, mainly members of the Jewish community—numbering 363 men, 689 women, and 207 children—were detained by the
Gestapo
The (), abbreviated Gestapo (; ), was the official secret police of Nazi Germany and in German-occupied Europe.
The force was created by Hermann Göring in 1933 by combining the various political police agencies of Prussia into one organi ...
. Of these detainees, 1,023 were identified as Jews and deported to the
Auschwitz concentration camp
Auschwitz concentration camp ( (); also or ) was a complex of over 40 concentration and extermination camps operated by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland (in a portion annexed into Germany in 1939) during World War II and the Holocaust. It con ...
. Of these deportees, only fifteen men and one woman survived.
Ghetto
The
Ghetto of Rome had been established in 1555. By the time of the raid, it was almost 400 years old and consisted of four cramped blocks around the
Portico d’Ottavia, wedged between the
Theatre of Marcellus
The Theatre of Marcellus ( la, Theatrum Marcelli, it, Teatro di Marcello) is an ancient open-air theatre in Rome, Italy, built in the closing years of the Roman Republic. At the theatre, locals and visitors alike were able to watch performances o ...
, the
Fontana delle Tartarughe
Fontana may refer to:
Places
Italy
*Fontana Liri, comune in the Province of Frosinone
*Fontanafredda, comune in the Province of Pordenone
* Fontanarosa, comune in the Province of Avellino
*Francavilla Fontana, comune in the Province of Brindisi
...
, Palazzo Cenci, and the river
Tiber
The Tiber ( ; it, Tevere ; la, Tiberis) is the third-longest river in Italy and the longest in Central Italy, rising in the Apennine Mountains in Emilia-Romagna and flowing through Tuscany, Umbria, and Lazio, where it is joined by the Riv ...
.
Prelude
When
Nazi Germany
Nazi Germany (lit. "National Socialist State"), ' (lit. "Nazi State") for short; also ' (lit. "National Socialist Germany") (officially known as the German Reich from 1933 until 1943, and the Greater German Reich from 1943 to 1945) was ...
occupied Rome two days after the
Italian surrender on 8 September 1943, 8,000
Italian Jews
Italian Jews ( it, Ebrei Italiani, he, יהודים איטלקים ''Yehudim Italkim'') or Roman Jews ( it, Ebrei Romani, he, יהודים רומים ''Yehudim Romim'') can be used in a broad sense to mean all Jews living in or with roots in I ...
were in Rome, one-fifth of all Jews in Italy. Many of those had moved south after the Allied landing, hoping to find safety from Nazi persecution.
The German military commander of Rome, General
Reiner Stahel, was initially wary that any action against the Jews of Rome would draw condemnation from
Pope Pius XII
Pope Pius XII ( it, Pio XII), born Eugenio Maria Giuseppe Giovanni Pacelli (; 2 March 18769 October 1958), was head of the Catholic Church and sovereign of the Vatican City State from 2 March 1939 until his death in October 1958. Before his e ...
, of which he had been warned by Bishop
Alois Hudal
Alois Karl Hudal (also known as Luigi Hudal; 31 May 188513 May 1963) was an Austrian bishop of the Catholic Church, based in Rome. For thirty years, he was the head of the Austrian-German congregation of Santa Maria dell'Anima in Rome and, until ...
, rector of the German church in Rome. This condemnation, however, never materialised, which has led to considerable
controversy
Controversy is a state of prolonged public dispute or debate, usually concerning a matter of conflicting opinion or point of view. The word was coined from the Latin ''controversia'', as a composite of ''controversus'' – "turned in an opposite d ...
. Stahel decided against ordering deportation without official authority from the German foreign ministry. Germany's Consul-General
Eitel Friedrich Möllhausen Eitel may refer to
* Eitel Friedrich II, Count of Hohenzollern (c. 1452–1512)
* Eitel Friedrich of Zollern (1454–1490), German nobleman and Admiral of the Netherlands
* Eitel Friedrich III, Count of Hohenzollern (1494–1525)
* Eitel Fried ...
went so far as to write to Foreign Minister
Joachim von Ribbentrop
Ulrich Friedrich Wilhelm Joachim von Ribbentrop (; 30 April 1893 – 16 October 1946) was a German politician and diplomat who served as Minister of Foreign Affairs of Nazi Germany from 1938 to 1945.
Ribbentrop first came to Adolf Hitler's not ...
in order to suggest that the Roman Jews be interned in Italian camps rather than deported, but Ribbentrop never dared to act against the ''
Sicherheitsdienst
' (, ''Security Service''), full title ' (Security Service of the ''Reichsführer-SS''), or SD, was the intelligence agency of the SS and the Nazi Party in Nazi Germany. Established in 1931, the SD was the first Nazi intelligence organization ...
'' (SD), from which Stahel received his orders. The role of the German ambassador to the Vatican,
Ernst von Weizsäcker
Ernst Heinrich Freiherr von Weizsäcker (25 May 1882 – 4 August 1951) was a German naval officer, diplomat and politician. He served as State Secretary at the Foreign Office of Nazi Germany from 1938 to 1943, and as its Ambassador t ...
, in these events remains a matter of controversy.
On 26 September,
Herbert Kappler
Herbert Kappler (23 September 1907 – 9 February 1978) was a key German SS functionary and war criminal during the Nazi era. He served as head of German police and security services (''Sicherheitspolizei'' and SD) in Rome during the Second W ...
, commander of the SS and the Gestapo in Rome, announced to the Jewish community in the city that unless they handed over of gold, 200 Jewish family heads would be deported. The community delivered this sum on the deadline of midday, 28 September, with the assistance of the non-Jewish citizens of Rome. This left the Jewish community with the impression that the Germans were only after loot, especially the priceless treasures of the ''
Biblioteca della Comunità Israelitica
The Biblioteca della Comunità Israelitica was the library of the Jewish community of Rome, Italy. Established in the early 20th century, it housed approximately 7,000 rare or unique books and manuscripts dating back to at least the 16th century. A ...
'' community library.
Raid
On the morning of 16 October 1943, 365 German security and police forces (the Italian police were considered too unreliable
) sealed off the Ghetto, which held a large part of the Jewish community at the time, turning it into a virtual prison.
Theodor Dannecker
Theodor Denecke (also spelled Dannecker) (27 March 1913 – 10 December 1945) was a German SS-captain (), a key aide to Adolf Eichmann in the deportation of Jews during World War II.
A trained lawyer Denecke first served at the Reich Security M ...
, recently appointed chief of the ''
Judenreferat
The or (German plural: ; ), variously translated as Jewish advisers or Jewish experts, were Nazi SS officials who supervised anti-Jewish legislation and the deportations of Jews in the countries under their responsibility. Key architects of the ...
'' in Italy and tasked with implementing the
Final Solution
The Final Solution (german: die Endlösung, ) or the Final Solution to the Jewish Question (german: Endlösung der Judenfrage, ) was a Nazi plan for the genocide of individuals they defined as Jews during World War II. The "Final Solution to th ...
, the genocide of the Jews, in Italy, had ordered the Ghetto to be cleared. Some Jews in the Ghetto managed to escape over rooftops.
In the raid, 1,259 people were detained, comprising 363 men, 689 women, and 207 children.
Afterwards, non-Jewish prisoners were released while 1,023 Jews were taken to the ''Collegio militare'' in the
Palazzo Salviati in
Trastevere
Trastevere () is the 13th ''rione'' of Rome: it is identified by the initials R. XIII and it is located within Municipio I. Its name comes from Latin ''trans Tiberim'', literally 'beyond the Tiber'.
Its coat of arms depicts a golden head of a lio ...
. Two days later, at least 1,035
prisoners were loaded onto
Holocaust trains
Holocaust trains were railway transports run by the ''Deutsche Reichsbahn'' national railway system under the control of Nazi Germany and its allies, for the purpose of forcible deportation of the Jews, as well as other victims of the Holocaus ...
at
Tiburtina station and deported to
Auschwitz
Auschwitz concentration camp ( (); also or ) was a complex of over 40 concentration and extermination camps operated by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland (in a portion annexed into Germany in 1939) during World War II and the Holocaust. It con ...
.
Only 16 survived.
Aftermath
At the time of the raid, The Italian racial laws (Italian: Leggi Razziali), were already promulgated by the Council of Ministers in Fascist Italy as from 1938 in order to enforce racial discrimination and segregation in the Kingdom of Italy. It restricted the civil rights of Italian Jews, banned books written by Jewish authors, and excluded Jews from public offices, education, most professions and marriage with Italians. Additional laws stripped Jews of their assets, restricted travel, and finally, provided for their confinement in internal exile. The deportation of Jews in Italy began on September 8, 1943, after German troops seized control of Northern and Central Italy freed Benito Mussolini from prison and installed him as the head of the puppet state of the Italian Social Republic.
During the of the German occupation, the Jews of Rome continued to live in hiding, under constant threat of arrest and deportation, until the liberation of the city by the Allies on 4 June 1944. In total, a quarter of the Jewish population of Rome—over 2,000 people—was deported, of which only 102 survived the Holocaust. Additionally, another 75 Roman Jews were murdered in the
Ardeatine massacre
The Ardeatine massacre, or Fosse Ardeatine massacre ( it, Eccidio delle Fosse Ardeatine), was a mass killing of 335 civilians and political prisoners carried out in Rome on 24 March 1944 by German occupation troops during the Second World War ...
, when 335 civilians were executed as a reprisal for a
bombing attack on SS soldiers.
The Italian police in Rome, unlike in many other parts of German-occupied Italy,
did not participate in the arrests of Jews, and the general public objected and resisted such arrests.
For these reasons, a sizeable proportion of the Jews in Rome avoided arrest and survived the Holocaust, often hiding in the Vatican or other Catholic institutions.
Of the main perpetrators, Theodor Dannecker committed suicide following his capture in December 1945.
Herbert Kappler was sentenced by a military court in 1948 to life imprisonment for his role in the Ardeatine massacre, escaped prison in 1977, and died less than a year later.
Pope Pius XII's role in the events has been the subject of considerable controversy, due to the proximity of the Vatican and the Roman Ghetto. According to
Michael Phayer
Michael Phayer (born 1935) is an American historian and professor emeritus at Marquette University in Milwaukee and has written on 19th- and 20th-century European history and the Holocaust.
Phayer received his PhD from the University of Munich i ...
, "the question of the pope's silence has become the focus of intense historical debate and analysis" because the deportations occurred "under his very windows". The term "under his very windows" was used as the title of a
book on the subject by American historian
Susan Zuccotti.
[Phayer, 2008, p. 70.] The phrase is based on an actual quotation from the report of
Ernst von Weizsäcker
Ernst Heinrich Freiherr von Weizsäcker (25 May 1882 – 4 August 1951) was a German naval officer, diplomat and politician. He served as State Secretary at the Foreign Office of Nazi Germany from 1938 to 1943, and as its Ambassador t ...
, the German ambassador to the Vatican, who reported to Berlin that the ''
razzia'' had taken place "under the Pope's windows". British historian
Ian Kershaw
Sir Ian Kershaw (born 29 April 1943) is an English historian whose work has chiefly focused on the social history of 20th-century Germany. He is regarded by many as one of the world's leading experts on Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany, and is pa ...
wrote that "A strong and unequivocal protest from the Pontiff might well have deterred the German occupiers, unsure of the reactions, and prevented the deportations of the Jews they could lay their hands upon. The Germans were expecting such a protest. It never came."
Commemoration
A number of stone plaques have been unveiled in the Roman Ghetto and at Tiburtina railway station to commemorate the arrest and deportation of the Jews of Rome in October 1943.
See also
* ''
Gold of Rome
''L'oro di Roma'' (internationally released as ''Gold of Rome'') is a 1961 Italian war - drama film directed by Carlo Lizzani. The film is based on actual events surrounding the Nazi's raid of Rome's Jewish ghetto in October 1943.
Cast
*Gérar ...
'', a 1961 Italian film based on related events
*
History of the Jews in Italy
The history of the Jews in Italy spans more than two thousand years to the present. The Jewish presence in Italy dates to the pre-Christian Roman period and has continued, despite periods of extreme persecution and expulsions, until the presen ...
References
Bibliography
*
* Phayer, Michael (2008). ''Pius XII, The Holocaust, and the Cold War''. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. .
* Sánchez, José M. (2002). ''Pius XII and the Holocaust: Understanding the Controversy''. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press. .
{{Authority control
1940s in Rome
1943 crimes in Italy
Ghettos in Nazi-occupied Europe
History of Rome
The Holocaust in Italy
Holocaust massacres and pogroms in Italy
Jewish Roman (city) history
Nazi-Jewish negotiations
October 1943 events