The Germans occupy Rome

At 4 p.m. on 10 September 1943 the capitulation of the Italian capital was signed in the War Ministry building in Rome. On the German side the signatory was General Siegfried Westphal, chief of staff to Field Marshal Albert Kesselring; on the Italian side Lieutenant Colonel Leandro Giaccone signed on behalf of General Giorgio Calvi di Bergolo, the king’s son-in-law. The agreement ended two days of chaotic fighting in the suburbs and at the gates of the city, in which Italian soldiers and civilian volunteers resisted German paratroopers without orders and without leadership. The king, the prime minister and the chiefs of staff had already left Rome in the early hours of 9 September. The German occupation of the Eternal City was to last until 4 June 1944.

A capital without defence

On paper Rome had enough troops to defend itself. Around the city stood General Giacomo Carboni’s Motorised-Armoured Corps, with the Piave, Granatieri di Sardegna, Ariete and Centauro divisions, as well as the Sassari and Piacenza divisions and battalions from several others – some 55,000 men and about 200 armoured vehicles in all. On the German side was General Kurt Student’s XI Air Corps, which had near Rome the 2nd Parachute Division around Pratica di Mare to the south and the 3rd Panzergrenadier Division near Lake Bolsena to the north, some 26,000 men in all. The Germans, however, were veterans, had clear orders and had been preparing for this moment for several weeks under the plans for Operation Achse.

Italian preparations assumed that the armistice would be announced later, most likely around 12 September, and that the American 82nd Airborne Division would land near Rome at the same time. When General Maxwell Taylor, who arrived secretly in the capital on 7 September, saw the state of the Italian preparations, he advised calling off the airborne operation. Eisenhower refused to delay and on the evening of 8 September announced Italy’s surrender. A few hours later, at about 8.30 p.m., German paratroopers attacked the fuel depot at Mezzocammino and moved towards the city, and the first clashes with the grenadiers at the Tiber bridge at Magliana began at about 10 p.m.

The king’s flight

During the night ever more alarming reports came in. At 2 a.m. the Germans took Ciampino airfield, and an hour later German patrols were reported on the Via Prenestina, a few kilometres from the centre. The army chief of staff, General Mario Roatta, persuaded King Victor Emmanuel III and Marshal Pietro Badoglio to leave by the Via Tiburtina, the only road that seemed clear. At 5.10 a.m. on 9 September a column of cars carrying the king, the queen, the heir to the throne Umberto, Badoglio, the Chief of the Supreme Command General Vittorio Ambrosio and a group of senior officers left the city. Travelling via Tivoli and Avezzano, it reached Pescara without hindrance, and from there the corvette Baionetta took the fugitives from Ortona to Brindisi, where they arrived on the afternoon of 10 September.

Before leaving, Roatta ordered the divisions around Rome to withdraw towards Tivoli, and then he too departed, leaving Carboni no instructions. Carboni himself left the city in civilian clothes and returned only on the morning of 10 September. On the morning of 9 September the head of the staff’s operations department, General Umberto Utili, announced that the General Staff had ceased to function. An attempt to direct the capital was made by the aged Marshal Enrico Caviglia, who happened to be in Rome and who, together with the War Minister, General Antonio Sorice, opened talks with the Germans.

The fighting for the city

Despite the flight of the high command, some units fought. In the north General Raffaele Cadorna’s Ariete Armoured Division halted the 3rd Panzergrenadier Division at Monterosi and by Lake Bracciano. On the morning of 9 September some 800 German paratroopers under Major Walter Gericke jumped over Monterotondo to capture the Italian General Staff in the Orsini palace there. The headquarters was already empty, and the paratroopers fought heavy battles all day against soldiers of the Piave and Re divisions, Carabinieri and armed townspeople. They took the palace, but according to Italian accounts they themselves remained besieged in it until Rome capitulated. According to Italian figures, the fighting at Monterotondo cost the Germans 33 dead and the Italians 125.

In the south, where the 2nd Parachute Division was attacking, grenadiers of the Granatieri di Sardegna Division, supported by Ariete tanks, defended the Magliana bridge and the Cecchignola area. On the afternoon of 9 September, after the first talks with the Germans, the grenadiers were ordered to pull back from the bridge to let through German columns that were supposedly marching north. In the evening, however, the paratroopers attacked their new positions. The grenadiers were joined by hundreds of civilians, to whom General Carboni had ordered weapons to be distributed the night before: workers, students and anti-Fascist activists, among them future leaders of the Resistance. On the morning of 10 September fighting raged at the Forte Ostiense, at Montagnola and finally at the Porta San Paolo beside the Pyramid of Cestius, barely two kilometres from Piazza Venezia. Among the civilians killed there was the teacher Raffaele Persichetti, a retired lieutenant of grenadiers, who joined the defenders in civilian clothes. The shooting spread to the streets of the Testaccio district, to the Porta San Giovanni, where the grenadiers barricaded the gate with trams, and to the square in front of Termini station. It went on even after the capitulation had been signed.

Kesselring did not want to draw his forces into street fighting. He needed them at Salerno, where the Allies had been landing since 9 September. As early as the afternoon of 9 September Caviglia’s envoys, Calvi di Bergolo and Colonel Giuseppe Cordero Lanza di Montezemolo, were talking to him at Frascati, while Westphal was simultaneously negotiating with the command of the Centauro Division, made up of former Blackshirts. The Germans threatened to bomb the city and destroy the aqueducts. On the afternoon of 10 September, with German artillery already shelling districts inside the walls, the Italians accepted the terms. Under the agreement Rome was to remain an open city under Calvi di Bergolo’s Italian “Open City Command”, with a single division, the Piave, to keep order. The Germans were to stay out of the centre, except for the embassy, the radio station and the telephone exchange. The remaining Italian units were to lay down their arms and the soldiers return home.

The casualties

The number of casualties in the fighting for Rome is given variously. According to figures cited in Italian historiography, 984 Italians were killed, including 659 soldiers, 121 civilians and 204 unidentified persons. Other calculations give 414 soldiers and 183 civilians, and still others 1,167 military dead and around 120 civilians. Among the dead were women and a nun working as a nurse. The Germans lost about a hundred killed and some 500 wounded. More than a dozen Gold Medals of Military Valour were later awarded for taking part in the defence of the city.

Occupation

The Germans soon broke the agreement of 10 September. As early as 11 September Kesselring declared Rome part of the war zone, subject to German martial law, and announced that organisers of strikes, saboteurs and civilians who fired on soldiers would be shot. By 15 September all the Italian units remaining in the city had been disarmed, and on 23 September Calvi di Bergolo was arrested and the last division, the Piave, disarmed. Power over the city passed to the German commandant, General Rainer Stahel, and formally also to officials of Mussolini’s nascent republic. The Germans went on calling Rome an “open city”, but the Allies never recognised this status, since supplies and transports for the front passed through the city.

Rome also became a field of operations for the German Security Police. Its chief in the city, SS Lieutenant Colonel Herbert Kappler, extorted a ransom of 50 kilograms of gold from Rome’s Jewish community at the end of September, and on 16 October the SS carried out a round-up in the Roman Ghetto and throughout the city, after which more than a thousand people were deported to Auschwitz. Those who had fought at Magliana and the Porta San Paolo often went on to swell the underground units of the Resistance. Colonel Montezemolo built up a clandestine military network in the city; arrested in the winter of 1944, he was killed in March in the Ardeatine Caves massacre, organised by Kappler in reprisal for a partisan attack.

Significance

The fall of Rome was the most visible symbol of the collapse of the Italian state in September 1943. An army that could have defended the capital for at least a few days disintegrated not for want of strength but for want of orders and of will on the part of its leaders. The flight of the king and Badoglio preserved the continuity of the state and its recognition by the Allies, but in the eyes of many Italians it discredited the monarchy, which weighed on the outcome of the 1946 referendum, won by the republic. The dispute over responsibility for the “failed defence of Rome”, as Italian historiography calls these events, went on long after the war. A commission of inquiry set up in October 1944 by Ivanoe Bonomi’s government heard around a hundred witnesses, and its files remained secret until 1965. Generals Roatta and Carboni were charged with failing to defend the capital, but in February 1949 a court acquitted them on all counts. Historians point out that the decisive factor was a political decision: the highest leaders put the safety of the king and the continuity of the government ahead of the defence of the city, and left the army no order to fight.

For the Germans, control of the capital and its communication hubs made it possible to hold the front in the south of the peninsula; for the Allies, Rome became an objective they reached only nine months later, on 4 June 1944.