Herbert Kappler

Herbert Kappler was a German political policeman and SS officer who for most of the war represented the security apparatus of the Third Reich in Rome. After the Germans occupied Rome in September 1943, he commanded the Security Police and SD in the city. His men extorted a ransom in gold from the Jews of Rome, and a few weeks later supported the round-up after which more than a thousand of them were deported to Auschwitz. He also ran the prison on the Via Tasso, where members of the Resistance were tortured. On 24 March 1944 he organised, and personally supervised, the shooting of 335 people in the Ardeatine Caves. Sentenced to life imprisonment in 1948, he became in Italy a symbol of German crimes under the occupation. His escape from a military hospital in 1977 provoked a crisis in relations between Italy and West Germany.

Youth and the road to the political police

Gustav Adolf Herbert Kappler was born on 23 September 1907 in Stuttgart into a middle-class family. He studied in Stuttgart and worked as an electrical technician for several firms in Württemberg. On 1 August 1931 he joined the NSDAP, before the Nazis came to power, and shortly afterwards the SA and the SS.

After a brief period of unemployment, in June 1933 he found work with the Württemberg political police as an auxiliary policeman. From 1934 he headed its outpost in Tübingen, and in 1937 he passed the examination for criminal commissioner in Berlin. He belonged to the generation of young officials who built their careers in the political police of the Third Reich unified by Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich – in the Gestapo and the SS Security Service.

The Rome posting

In the spring of 1939 Kappler was sent to Rome as liaison officer of the German Security Police to the Italian police. His task was to cooperate with Benito Mussolini’s Fascist police and to keep watch on émigré, anti-Fascist and church circles. In November 1939 he was briefly summoned to Berlin, where he took part in the interrogation of Georg Elser, who had carried out the bomb attack on Adolf Hitler in the Munich beer hall. In 1942 his office at the German embassy was converted into the bureau of a police attaché. Kappler, promoted to major and in 1943 to SS lieutenant colonel (Obersturmbannführer), had some forty subordinates in Rome from the Gestapo, the Criminal Police and the Order Police, as well as an extensive network of informers.

Thanks to these contacts he was well informed in the summer of 1943 about the mood around Mussolini. After the dictator’s fall on 25 July, his office gathered information on where Badoglio’s government was holding the Duce. From wiretaps, bribed informers and the correspondence of the Mussolini family it was established that the dictator had been taken to the island of La Maddalena. These findings were later used by Otto Skorzeny, who on 12 September 1943 took part in freeing Mussolini from the Gran Sasso.

Police chief in occupied Rome

After the announcement of the Italian armistice with the Allies, the Germans occupied Rome. On 10 September 1943 Kappler became commander of the Security Police and SD (Kommandeur der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD) in the city. He was subordinate to the city commandant of Rome, General Kurt Mälzer, and in the SS hierarchy to the commander of the Security Police in Italy, General Wilhelm Harster, and the Supreme SS and Police Leader in Italy, General Karl Wolff. In practice he also controlled the Fascist police in Rome.

The Jewish community became his first victim. On 26 September 1943 he summoned the leaders of the Jewish community and demanded 50 kilograms of gold within 36 hours, threatening otherwise to deport two hundred people. The gold was collected, with help from non-Jewish Romans as well, and handed over to the Germans on 28 September. It bought no one any safety. On the night of 15–16 October 1943 a special SS commando under Captain Theodor Dannecker, sent from Adolf Eichmann’s office, carried out a round-up in the Rome ghetto and across the city, supported by Kappler’s men. More than 1,200 people were detained; after some were released, more than a thousand were deported to Auschwitz, from which fewer than twenty returned after the war. On 18 October Kappler reported to Wolff that the “action against the Jews” had been carried out “according to the best-prepared plan”. Further Jews were tracked down and arrested in the months that followed, often after denunciations.

In a building on the Via Tasso belonging to the German embassy, Kappler set up a prison and interrogation centre. Members of the Resistance, officers of the military underground and people suspected of helping escaped Allied prisoners of war were brought there; many were tortured. Today it houses the Museum of the Liberation of Rome. Kappler also hunted the escape network that the Irish priest Hugh O’Flaherty had built up in the Vatican. It hid thousands of escaped prisoners, Jews and other persecuted people in monasteries and flats; according to post-war accounts, Kappler planned to abduct and kill the priest if he ever left Vatican territory.

The Ardeatine Caves

On 23 March 1944 communist partisans of the GAP groups attacked a company of the German “Bozen” Police Regiment with a bomb in the Via Rasella; by the next morning 32 policemen had been killed or had died of their wounds. Hitler demanded harsh reprisals, and the commanders in Rome and Field Marshal Albert Kesselring fixed the ratio at ten Italians for every German killed. Kappler and his deputy, Captain Erich Priebke, spent the whole night drawing up lists of victims. He put on them prisoners from the Via Tasso, members of the underground, people detained after the attack and 75 Jews, while the Fascist police supplied fifty names. When the 33rd policeman died, he added another ten people on his own initiative.

On the afternoon of 24 March, in disused quarries on the Via Ardeatina, his men shot the prisoners in the back of the head in groups of five. On Mälzer’s orders Kappler fired himself, to “set an example” to his officers. It turned out that five more people had been brought than the list provided for; they too were killed, so as to leave no witnesses. In all 335 people died, and the entrances to the tunnels were blown up.

Kappler remained active in Rome until the end of the occupation. On 17 April 1944 his men, together with the army, carried out a round-up in the working-class district of Quadraro, regarded as a partisan stronghold: nearly a thousand men were deported to forced labour in the Reich, and according to Italian estimates about half of them never returned. When the Americans entered the city on 4 June 1944, Kappler withdrew to northern Italy with the German police apparatus.

Trial and imprisonment

In May 1945 Kappler gave himself up to the British military police in Bolzano. In 1947 the British handed him over to Italy. His trial before an Italian military tribunal in Rome took place in 1948. His superiors had already been tried by the British: General Mälzer and General Eberhard von Mackensen were sentenced to death in 1946 and Kesselring in 1947, and all these sentences were commuted to imprisonment. Kappler’s defence was that he had been obeying orders. On 20 July 1948 the court sentenced him to life imprisonment. It found that a reprisal on such a scale and in such a form was unlawful, but it did not hold Kappler guilty for the 320 victims designated by his superiors’ order; it convicted him of killing the fifteen people added on his own initiative, and separately sentenced him to 15 years for extorting gold from the Jews of Rome. His subordinates, tried alongside him, were acquitted. In 1952 the Supreme Military Tribunal upheld the sentence.

He served his sentence in the military prison in the fortress at Gaeta. Among his visitors there was Father O’Flaherty, from whom – according to his German and English biographers – he received Catholic baptism in 1959. His petitions for clemency were rejected, although West German politicians interceded on his behalf, among them President Gustav Heinemann and Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, as did the German churches. In Germany an association of his friends was active. In 1972 Kappler married, in prison, Anneliese Walther, a nurse from Soltau who had been corresponding with him for several years.

Escape and death

In the mid-1970s Kappler was diagnosed with metastatic cancer. He was transferred to the Celio military hospital in Rome. In 1976 a military court granted him parole, but after a wave of protests across Italy the decision was overturned and Kappler remained in hospital under Carabinieri guard. On the night of 14–15 August 1977, during a public holiday, he vanished from the hospital with his wife and soon turned up at her home in Soltau in Lower Saxony. The circumstances of the escape have never been fully explained. According to the best-known version, his wife carried her emaciated husband out in a large suitcase; German authors consider it more likely that the two of them simply walked out of the poorly guarded hospital.

The escape caused outrage in Italy and a crisis in relations with the Federal Republic of Germany. The Defence Minister, Vito Lattanzio, resigned. The government of Giulio Andreotti demanded Kappler’s extradition, but the West German authorities refused, citing the ban on extraditing their own citizens and his state of health; nor was he put on trial in Germany. Herbert Kappler died in Soltau on 9 February 1978, less than six months after his escape.

Significance

Kappler was not one of the Third Reich’s highest dignitaries, but in Rome he was the embodiment of the occupation terror: it was he who extorted the gold from the Jews, ran the prison on the Via Tasso and organised the executions in the Ardeatine Caves. He was one of the few German perpetrators of crimes in Italy to serve a long sentence, and his trial shaped Italian memory of the massacre for decades. The 1948 verdict, which accepted that he had been carrying out an order as regards the 320 victims, remains the subject of criticism by lawyers and historians.

His escape in 1977 reopened the debate in Italy about the impunity of German perpetrators. The Ardeatine Caves case was revisited in the 1990s, when Priebke was extradited from Argentina. Kappler also appears in popular culture: among others, Richard Burton played him in the film Massacre in Rome (1973).