The Battle for Rome: The Germans, the Allies, the Partisans, and the Pope, September 1943-June 1944

The Italian campaign in World War II was a bloody (and that's not just a swear word, but also a description) waste of time, as the Allies followed Churchill's plan of hitting the "soft underbelly of Europe." Landings at Salerno in southern Italy and, in January 1944 at Anzio just south of Rome, resulted in a stalemate for a great many months, costing thousands of lives and not really gaining much. The ultimate objective was Rome, mainly for the propaganda coup that would benefit whichever army entered it first. When the Allies invaded, many Romans thought that they would be liberated in a matter of days. The Fascist government had been toppled and there's no way the Germans would try to hold Rome and fight in southern Italy.Right?The Battle for Rome, by Robert Katz, tells the story of a city that awaited that "matter of days" for 9 long months. Nine months of resistance activity, starvation, and oppression that battered the city's soul and resulted in the deaths of many, including almost the entire Jewish population. The sub-title of the book is "The Germans, The Allies, The Partisans, and the Pope." Katz examines all of these aspects of the Italian campaign, meshing them into a seamless narrative that's both provocative and fascinating to read. Well-researched and extensively documented, Katz makes use of many sources that have just come to light, including documents recently declassified by the CIA. He uses these to greatly criticize Pope Pius XII and his handling of the Roman situation. Katz doesn't examine the complete attitude of the Vatican toward Hitler's "Final Solution," but he does examine the attitude as it pertained to the round-up of Jews in Rome after the Germans occupied it, as well as its reaction to the massive reprisal that killed 335 Romans after a particularly effective Partisan attack. The Vatican (and especially the Pope) comes out of this wanting.Not only was Pius silent in his criticism of the Holocaust, not only was he silent as the Germans systematically rounded up the Jews who were supposedly being protected by the Vatican, but he was silent as the Germans clamped down on the population of Rome, including one of the worst massacres in Italian history. Katz points out that, even if Papal silence in the face of the Holocaust facing Europe may have been "understandable" at times, what awaited his personal flock in Rome deserved some sort of outcry that never came. Instead, he sacrificed everything for a myth of an "open city" where no military presence was allowed. The Germans, while agreeing to this concept, ignored it when it came time to move troops to the front. Instead of protesting this, however, he criticized the Roman partisans for breaking the peace when they attacked. Instead of criticizing the Germans for cracking down on partisans, he instead blamed the partisans for it. The Vatican has been very reluctant to release documents from its archives pertaining to World War II, especially documents re

This is an engaging, rich book about heroes and horror, about triumph and tragedy, about ego and humility, and about acting out and remaining silent. From July 1943, when the Italian army effectively exited the war, until the Allies -- Brits, French, American, Polish, African -- almost egomaniacally raced each other to enter Rome before D-Day in Normandy, Rome, the Vatican and the papacy suffered through their greatest threat since the Dark Ages, occupied by a sometimes charming, always cunning, and commonly cruel German force of occupation. The position Pope Pius appears to have assumed, especially as to the round up of Roman Jews and the horrific massacre in the Ardeatine caves, is the center of the controversy for this thorough, multi-faceted view of the occupation. Taking advantage of unique, timely if belated access to Vatican and other secret files, Katz weaves a story that captures the humanity and the terror of these twelve awful months in the history of the city.Katz's work involves a detailed cast of priests, diplomats, partisans, Romans, Allies, Nazis, with an especially helpful listing of them at the opening of the book. He closes with a summary of his legal battles with the niece of Pius XII (over Katz's accusations of the Pope's silence and implied complicity) and a nice, tight chronology of these troubled days. While the focus is on Rome itself, Katz describes the exhausting battles up from the south of Italy and the Allies' failure to grasp a major opportunity at Anzio in January 1944, when an American officer found that they could have probably driven straight into Rome on the day of the landings. Instead, the Germans regrouped and held out, the Americans hesitated and bled, and the citizens of Rome starved and waited four more months for the Allies to arrive. The partisans, expecting the imminent arrival of the Allies, worked to thwart the Nazis, yet faced terrible odds, gruesome torture, and little support or rest. And the partisans bickered among themselves; some even betrayed others for money. In the midst of the carnage and uncertainty, one partisan couple finds love and rebirth. And, in the aftermath, some (perhaps too few) are called to be accountable for their actions.Pope Pius appears to have favored a passive resistance and even a peaceful settlement between the Germans and the Allies, over the possibility of godless communism and the destruction of the Eternal City. It is hard to see how the Nazis could be accommodated and tolerated, or how they could be expected to treat Rome as an open city. Katz offers an illustration at the end of his work: After the siege of Rome in June 1944, Pius was not happy with the Allies parking a tank near one of the Bernini colonnades, so according to Katz, 'the Pope telephoned the Vatican secretariat three times to have the tank removed.' Katz wryly notes: 'Continual denunciations of Allied violations would get him nowhere now. They might have had a greater moral force had he begun w

Reading The Battle for Rome by Robert Katz, I felt as though I was an observer in an operating theatre...the doctors, nurses, etc. replaced by the Partisans, Nazis, Allies and the Pope. Moment by moment you are a witness to the courage and resolve of the Partisans, the hesitancy and intolerable silence of the Pope, the enigmatic maneuvering of the Allies and the treachery and atrocities of the Nazis. The evidence that Katz places before us is indisputable yet surreal, as is the Holocaust in its entirety.It is not an easy read for those of us who have never been aficionados of WW II narratives, but it is a book, once started, impossible to put down, once completed, impossible not to recommend.

My father was one of the soldiers who captured Rome in June 1944, so when I saw this book I knew that I wanted to read it. I found it very well-written, and it covered quite a bit of the history of the Nazi occupation of the Italian capital in 1943 & 1944. The emphasis was mainly on the partisan activity within the city itself, and the Allied military planning and actions take somewhat of a back seat, but it is important to note that the inside activity was extremely important to the eventual safe delivery of the city without the potential wholesale destruction that many people feared. Puis XII is shown to have attempted to steer a middle course between the occupiers and the Allies, to the point of compromising his moral authority as Pope. There were many things he could have, and probably should have, done, but he didn't, and it's difficult at this remove in time to attempot to stand in his shoes and judge his actions. In my humble opinion, he was found wanting, but that's an entirely different issue. The book is excellent, and worth reading!

Don't let the title of this book confuse you. Mr. Katz uses the word "battle" in its broad sense- this is not a work primarily concerned with the nuts-and-bolts of the Allies attempt to wrestle Rome away from the Germans. There is some military history- the landing at Anzio and the "lost opportunity" to move quickly up the underdefended route to Rome are neatly summarized. But Mr. Katz is mainly concerned with personalities, diplomacy and morality. He focuses on a few of the partisans, so that we come to know them intimately. We go along on several of their "missions" and learn about both fear and bravery. One key mission, setting off a bomb on a street known to be part of the daily route followed by some German policemen, results in the deaths of 32 Germans- and results in the infamous reprisal known as the Ardeatine Caves massacre. Hitler was so angered by the attack on the policemen that he wanted 30-50 Italians, per each German killed, to be executed. "Cooler heads" prevailed and managed to get the ratio down to 10-to-1. Lists were drawn up to figure out who the unlucky 320 people would be- they were largely made up of Italians already in jail awaiting execution or life imprisonment for previous "crimes." As you might expect, when these numbers proved insufficient the Germans became less selective- they also wound up miscounting and wound up executing 5 extra people. A thread running throughout the book is the behind-the-scenes maneuvers by the Vatican and Pope Pius XII to remain neutral- so that Rome would not be devastated and also so that Vatican City and its inhabitants would be left alone. Mr. Katz fairly presents the Pope's position. He also clearly condemns the Pope and the Vatican hierarchy for a failure to provide moral leadership. A consistent failure to "speak up" allowed the Germans to act with impunity- to kill Roman Jews and non-Jews alike. Would "speaking up" have made any difference? We'll never know the answer to that question- but Mr. Katz is persuasive when he argues that the Pope had an obligation to condemn brutality and inhumanity- and he failed to do so in any forceful manner. Another interesting aspect of the book is the military politics that were played in the final push to Rome. American General Mark Clark was determined that the Americans would liberate Rome. He felt that our troops had earned that right after the casualties suffered at Anzio. Clark felt that British General Alexander was trying to manipulate strategy so that the British could get to Rome first. In the end, Clark prevailed. Mr. Katz manages to juggle all of the storylines without losing sight of the big picture. He also drops a bombshell in the epilogue- but I can't give that away. Suffice it to say that it involves some more unsavory behavior by Vatican officials.