We instinctively applaud members of the resistance like the man in Cosmatos’s movie who accepts the inevitability of reprisals for the via Rasella attack. They made it to West Germany, which refused to extradite him to Italy he died there in 1978. His wife, a nurse he married in prison, managed to smuggle the diminutive Kappler out in a large suitcase. Kappler was sentenced to life imprisonment, but in 1975, suffering from cancer, he was moved to hospital. Audiences did not see what preceded the execution: the director of the Regina Coeli prison, Donato Carretta, a witness for the prosecution at Caruso’s trial, had been beaten to death by a mob led by women widowed by the massacre. US troops entered Rome in June, and three months later Pietro Caruso, the police chief who had helped organise the Fosse Ardeatine killings, was executed by firing squad footage was shown in British cinemas in a Pathé News bulletin. The cave entrances were dynamited to seal in the corpses and conceal their murder. After several hours all 335 prisoners – the eldest was 74, the youngest 15 – were dead. They were made to kneel at the far wall, then one by one they were shot in the back of the head. On the command of a junior SS officer, Erich Priebke, the prisoners were led in, five at a time, hands tied. the first trucks arrived at the Fosse Ardeatine, a cave complex south of the city, near Christian catacombs dating from the late Roman Empire. By daybreak Kappler had 335 names – five more than necessary.
In the film we see Burton at a desk, adding the names of political prisoners, men already condemned to death, Jews in Nazi custody – anyone he could think of – to the list. Cosmatos’s film Massacre in Rome (1973) – had to come up with names very quickly: the killings were to be carried out within 24 hours of the attack. Kappler – played by Richard Burton in George P. Rome’s Gestapo chief, Herbert Kappler, was ordered to execute civilians at the rate of ten for every German killed (elsewhere it had been even worse: fifty for every German). In no other Nazi-occupied city had partisans succeeded in such an audacious attack. More than thirty SS men were killed and dozens were injured. Bentivegna’s comrades opened fire and hurled grenades, then fled through the backstreets.
Rosario Bentivegna, a 21-year-old medical student, lit the fuse on a bomb hidden in a dustcart, then walked away. O n 23 March 1944 Italian resistance fighters ambushed an SS company marching up via Rasella, a quiet street in central Rome.