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

From Publishers Weekly
Expanding upon his classic account of the 1944 Ardeatine Caves massacre, Death in Rome, Katz presents a vivid, well-researched history of German-occupied Rome, from the fall of Mussolini in 1943 to the Allied Liberation 10 months later. Katz weaves several biographical histories into his narrative, devoting particular attention the experiences of five individuals: Herbert Kappler, an SS officer who began his tenure in Italy intending to save the Jews of Rome from Auschwitz but ended up presiding over the killing of 335 men and boys at the Ardeatine Caves; Peter Tompkins, the 24-year-old, bilingual OSS spy who, as the primary Allied representative in Rome, tried to make a useful network out of the brave individuals and quarreling factions residing in the Eternal City; Paolo and Elena, a partisan couple who orchestrated the most effective attack on German police troops; and Pope Pius XII, who, in Katz's telling, appears as a cold-hearted politico whose insistence on the Vatican's neutrality endangered thousands of lives in Rome. Combined with Katz's broad historical knowledge and his personal experiences living in Rome, these narratives create an engrossing portrait of a confused, tragic period of Italy's history. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Booklist
This narrative history describes the Eternal City at a key time of struggle--the dark year of German occupation between the overthrow of Mussolini in 1943 and liberation by the Allies in 1944. Four parties wrestle for Rome: the ruthless yet wary German occupiers, the Holy See in self-preservation mode, a gutsy band of patriotic students with homemade explosives, and the U.S. Fifth Army under Mark Clark, the first general since the sixth century to take Rome from the south. Its horrific climax is an account of the Via Ardeatina massacre, in which more than 300 Roman civilians were shot in reprisal against the resistance. Based overwhelmingly on U.S. intelligence files, Katz's history navigates the elaborate Roman underground of spies and counteragents, and even unearths a few surprises, like a key telegram about the Jewish genocide, addressed to Hitler, intercepted and sent in translation to Roosevelt. Curiously, one appendix also details Katz's legal difficulties regarding his last book. This is challenging research presented fluidly, and Katz's fascination with a key moment for a fascinating city shines through. Brendan Driscoll
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Review
Susan Zuccotti author of Under His Very Windows: The Vatican and the Holocaust in Italy With his customary lively and graceful prose, Robert Katz provides a sweeping yet detailed and well-documented description of the battle for Rome during the Second World War. All the players are here: the Allied forces slowly plodding north; the German army defending with fearful determination; cruel and vicious Nazi and Fascist fanatics; young Italian partisans and the American and British agents sent to support them; Jews caught in a deadly trap; and German diplomats and Vatican prelates, including Pope Pius XII, anxious for different reasons to preserve the Eternal City. This is a book that is difficult to put down.


Book Description
In September 1943, the German army marched into Rome, beginning an occupation that would last nine months until Allied forces liberated the ancient city. During those 270 days, clashing factions -- the occupying Germans, the Allies, the growing resistance movement, and the Pope -- contended for control over the destiny of the Eternal City. In The Battle for Rome, Robert Katz vividly recreates the drama of the occupation and offers new information from recently declassified documents to explain the intentions of the rival forces. One of the enduring myths of World War II is the legend that Rome was an "open city," free from military activity. In fact the German occupation was brutal, beginning almost immediately with the first roundup of Jews in Italy. Rome was a strategic prize that the Germans and the Allies fought bitterly to win. The Allied advance up the Italian peninsula from Salerno and Anzio in some of the bloodiest fighting of the war was designed to capture the Italian capital. Dominating the city in his own way was Pope Pius XII, who used his authority in a ceaseless effort to spare Rome, especially the Vatican and the papal properties, from destruction. But historical documents demonstrate that the Pope was as concerned about the Partisans as he was about the Nazis, regarding the Partisans as harbingers of Communism in the Eternal City. The Roman Resistance was a coalition of political parties that agreed on little beyond liberating Rome, but the Partisans, the organized military arm of the coalition, became increasingly active and effective as the occupation lengthened. Katz tells the story of two young Partisans, Elena and Paolo, who fought side by side, became lovers, and later played a central role in the most significant guerrilla action of the occupation. In retaliation for this action, the Germans committed the Ardeatine Caves Massacre, slaying hundreds of Roman men and boys. The Pope's decision not to intervene in that atrocity has been a source of controversy and debate among historians for decades, but drawing on Vatican documents, Katz authoritatively examines the matter. Katz takes readers into the occupied city to witness the desperate efforts of the key actors: OSS undercover agent Peter Tompkins, struggling to forge an effective spy network among the Partisans; German diplomats, working against their own government to save Rome even as they condoned the Nazi repression of its citizens; Pope Pius XII, anxiously trying to protect the Vatican at the risk of depending on the occupying Germans, who maintained order by increasingly draconian measures; and the U.S. and British commanders, who disagreed about the best way to engage the enemy, turning the final advance into a race to be first to take Rome. The Battle for Rome is a landmark work that draws on newly released documents and firsthand testimony gathered over decades to offer the finest account yet of one of the most dramatic episodes of World War II.


About the Author
Robert Katz is the author of twelve previous books, including the international bestseller Death in Rome. His writing has appeared in numerous publications, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Esquire, and Military History Quarterly. A fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, he lived in Rome for nearly twenty years and now lives in Tuscany in Italy.


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In the best tradition of Harrison Salisbury and Cornelius Ryan, novelist/historian Katz (Days of Wrath, 1980, etc.) captures a tumultuous nine months in Rome's long history, with plenty of circumstantial detail and incidents involving many actors. That short but bloody period followed the collapse of Mussolini's regime and the dictator's arrest, when Nazi forces declared martial law and seized control of the erstwhile ally's territory. Katz begins his account with a renowned partisan attack on SS police forces within Rome in which dozens of Nazis died, representing a military feat "unequaled by the partisan movements in any other of the German-occupied European capitals." The assault in the Via Rasella led to swift reprisals: the massacre of Roman men and boys in the long-abandoned catacombs outside the city, accelerated efforts to deport and destroy the city's Jews. It also emphasized the sharp divisions that obtained among the Romans vis-￯﾿ﾽ-vis the Communist-dominated resistance-divisions that were particularly pronounced within the Vatican, where the reigning pope, who regarded Stalin's Russia as a far greater evil than Hitler's Germany, made no official comment on affairs outside St. Peter's gates, but where individual clerics resisted the occupiers against the pontiff's wishes. (The pope's silence, Katz suggests, certainly owed to his personal politics, but perhaps more to his fervent desire to protect the Vatican from attack by any party.) Confusion and division similarly attended the Allied campaign to liberate Rome, a matter involving personality clashes among the commanders as well as the usual fog of war, and Katz's account of the tangled politics that accompanied their militaryefforts is one of the best parts of an already strong, swiftly moving narrative. An episodic reconstruction, complete with a dazzling dramatis personae, of Rome under the Nazi occupation and the Allied drive to free it. Book-of-the-Month Club main selection; History Book Club/Quality Paperback Book Club alternate selection


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