The following day, the German army began moving in on Rome, and that night the King and Badoglio fled the city for Pescara, whence by sea to Bari, leaving a leadership vacuum.

After a failed resistance in the working-class neighbourhood at the Porta San Paolo and the Pyramid of Cestius by remaining loyalist soldiers, carabinieri (including a school of cadets) and civilians, the Germans occupied Rome.

Three days later (on 12 September), Nazi commandos led by Waffen-SS officer Otto Skorzeny, tracked down and rescued Mussolini from his hidden prison in the Gran Sasso and set him up in the puppet regime of the so-called "Republic of Salò" in Northern Italy.

In October 1943 the Nazis rounded up and deported the Jews of Rome for extermination at Auschwitz and also made numerous mass roundups of non-Jewish male civilians for forced labour.

The Germans responded with raids carried out by mixed Gestapo and Italian Fascist police militias on Vatican institutions, known to be harbouring prominent CNL members and other Anti-Fascists.

[5] In January 1944, news of the surprise Allied landing behind enemy lines at Anzio (Operation Shingle), only 30 miles from Rome, created temporary euphoria among the Roman populace along with a dangerous relaxation of caution on the part of Resistance members, that enabled the Nazis to arrest and torture many of its most important leaders.

[6] The soldiers of the battalion were veterans of the Royal Italian Army who had seen action on the Eastern Front and had chosen service in the SS rather than face another tour in the East with the Wehrmacht.

That evening he was summoned to the headquarters of the German Armed Forces Commandant in Rome, Luftwaffe Generalmajor Kurt Mälzer, who had decided that the killings called for reprisals.

Kappler's superior, SS Brigadeführer und Generalmajor der Polizei Wilhelm Harster, suggested making up the numbers from the 57 Jews also in Nazi custody.

To make up the numbers, Questore Pietro Caruso, chief of the Fascist police in Rome, offered some Italians from his Regina Coeli prison, among them Maurizio Giglio, who had been one of his own lieutenants, before being unmasked as a double agent working for the American OSS in charge of radio communications with the Fifth Army.

[12] Because of the time limit that Hitler had imposed, Mälzer and Kappler agreed that the victims would have to be shot in the back of the head at close range rather than by conventional firing squad.

[14] The bodies of the victims were placed in piles, typically about a metre in height, and then buried under tons of rock debris when German military engineers set explosives to seal the caves and hide the atrocity.

Families of the victims were notified with excruciating slowness by an individual letter, if at all, a strategy of cover-up and concealment—"Night and Fog"—designed to confuse, grieve, and intimidate surviving relatives, according to Robert Katz.

[17] In fact, the victims comprised, in Robert Katz's words, "rich, and poor, doctors and lawyers, workers and shopkeepers, artists and artisans, teachers and students, men and teenage boys from every walk of life, and even a man of God ... among them".

[21] Besides Simoni, four more generals were among the executed, all members of the Clandestine Military Front: Vito Artale, Dardano Fenulli, Roberto Lordi, and Sabato Martelli Castaldi.

The design of the Fosse Ardeatine monument resulted from a national competition and was a collaboration between five architects (Nello Aprile, Cino Calcaprina, Aldo Cardelli, Mario Fiorentino & Giuseppe Perugini) and two sculptors (Francesco Coccia & Mirko Basaldella).

The massive bronze gate by Mirko Basaldella used the ubiquitous barbed wire of battlefields and concentration camps as inspiration, merging it with the moving curlicues of a Tree of Life.

Each face has a distinct expression portraying the range of emotions the men likely felt marching to their deaths in the quarry: despair, eyes half-closed in resignation, a resolute distant stare.

[22] The memorial plaque outside the entry to the caves reads:WAYFARERS THIRSTY FOR LIBERTY – WE WERE ROUNDED UP AT RANDOM – IN THE STREET AND IN JAIL – AS A REPRISAL CAST IN EN MASSE – SLAUGHTERED AND WALLED WITHIN THESE PITS – ITALIANS, DO NOT CURSE – MOTHERS, BRIDES, DO NOT WEEP – CHILDREN, CARRY WITH PRIDE – THE MEMORY – OF THE HOLOCAUST OF YOUR FATHERS – IF OUR SLAUGHTER – WILL HAVE HAD A PURPOSE BEYOND REVENGE – IT IS TO ENSHRINE THE RIGHT OF HUMAN EXISTENCE – AGAINST THE CRIME OF MURDER Inside the former quarries themselves, there are two more plaques.

[23] The Vatican's role in the massacre came under particular scrutiny following the publication of Robert Katz's first book, Death in Rome (1967), in which he speculated that Pope Pius XII had advance knowledge of the Nazi orders and did little to forestall it.

According to Katz, the Secretariat of the Vatican believed that "the attack on Via Rasella had been undertaken to provoke the occupiers into an excessively repressive act and increase the people's hatred of the Germans.

[33] Instead, a special editorial entitled "The Deeds in Via Rasella" appeared in the "semi-official" Vatican newspaper, the Osservatore Romano, deploring the violence of "the guilty parties who escaped arrest" (presumably the Partisans, however Stephen Walker in his book Hide and Seek writes that "the wording is worthy of examination" and speculates that this is a reference to "the Nazis who rounded up over 300 people and then butchered them.")

In 1952, the new Italian Supreme Court declared the Via Rasella attack to have been a legitimate act of war after an appeal by Kappler's lawyers of his conviction of guilt in the Ardeatine Massacre.

This decision was reaffirmed in 1999, when the Italian Supreme Court declared the Partisans immune from prosecution after a Roman prosecutor had unsuccessfully attempted to bring a suit against them for the death of the boy Piero Zuccheretti, who had been killed in Via Rasella.

[35] Historian Robert Wolfe finds "persuasive" Katz's characterisation of the Pope's decision to condemn the Partisans for the Via Rasella attack, rather than the Nazis for the reprisals, as evidence of "a moral failure" resulting from one of the "great misreadings of history".

[37] Nevertheless, some historians, such as Richard Raiber and István Deák, continue to imply that the Partisans were the equivalent of terrorists and were, moreover, responsible for avoidable suffering, thus offering some support for the official judgment of the Vatican at the time.

[40] Immediately after the war Roman Partisan leaders, including Rosario Bentivegna, the medical student who had set off the Via Rasella bomb, were recipients of medals conferred by the post-war Italian government.

Priebke escaped from a British prison camp in 1946 and fled, first to the Tyrol and then back to Rome, whence, using false papers supplied by the Vatican "ratline", he emigrated to Argentina.

[41] But the Society of St Pius X, a Catholic splinter group often accused of having far-right and anti-Semitic leanings, offered to hold the ceremony in the city of Albano Laziale.

[41] Don Florian Abrahamowicz, a priest expelled from the Society of St Pius X for his extreme right-wing views, told Italy's Radio 24: "Priebke was a friend of mine, a Christian, a faithful soldier.