Fosse Ardeatine

The Fosse Ardeatine massacre (Eccidio delle Fosse Ardeatine) was a mass execution carried out in Rome on 24 March 1944 by Nazi German occupation troops during the Second World War. As a reprisal for a partisan attack conducted a day earlier in central Rome, and which had claimed the lifes of 33 German soldiers, three-hundred and thirty-five Italian hostages - comprising civilians, Jews from the local community casually picked up on the city streets, Italian prisoners of war (up to the General rank), previously captured partisans and a few inmates from the Roman jails - were shot in groups of five as reprisal for the attack. The massacre was perpetrated without prior notice in what was then an unfrequented rural suburb of the city, inside the tunnels of the disused quarries of pozzolana, near Via Ardeatina (Italian: Cave Ardeatine).
Because of a number of reasons, including - but not limited to - the high number of the victims, the fact that many of them were civilian innocents casually taken only to add up to the number of those to be killed, the cruel methods implemented even by nazi standards to carry out the massacre, the circumstance that the reprisal order had come directly from Adolf Hitler (or so has been insistently claimed), and the hiding of the bodies, which were buried summarily instead of being returned to their families, the slaughter became a symbol to the various massacres carried out against civilians in Italy from 8 September 1943 until the German surrender on 8 May 1945. (...) more....