The Ardeatine Caves in the context of the anti-partisan war in Rome

di Steffen Prauser
in Memoria e Ricerca n.s. 16 (2004), p. 57

Steffen Prauser focusses on German antipartisan warfare in Rome, which culminated in the biggest reprisal in the Western theatre of war, the shooting of 335 men in the Fosse Ardeatine on 24 March 1944. He argues that nevertheless the Germans purused an unusually flexible policy of repression until the Fosse Ardeatine. He investigates the reprisal itself and, using new archival material, seeks to finally answer long debated questions as to which police unit attacked the day before the reprisal and who ordered the shooting. He concludes with a discussion of the problem of reprisals in international law.