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PARTISAN REVIEW
that tries to face guilt but has too much of it to face in entirety, stepped
In.
On March 24, 1944, in retaliation for a partisan bombing in central
Rome that killed thirty-three Germans, three hundred thirty Italians were
rounded up to be shot within twenty-four hours, ten Italians for every
dead German. When the round-up of political prisoners and miscella–
neous "suspects" did not yield enough people, seventy Jews were picked
up to fill the quota.
The hostages were taken to the Ardeatine Caves off the Appian
Way, south of the capital. Hands bound behind their backs, prisoners
were forced to stand five at a time on the corpses of the previous victims
and were shot in the backs of their heads, while Captain Priebke checked
their names off a list. SS Commander Colonel Herbert Kappler had cal–
culated that they could make their deadline if they took no more than
one minute for each victim. But things got sloppy, partly because the
executioners were so visibly sickened by their task that Kappler decided
to get them drunk on cognac. It took up to four bullets per victim, the
SS sometimes firing away until the head was literally blown off. Priebke
personally shot two. When it was over he reported to Kappler that they
had miscalculated and killed three hundred thirty-five instead of three
hundred thirty.
After the war, two Italian officials were executed for complicity in
the crime. But the purge did not last long. Kappler's death sentence was
later commuted to life in an Italian prison. In 1977 he escaped to die in
Germany. Allegedly, though understandably few believe this story, his
wife smuggled him out in a suitcase. Eric Priebke vanished from a British
prisoner-of-war camp in 1946.
The decision to let the guilty escape and drop the subject has crip–
pled Italy and much of Europe for a half century. Argentina seems de–
termined to repeat Europe's mistakes. The young Argentine democracy,
instead of building an exuberant new society, is paralyzed with guilt and
cynicism.
During a military dictatorship from 1976 until 1983, thirty thousand
people were tortured and murdered in the name of anti-Communism.
It
was called the Dirty War, although there was no war. After democracy
was re-established in 1983, attempts at a purge were abandoned as they
were considered too dangerous, and the subject was dropped in the
name of national reconciliation. Of the thirty thousand missing, only
9,250 have been accounted for. After a series of trials, convictions, com–
mutations, pardons and amnesties, the total punishment for the Dirty
War has been brief prison terms for two officers. The end of the trials
came when the first elected president, Raul Alfonsin responded to a 1988
