Springing a Nazi war criminal with suitcase and chivalry
Why can’t I die in my own country, revisiting the places that were dear to me and which have been constantly in my thoughts during all these years of prison ?
—Herbert Kappler, December 1976
It was the long mid-August Assumption holiday known as ferragosto and, except for tourists, Rome was a ghost town. But inside the big military hospital on the Caelian Hill overlooking the Colosseum, a lone middle-aged woman moved with purpose. Around 1 a.m., she paused in the doorway of Room No. 2, located on the third floor of the surgical pavilion at the rear of the block-long hospital complex. On the door she tacked a note handwritten in Italian: “Please do not disturb me until 10a.m.”
Then she pulled a large (30-in.) black Samsonite-type suitcase equipped with casters out of the room and dragged it past the potted plants in the corridor to the elevator. “Let me help you,” said a carabinieri guard who was posted in the corridor, and the two rolled the valise onto the elevator. Downstairs the woman wheeled the suitcase up to a new red Fiat 132 parked near the door of the building and loaded it into the trunk. She asked the guard on duty at the gate to mail a letter for her and then drove off.
Scrupulously observing the note on the door, nurses at the hospital did not discover until late the next morning that the man in Room No. 2 was missing. Instead of the frail, 105-lb. cancer patient, they found a wig and a pillow propped up in the rumpled bed. By that time, Herbert Kappler, 70, a notorious Nazi war criminal serving a life sentence in Italy, was long gone. He and his German wife Anneliese, 52, who had spirited him out in the suitcase, turned up in West Germany the same day and were believed to be safely ensconced in the gray stone-and-brick apartment house in the northern town of Soltau where Frau Kappler practices homeopathic medicine.
The sensational escape of the man whom Romans called “the Hangman of the Ardeatine Caves” rocked Italy out of its holiday stupor like an earthquake. “An offense to the memory of all the victims of Nazi ferocity,” declared the Christian Democrats’ official daily, Il Popolo. Howled Milan’s influential Corriere della Sera: “A humiliating scandal without redemption.” A summit meeting between West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt and Italy’s Premier Giulio Andreotti, scheduled for later in the week, was promptly postponed, and Rome’s Communist-elected mayor Giulio Carlo Argan led a march in memory of Kap-pler’s victims.
Romans still point out the narrow street not far from the Trevi Fountain where, in March 1944, a partisan bomb attack wiped out a 33-man Waffen-SS unit. Kappler, then an SS colonel acting as police chief of the German occupation force in Rome, received orders from Berlin to execute ten times as many hostages in reprisal. Within 36 hours, German troops had rounded up several truckloads of Italian civilians. The Italians were taken to the ancient Ardeatine Caves three miles south of Rome and there were shot dead. The precise toll was 335—five more than Kappler’s orders called for.
Arrested by British forces in 1945, Kappler was turned over to Italian authorities in 1947 and the following year was tried by a military court and sentenced to life imprisonment. Last year he was transferred from prison to the hospital in Rome for treatment of terminal intestinal cancer. Since then, his wife, a nurse who had carried on a lengthy correspondence with Kappler before marrying him in a prison wedding in 1972, had become a frequent and familiar visitor. Because of Kappler’s deteriorating condition, she had been allowed almost unlimited access to him, often acting as his private nurse.
In the actual escape, she apparently had some help: when the Fiat broke down near Trento, 370 miles north of Rome, two men sought to have it repaired. The Kapplers are believed to have transferred to another vehicle and driven the rest of the way to West Germany. At week’s end the couple were in hiding under tight West German security guard.
The Italian government requested Kappler’s extradition, but Bonn indicated that it would turn down the request. The West German constitution prohibits turning a German citizen over for foreign prosecution, and the Justice Ministry said that this applied even though Kappler was a war criminal. Nor was there much chance that Germany itself would prosecute Kappler. Despite a vigorous re-examination of the Nazi era in books and film (see following story), German opinion has favored his release because of his illness; the government itself requested clemency last year for the same reason.
Meanwhile, Romans took up a new parlor game (“All right, you get in the suitcase, and let’s see how far I can carry you”). But the carabinieri were not amused: four top officers were summarily bumped from their posts, and two guards were arrested for breach of orders.
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