Herbert Kappler was a key German SS functionary and war criminal during the Nazi era. He served as head of German police and security services in Rome during the Second World War and was responsible for the Ardeatine massacre. Following the end of the war, Kappler stood trial in Italy and was sentenced to life imprisonment. He escaped from prison shortly before his death in West Germany in 1978.
SS career
Kappler was born to a middle-class family in Stuttgart in the German Empire. Herbert Kappler joined the Nazi Party on 1 August 1931. He joined the SS in 1933. In January 1936, he was assigned to duty at the Gestapo main office of Stuttgart. In 1937, Kappler graduated from the Führerschule der Sicherheitspolizei in Berlin as a Kriminalkommissar. In 1938, during the Anschluss, he supervised the mass deportations of Austria's Jews to concentration camps. Kappler was posted to Rome as head of the Sicherheitsdienst and throughout the war years he cooperated closely with the Fascist police. Following the Armistice between Italy and the Allied Forces on 8 September1943, Kappler acquired considerable power as German forces took control of the Italian capital.
Following the armistice between Italy and the Allies on 8 September 1943, the German military occupied Rome and Kappler was appointed as Chief of the Security Police and Security Service for all SS and Order Police units deployed in Rome. Kappler was in charge of Jewish roundups for deportations to Auschwitz; in his first action, 1,023 Italian Jews were deported with only 16 surviving, and Kappler would later arrange the deportation of a further 993 Roman Jews, nearly all of whom would eventually die inNazi gas chambers. During this action, he demanded 50 kilograms of gold from the Jewish community in Rome, which he later claimed was an attempt to prevent the round-up and the deportations. By early 1944, Kappler was the highest representative of the Reich Main Security Office in Rome and answered directly to both the military governorship, under Luftwaffe General Kurt Mälzer, as well as the SS chain of command under the Higher SS and Police Leader of Italy, SS-Obergruppenführer Karl Wolff. Kappler came into direct conflict with the Vatican, as the Germans had strong suspicions that it was harbouring Allied fugitives and escaped prisoners, even though the Vatican under Pope Pius XII was technically neutral. A particular adversary of Kappler's in this respect was Monsignor Hugh O'Flaherty, whose activities helping Jewish fugitives and Allied prisoners escape from Rome led to Kappler having him targeted for assassination. Paradoxically, after the war Kappler and O'Flaherty would become friends of sorts. Kappler organised the Ardeatine massacre where 335 Italian civilians were killed on 24 March 1944 as a reprisal for an attack by resistance fighters resulting in the deaths of 33 men of the SS Police garrison in Rome.
Criminal conviction
Kappler was arrested by British authorities in 1945 and later turned over to the Italian government in 1947 and tried the following year. Kappler's second in command in Rome, SS-Captain Erich Priebke, managed to escape and it was not until 1996 that Priebke would face justice. In 1948, Kappler was tried by an Italian military tribunal and sentenced to life imprisonment in the Gaeta military prison. Kappler and his first wife divorced while he was serving his sentence. He later married Anneliese Kappler, a nurse who had carried on a lengthy correspondence with him, before marrying him at a prison ceremony in 1972. By this time, Kappler had also converted to Catholicism, partly due to the influence of his war-time enemy, the Vatican diplomat Hugh O'Flaherty, who often visited him in prison, discussing literature and religion with him. By 1975, at the age of sixty-eight, Kappler was diagnosed with terminal cancer and he was moved to a military hospital in Rome in 1976. Appeals by both his wife and the West German government to release him were denied by Italian authorities. Because of Kappler's deteriorating condition and his wife's nursing skills, Anneliese Kappler had been allowed almost unlimited access to him during his time in the Italian hospital. On a prison visit in August 1977, Kappler's wife carried him out in a large suitcase and escaped to West Germany, assisted by apparently unwitting carabinieri. The Italians unsuccessfully demanded that Kappler be returned, but the West Germany authorities refused to extradite him and did not prosecute Kappler for any further war crimes, reportedly owing to ill-health. Six months after his escape, Kappler died at home in Soltau, on 9 February 1978, aged 70.
In film and drama
In the 1973 feature filmMassacre in Rome, which deals with the Ardeatine massacre, Kappler was portrayed by actor Richard Burton. Kappler was also portrayed by Christopher Plummer in the 1983 TV filmThe Scarlet and The Black, which detailed Kappler's first meeting with Monsignor Hugh O'Flaherty. Kappler's post-war time seeking asylum in the Vatican, and his resultant friendship with his former enemy Monsignor O'Flaherty, was dramatised in the radio playThe Scarlet Pimpernel of the Vatican by Robin Glendinning. The radio play was first broadcast on 30 November 2006 on UK BBC Radio 4.
