This is the epic story of the brutal occupation of Rome by the Germans after the fall of Mussolini in July 1943. After the overthrow of Mussolini and Italy's surprise surrender to the Allies, Hitler's forces seized Rome, determined to prevent the capture of the capital as the West's first shining prize of the war. Led by U.S. General Mark Clark's Fifth Army, an Allied invasion south of Naples - and later at Anzio - clawed up the Italian peninsula, fiercely opposed in one of the bloodiest campaigns in America's history. Occupied Rome soon became a city of spies, double agents, informers, torturers, escaped Allied war prisoners, hunted Jews and hungry people. Yet the population doubled, with the streaming arrival of a million refugees hoping to find a safe haven by the presence of the pope. Instead, like the Romans, they came under constant "precision" Allied bombardment and Gestapo repression, taken hostage to Hitler's plans to destroy the Eternal City. Meanwhile, Italian partisans decided to take matters into their own hands. They harassed and attacked German soldiers on the streets of Rome, growing even bolder. The Germans initiated the first roundup of Jews in Italy, beginning in the Rome ghetto, heart of the oldest Jewish community in the West. Pope Pius XII intervened in individual cases, but his greatest concerns were protecting the Vatican State and preserving order and preventing a popular uprising, which he thought would lead to communist rule in Rome.
Robert Katz tells the dramatic story of these colliding forces through the key figures who held the Eternal City's fate in their hands. Alongside famous historical figures are a partisan couple, code-named Paolo and Elena, who met in the resistance and together helped execute the most successful and deadly partisan attack, to which the Germans responded with the Ardeatine Caves massacre of 335 Roman men and boys, the worst atrocity committed during the occupation.
The first book to draw on the intelligence files of the OSS - held secret by its successor agency, the CIA, until 2000 - as well as newly declassified documents from Italian and Vatican archives, the work is further enhanced by the author's interviews with survivors over many years. FATAL SILENCE is the finest account of Rome's most desperate days.

ISBN: 0 297 84661 2

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