The Race for Rome

by Dan Kurzman

Field Marshal Kesselring meant every word of his threat to burn down Rome. A team of trained saboteurs received its Blow up the city. Rome was fighting for its life . . .This is the first full account of one of the most dramatic events of World War II—the Allied liberation of Nazi-occupied Rome. Drawing from thousands of documents—-many heretofore secret—and hundreds of interviews, Dan Kurzman reconstructs a city girding for In the spring of 1944 the Eternal City seemed doomed to become a vast burial ground for some of the greatest treasures of Western civilization.While Hitler made plans to kidnap the Pope and loot the Vatican, the Nazi dragnet flushed out refugees hiding in the city’s maze of churches. Panic and terror swept through the hills of Home as partisan raids were met with ruthless Nazi retaliation. The Roman underground — torn apart by political differences — threatened the city with civil war and Communist takeover. Could Rome possibly last until the Allies arrived?Caught up in this desperate race are presidents and prime ministers, kings and generals, rabbis and priests. An Italian princess rushes to the Vatican at dawn to tell the Pope of the deportation of Roman Jews to death camps; Pius XII orders Vatican papers to be sealed in secret vaults; and SS General Wolff—the man who was supposed to kidnap the Pope—meets secretly with the Holy Father to plan the salvation of Rome.Finally, there are the vivid and telling glimpses of the Allied commanders undercutting each other in their final drive for the Men obsessed by the glory of being the first to ride victorious into Rome.

Genres: World War II, History, Nonfiction

Paperback

First published January 1, 1975

About the author

Dan Halperin Kurzman was an American journalist and writer of military history books. He studied at the University of California in Berkeley, served in the United States Army from 1943 to 1946, and completed his studies at Berkeley with a Bachelor degree in political science. In the early 1950s, he worked in Europe and in Israel for American newspapers and news agencies and was then correspondent of the NBC News in Jerusalem.

Reviews

[Julio The Fox · Rating 4 out of 5]

A pearl of a book from my youth. Dan Kurzman wrote books celebrating history's freedom fighters, in this case Italian resistance men and women, fighting first Mussolini and then Hitler, Allied soldiers working their way up the Italian coast towards the Eternal City and churchmen frantically trying to save Rome's Jewish population from the Nazis. (A horror depicted in the Marcello Mastrionni, Richard Burton film MASSACRE IN ROME). Dan does not buy the story that Pius XII was "Hitler's Pope", indifferent to the plight of his Jewish countrymen. Others will differ. An exciting tale told in breathless journalistic fashion.

[Bob Stenberg · Rating 4 out of 5]

It was a great overview about the Allies in Italy during WWII.