The Missing Cancer Patient

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.