Race for Rome - Softcover

Kurzman, Dan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0523400136 ISBN 13: 9780523400136

Publisher: Pinnacle Books, 1980

Synopsis

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.

Edition details

• Publisher: Pinnacle Books
• Publication date: 1980
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0523400136
• ISBN 13: 9780523400136
• Binding: Paperback