description: 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.
language: English
title: The Race for Rome
titlecomplete: The Race for Rome
genres: World War II, Nonfiction, History
ratings_count: 10
publisher: Pinnacle Books