IN A move unlikely to help to heal the Italian-German rift over Silvio Berlusconi’s “Nazi joke”, a former wartime bunker of the Third Reich leadership hidden deep in a mountain near Rome is to be opened as a tourist attraction.
The plan for the new museum was made public as Signor Berlusconi gave an interview to Bild, Germany’s leading tabloid newspaper. The Italian Prime Minister and media baron was seeking to lay to rest the row between Rome and Berlin that marred the beginning of Italy’s six-month presidency of the European Union last month.
The furore began when Signor Berlusconi compared a German MEP at Strasbourg to a Nazi concentration camp guard after being accused of putting himself above the law by evading prosecution for corruption. The Italian minister responsible for tourism further insulted Germans by declaring them to be “arrogant, beer-drinking blonds who invade our beaches”.
Gerhard Schröder, the German Chancellor, cancelled his Italian holiday as a result. Later he said that he might visit the opera at Verona at the invitation of Romano Prodi, President of the European Commission.
In the interview, Signor Berlusconi said that he felt himself to be “almost a German” because he shared the German capacity for hard work. Italy and Germany had “indestructible common interests” after more than half a century of “co-operation and mutual affection”.
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Since the “German gaffes”, Italian officials have been at pains to play down Italian memories of the Second World War, when Nazi Germany occupied much of the country after the collapse of Italian Fascism in late 1943. Yet that message appears not to have reached the small community of Sant’Oreste, on the slopes of Monte Soracte, 20 miles (32km) north of Rome, which annouced this week that it intended to make a tourist complex out of a secret network of tunnels and chambers used from 1944 as Nazi headquarters in Italy, under the command of Field Marshal Albert Kesselring.
Monte Soracte, a volcanic outcrop whose seven jagged peaks stand 2,200ft high, has been celebrated for its panoramic views and strategic value since Ancient Roman times. But the mountain acquired a sinister significance when Kesselring, the German commander in the Mediterreanean, moved his headquarters there from Frascati. He developed earlier tunnels into a ten-mile network of concrete passages and chambers.
Mario Segoni, the Mayor of Sant’Oreste, said that it was from this bunker that Kesselring ordered one of the most notorious wartime massacres on Italian soil, when 335 men and boys were shot in March 1944 in reprisal for an attack by partisans on German troops. After the war Kesselring was sentenced to death for his role in the massacre. The sentence was commuted to life in prison and he died in 1960.
Giuseppe Pullara, a local journalist, said that the complex resembled “Dante’s inner circle of Hell without the flames – a dank labyrinth of dead air, crumbling cement and darkness”.
Doriano Menichelli, in charge of public works for Sant’Oreste, said that the council was making the tunnels safe and planned to convert the derelict barracks outside into a “high-quality hotel and restaurant”.