On September 22, 1944, the sentence was carried out. The man tied to the chair, facing its back, his hands bound with rope, had until recently been the most feared policeman in Rome. A firing squad took aim. The volley came, and then a priest stepped forward to read a prayer over the body.

Only after that was the death of Pietro Caruso, former chief of the Roman police, officially declared. His body was untied, placed in a box resembling a coffin, loaded into a car, and driven away to an unknown destination. How a mid-level fascist functionary had come to die before a firing squad outside Rome was a story that ran through the darkest years of the Italian war, and it began with the collapse of everything Caruso had served. When the Kingdom of Italy signed the Armistice of Cassibile with the United States and Great Britain in September 1943, the Italian crown capitulated.

Hitler had no intention of accepting this. German troops occupied most of Italy, including Rome. Mussolini, who had been arrested, was freed from captivity by German commandos and placed at the head of a newly formed puppet state, the so-called Italian Social Republic. King Victor Emmanuel III and his government fled Rome for the south of Italy, where they sheltered under Allied protection.

From that moment on, the finest hour began for those Italian fascists who had thrown in their lot entirely with Hitler. Pietro Caruso was one of them. His idols were Hitler and Mussolini. Caruso had been born at the very end of the nineteenth century in the Campania region of southern Italy.

Little survives about his family; it is known only that he had a brother and sisters. He fought in the First World War, joining the fight near its end. After the war he attached himself closely to the National Fascist Party, becoming an ardent admirer of Mussolini. In 1922, he marched on Rome with the Blackshirts, the demonstration of force that brought Mussolini and his party to power.

For the next two decades Caruso remained what might be called a mid-level official. He was an active functionary of the party and a servant of the state apparatus of fascist Italy. In 1941, holding the rank of lieutenant colonel, he served as a judge on the emergency tribunal in Dalmatia, the region on the northwest coast of the Balkans that had once belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire and had been ceded to Italy after the First World War. There he distinguished himself by his cruelty toward anyone suspected of disloyalty to the regime.

As a fascist judge, he paid particular attention to the persecution of Communists and Jews, considering Communists the principal enemies of Italian fascism. His true rise began only with the German occupation and the proclamation of the Social Republic in September 1943. In the new puppet state, Caruso quickly befriended a man named Tullio Tamburini, the chief of police of the newly formed fascist republic. Tamburini was a fascist activist, an adventurer, a man of absolute immorality in the description of those who knew him.

Together the two men carried out an operation to confiscate gold items from the Jews of the city of Trieste. Tamburini then appointed Caruso chief of police in Verona. There Caruso quickly launched repressive work against everyone suspected of anti-fascism or sympathy for the underground partisans of the Italian Resistance. His vigorous activity in Verona lasted barely a month.

Tamburini soon transferred his friend to even more responsible work, appointing him questore, or chief of police, of Rome. In the capital, Caruso did not disappoint his superiors. He cracked down ruthlessly on dissent. He became one of the main organizers of the Ardeatine massacre of March 24, 1944, the murder of 335 political prisoners, hostages, and civilians by the German SS in retaliation for a partisan attack on a German column.

Under Caruso, Rome saw a brutal persecution of Jews and of all representatives of the banned leftist parties, especially the Communists. Many Jewish residents of Rome were sent to German concentration camps. As was customary in such roundups, they were stripped of most of their property and allowed to take only what they could carry. In any case, upon arrival at the camps, their personal belongings and household goods were taken from them as well.

For Communists and underground workers, the chief of the Roman police had only one punishment: execution. Retribution nonetheless overtook the fascist policeman. On June 4, 1944, Allied troops liberated Rome. Caruso did not manage to escape.

Or perhaps he did not try, hoping that his services as a policeman would still be needed by the new masters of the city. Apparently he had heard a great deal about Churchill’s anti-communism and calculated that the Allies would keep a firm hand against the left. In that calculation, he was wrong. Caruso was arrested and brought to trial in the newly liberated Italy.

The resentment of the Roman public was so intense that residents once burst into the courtroom, wanting to take revenge on the fascist policeman by lynching him. The security detail managed to protect the accused. At the trial, testimony was heard from various witnesses. Documents that had fallen into the hands of the investigators were studied.

Everything pointed to Caruso’s guilt in numerous crimes and repressions against Italian citizens and against representatives of other countries who had found themselves in Italian captivity. On the conscience of the chief of police lay the organization of treacherous provocations and murders of anti-fascists, repressions against representatives of the dissolved leftist parties, and the persecution of Jews. The court did not delay its verdict. It was announced on September 21, 1944.

The chief of the fascist police of Rome was sentenced to death. The moment the verdict was read, Caruso fell ill. The fascist, apparently in a nervous collapse, lost the use of his legs. There was no delay in carrying out the sentence either.

The very next day, September 22, Caruso was driven by car outside of Rome to an undisclosed location. He walked to the place of execution on crutches. He was placed in a chair facing its back, his back exposed to the firing squad. He was tied to the chair with rope.

The commands were given. A volley was fired. A priest approached, read a prayer over the condemned man, and the death was declared. The body of the former chief of police of Rome was untied from the chair, placed in a box resembling a coffin, loaded into a car, and driven away to an unknown location.

So ended the days of the fascist henchman and executioner. The trial of Pietro Caruso was one of the first trials of a high-ranking fascist criminal, the opening act in a series of subsequent trials that took place throughout Europe in the months and years that followed the war.