JUST a couple of hundred metres past my daughter's school at La Storta on the outskirts of Rome, there is a small war memorial.
Given the pressure of traffic along the Via Cassia, the memorial plaque is inevitably largely ignored, situated in a tiny park at the end of a nondescript, dusty suburban road.
The plaque recalls the events of June 4th, 1944, when 14 Italian prisoners were summarily executed by Nazi troops. The prisoners had been taken from the SS detention centre of Via Tasso in Rome and loaded on to four lorries on the first leg of a journey which would presumably have taken them to concentration camps in Germany.
The lorries got no farther than the outskirts of Rome before one of them broke down. The soldiers attempted a hasty but futile repair job.
At that point, the SS officer in charge of the convoy resolved the problem of his "cargo" by lining up the 14 prisoners and shooting them.
The name of the SS officer was, allegedly, Erich Priebke, the 82 year old former SS captain currently on trial in Rome for his part in the even more grisly Ardeatine Caves massacre, where 335 civilians were executed in a March 1944 reprisal killing.
Attention to the almost forgotten La Storta killings was revived last week when the 84 year old former SS intelligence chief in Rome, Karl Hass, arrived to testify at Priebke's trial.
For it is Hass who has accused Priebke of not only having taken part in the Ardeatine Caves massacre, but also of having ordered the La Storta executions. He furthermore accused Priebke of having "entrapped" King Vittorio Emmanuele's daughter, Mafalda di Savoia, in September 1943. She subsequently died in Buchenwald concentration camp.
Karl Hass is hardly an angel. He, too, is wanted for his alleged part in the Ardeatine Caves massacre. A warrant for his arrest had been issued by the Allied military authorities in 1946. But he escaped capture and had long been presumed dead.
It was Priebke himself who drew attention to Hass during a preliminary hearing in April when he spoke of a meeting with the former intelligence chief, a meeting which could have taken place only after Hass's presumed death.
Further investigation this spring revealed that Hass was alive and well and living in Geneva, Switzerland, and, what is much more remarkable, had been living just outside Milan until some time this year.
Karl Hass arrived in Rome last Thursday and immediately had a four hour interview with a state prosecutor, Antonio Intelisano, the man who has brought the case against Priebke. Then Hass went to his Rome hotel, accompanied by two special services policemen who remained "on guard" in the lobby.
For reasons that as yet remain unclear, Hass appeared to change his mind during the night about his willingness to testify. At about four in the morning, he attempted to escape from the hotel by climbing out on to the first floor terrace via a fire escape and sliding down a potted palm to the hotel pavement.
Perhaps this was the sort of stunt that the younger Hass would have pulled off in style. On this occasion he got his calculations painfully wrong, falling heavily from 10 feet up and breaking his pelvis.
Why did he do it? The media claimed that he had received veiled threats and obscure messages in the last week, speculating that a modern day "Odessa" rat line had moved into action to protect a former Nazi (Priebke) who was about to be betrayed by another Nazi (Hass).
Remarkably, Prosecutor Intelisano does not entirely dismiss this interpretation of events, confirming that in the last week persons unknown did attempt to contact Hass, passing themselves off as journalists, and adding.
"The suspicion is that someone wanted to ... send a message to Hass or to psychologically intimidate him ... As for the Odessa line, that is certainly not an abnormal hypothesis but, as of today, I'm not in a position to say, Yes, the threats against Hass came from that source'."
A disturbing aspect of the Priebke trial has always been the unanswered questions as to how the former SS captain managed to live and prosper in Argentina, under his own name, for more than 40 years.
Was Italy reluctant to push for his extradition? Was Argentina willing to turn a blind eye?
Furthermore, Erich Priebke has always claimed that he was helped (by the Vatican among others) to escape from Italy to Argentina in 1948. Is some form of that "rat line" still alive and well?
According to some, the answer is resoundingly "Yes". Shimon Samuels of the Simon Wiesenthal centre in Paris, persecuted Chilean writer Luis Sepulveda and Israeli investigative journalist Yaron Svaroy are just three who this week have argued that the Odessa support line, while radically different in organisation and personnel, still exists both to help former Nazis and to promote right wing, fascist ideals.
Against the background of those claims, today's session of the Priebke trial will be closely monitored. For, despite his hotel fall, Karl Hass is still scheduled to testify, albeit from a hospital bed.
His testimony could be among the most interesting yet heard at this complex, painful trial.