Pope Benedict XVI on Sunday visited the site of a Nazi massacre near Rome in which 335 Italians including Catholics and Jews were killed in 1944.
After kneeling and praying in the cave where the victims of the massacre are buried, he said the site was "a painful monument to the most horrendous evil."
"I have come to pay homage to these brothers," the pope said after reading out prayers by the graves along with Rome's chief rabbi Riccardo Di Segni.
He said the killings were "a very grave offence against God" and condemned "the most horrendous evil" and the "blind violence" behind the massacre.
Benedict read out a note written by one victim that was found at the site in which the man prayed for the Jews to be saved from persecution.
He said the message carried "the possibility of a different future, free from hatred and revenge, a future of freedom and fraternity."
"Whatever people he belongs to, man is the son of the Father who is in heaven, he is the brother of everyone in humanity," the pope said.
The Pope visit to the Fosse Ardeatine, on the outskirts of Rome, won Jewish praise that Benedict had taken yet another step to heal centuries of painful Vatican-Jewish relations.
The Fosse Ardeatine was the place of the killings on March 24, in 1944 of 335 civilians in Rome to avenge an attack by resistance fighters that killed 33 members of a Nazi military police unit.
The victims of this massacre included Italian army officers, resistance fighters, innocent civilians and 75 members of the city’s Jewish community. The youngest victim was 15 years old.
"What happened here is a very grave offense to God, because it is violence perpetrated by man upon man," the pope said in speech at the simple memorial fashioned out of the walls of the caves. "It is the most abominable effect of the war, of every war," the pontiff said.
The wounds are still fresh for Rome's tiny Jewish community. Many of them expressed outrage last fall when former SS Capt. Erich Priebke, 97, was allowed to go shopping and to church in Rome. Priebke, extradited to Italy from Argentina where he had lived for years, was put on trial and sentenced to life imprisonment for his role in the massacre but later given house arrest due to his age.
The Germans had ordered 10 Italians to be executed for each of the 33 Nazis killed by resistance forces in Rome a day earlier. Priebke admitted shooting two people and rounding up victims, but insisted he was only following orders.
Elan Steinberg, a leader of the American Gathering of Holocaust Survivors and their Descendants, praised the pontiff for paying "moving homage to the victims of this Nazi crime — Catholic and Jew."
"Coming on the heels of his strong pronouncement exonerating Jews in the death of Jesus, this latest gesture by the German-born Benedict is a further dramatic step in binding the wounds that have disturbed Vatican-Jewish relations in recent years," Steinberg said in a statement.
The landmark exoneration came in the pope's new book, "Jesus of Nazareth-Part II," in which Benedict lays out biblical and theological reasons why there is no basis in Scripture for the argument that Jewish people as a whole were responsible for Jesus' crucifixion. Interpretations to the contrary have been used for centuries to justify the persecution of Jews.
Steinberg also voiced the "shock and disbelief" of Holocaust survivors that Priebke "is allowed shopping trips and other excursions," and appealed to legal authorities to "put an end to this perversion of justice.'"
Benedict, who visited the Auschwitz concentration camp in 2006, is the third pope to visit the Fosse Adreatine after Paul VI in 1965 and John Paul II in 1982.