At Long Last, Nazi Faces Trial

Just months ago, the name of Erich Priebke lay in peace at the bottom of the world’s memory hole. The former SS captain who has admitted his role in one of the worst atrocities in Nazi-occupied Italy was lost in the ether of the past.

“Nobody ever mentioned him,” said Elvira Paladini, the curator of a small museum in Rome’s old Gestapo headquarters, a dreary stone building where relics of the massacre, including the personal effects of the victims, repose touchingly in glass cases: a monogram from a fine, hand-tailored shirt, a rope used to bind a pair of wrists, a father’s last letter to his son, urging him to always come home before curfew.

Now, Rome’s Historical Museum of the Liberation teems with visitors and their questions, and a sense of expectancy is abroad that after five decades, the Priebke case will be tried at last.

If Priebke’s trial begins today as scheduled in Rome, the 83-year-old may well be the last German ever prosecuted for Nazi-era war crimes.

A central, enduring lesson of the case, observers say, is the ease with which middle-ranking Nazis were able to elude apprehension after the war.

“We don’t want to persecute him, but history is about the truth, and we want the whole truth to come out,” said Paladini, whose husband, a wartime intelligence agent for the Allies, escaped death but had his ribs broken during torture sessions in an upstairs cell at the headquarters long ago.

Priebke, who slipped out of Europe in 1948 and resurfaced in Argentina only two years ago, is charged as a prime accomplice to the March 24, 1944, machine-gunning of 335 Italian civilians in retaliation for a Resistance bombing in Rome the day before that left 33 German soldiers dead. Hitler demanded 10 dead Italians for each dead German--and within 24 hours. Priebke is accused of shooting two and, significantly, of keeping the list of those to be killed.

No attempt was made to find the partisans who had tossed the bomb. The victims--most of whom were dragged out of prison cells, where they were awaiting sentencing on other Resistance-related charges--were roped together in small groups and herded into a quarry known as the Ardeatine Caves, south of Rome.

“As soon as the first 10 men went on their knees, the machine guns mowed them down,” said Eric Weiss, a former British staff sergeant who, at the end of World War II, interrogated participating German soldiers and drew up a detailed account. “They toppled over and fell into a kind of trench, and then the next batch was marched in.

“To heighten their agony, they could see before them, down below, the bodies of those on whom they would fall seconds later. This went on and on, the whole night. The air was filled with the screaming of those who were on the verge of insanity when entering their tomb, and those who lay already on the heap of bodies but were only mortally wounded and not yet dead.”

Weiss, retired and living in Portland, Ore., gave his notes to the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles last year after an Argentine court ruled that Priebke could be extradited to stand trial in Italy.

The Ardeatine Caves atrocity may seem minor when compared with the Nazi record in, say, Poland, where millions died; as mass murders go, it is not even the biggest in wartime Italy. (That grim distinction goes to a German punitive operation around the village of Marzabotto, where as many as 1,800 men, women and children were killed.)

Nor were the quarry slayings necessarily of a piece with the Nazi plan of extinguishing European Jewry: Although about 75 of the victims were Jewish, almost all the rest were Roman Catholics. (Some of the victims remain unidentified.)

Nonetheless, the massacre is of huge emotional importance in Italy, where presidents each year still lay a wreath at the site, and where uncomfortable questions still are asked about the role of the Holy See in accommodating fascism.

And Paladini isn’t the only observer hoping the trial will be a reminder to a world whose attention has moved on.

“The importance is not the fate of this 83-year-old man,” said Tullia Zevi, an Italian Jewish community leader in Rome. “The importance of this is that we can interrogate the defendant, ask certain witnesses to appear and broaden the scope of the trial. It is our duty to document things as they were. This is important today, when the trend [in the apportioning of war guilt] is toward revisionism.”

At the end of World War II, Priebke found himself in a British prisoner-of-war camp on the Adriatic coast. But he escaped with four other inmates and headed for the northern town of Vipiteno.

There, he lived unemployed for about a year. Asked who supported him, his lawyer, Velio di Rezze, credits “friends” the SS captain had made in wartime Rome, when he served as a liaison officer between the Vatican and the occupying German forces.

It is precisely the nature and role of such friendships that Priebke’s opponents would like to probe, in hopes of clarifying long-standing suspicions that ranking Roman Catholics, lay and clerical, helped Nazis like him escape prosecution.

Priebke’s commanding officer, Col. Herbert Kappler, was put on trial in postwar Rome; in 1948 he was sentenced to life imprisonment for the Ardeatine Caves atrocity, but his wife eventually busted him out of a hospital lockup, and he died a fugitive in 1978.

Priebke, meanwhile, wangled sea passage to Argentina for his family. A court-martial warrant remained outstanding against him in Italy until 1962, when federal prosecutors abandoned hope of finding him.

He could have been found, though, had anyone bothered to look.

Arriving in Juan Peron’s Argentina in 1949, Priebke was a dishwasher, and later, when he had learned enough restaurant Spanish to wait tables, he worked his way up to waiter and maitre d’. When he had scraped together enough to buy his own business, he opened a delicatessen in the mountain resort of San Carlos de Bariloche and became, in the minds of many residents, a successful businessman and pillar of the community.

Always under his own name, he presided over the German-Argentine Cultural Assn.--which has sponsored a private school--and appeared at the German Embassy in Buenos Aires every few years to have his passport renewed.

Even though Germany’s Central Office of State Justice Administration, a repository of Nazi war crimes cases, opened a file on Priebke in 1963, no one connected the former SS captain of Rome with the upstanding burgher of Bariloche.

“He even went back to Germany for Kappler’s funeral,” complained Pietro Nicotera, a lawyer for the relatives of the Ardeatine Caves victims. “There were never any restrictions against him at all.”

To Priebke, all this means is that he had nothing to hide--ergo, that he did nothing wrong.

“I [was] not running away from any accusation,” he said in a letter published last month in the leading Italian newspaper, Corriere della Sera, trying to explain why he moved to South America. “It was simply impossible to go from Vipiteno to [his former home in] Berlin [in 1949], because that city was completely destroyed. We had no relatives elsewhere in Germany who could take us in. So I came to Argentina with my wife and two children and nothing in my pockets but my two bare hands.”

As for the killings, Priebke has admitted that he was there, but he justifies his involvement by saying that he was obeying orders.

Indeed, postwar interrogator Weiss wrote in his account that there were not many full-fledged SS guards in Rome at the time of the massacre and that Kappler had a great deal of killing to do in the 24 hours allotted to him. “He had to think of some way to cope with his manpower problem,” Weiss said, “so he ordered the Gestapo clerical staff--all the typists and filing clerks in SS uniform--to take their part in the human target practice.

“It soon became clear that these pen-pushing SS men were not made of the proper stuff to do that kind of work,” Weiss added. “They soon started shaking like reeds, and many vomited and fainted on the spot. Thus, the longer the infernal spectacle went on, the more the victims were only wounded by the wildly veering machine guns in those incompetent, trembling hands.”

Priebke confessed to pulling the trigger twice during the nightlong massacre.

“If anyone tried to get out of this horrible business, he was told he would be shot,” said Di Rezze, his lawyer. “Priebke is the only one alive anymore, so now he’s got everything on his shoulders.”

But Nazi hunters say that Priebke’s long disappearance suggests nothing about his innocence of any crime and everything about the world’s unwillingness to go after German war criminals.

There is “a case file on any Nazi who has ever been looked for,” said Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean of the Wiesenthal Center. “The Catch-22 is, there are no detectives in the field.

“The day after Nuremberg ended, the determination of the Allies to bring Nazi war criminals to justice dropped down to zero,” added Hier, referring to the international war crimes trials conducted in 1945 and 1946, in which some of the most powerful Nazis were held to account for their wrongdoing.

Certainly, Argentina has often seemed a kind of Bermuda Triangle for Nazis on the run. Far bigger fish than Priebke ended up there: Josef Mengele, the Auschwitz physician known as the “Angel of Death” for his performance of evil-minded medical experiments on death camp inmates, reached Argentina in May 1949 and reportedly made a living as an abortion doctor there for 11 years. By the time the Argentine authorities bothered to issue an arrest warrant, he had moved to Brazil, where authorities and international investigators say he died in 1979.

In the late 1940s, the United States received a tip that Hitler deputy Martin Bormann was hiding in Argentina too, although Bormann was never found. And Adolf Eichmann, the handyman in chief of the Final Solution, lived peacefully in Argentina until 1960, when Israeli agents stole him away to Israel. Eichmann was tried and hanged.

But Hier said all Western countries--not just Argentina--should share the blame for letting lesser Nazis disappear, unpunished, in the postwar era.

“They had other agendas,” he said. “In America, the Cold War was intensifying. In France, people didn’t want to delve too deeply into the Vichy years. In postwar Italy, it was very difficult [economic] times.

“If the Allies had had the determination in the first 10 years after the war to really go after Nazi war criminals, then tens of thousands could have been apprehended,” he said. “But it just didn’t happen, because of a lack of political will. So the Nazis had a picnic. They thought nobody was looking for them. And the proof of the pudding was how easy it was to find someone like Priebke.”

Priebke’s occupancy of a cell in a military prison outside Rome today is not the fruit of super-sleuthing by any Western government prosecutor. It happened by a fluke, while an ABC News crew was preparing a segment on another Nazi fugitive in Bariloche.

As Hier tells it, an agent of the Wiesenthal Center working in Germany had heard that a man named Reinhard Kops was living in Argentina under an assumed name. Kops, Hier said, had helped spirit Nazi fugitives out of Europe and into Argentina at the end of World War II.

The center couldn’t do anything with the tip, because it appeared that Kops couldn’t be linked to war crimes. But word of his whereabouts made its way to ABC reporter Sam Donaldson, who showed up in Bariloche with a camera crew and confronted Kops on the street. Under rapid-fire querying from Donaldson, Kops finally admitted his identity but then asked the journalists why they were bothering with a nobody like him when he could lead them to Priebke.

Donaldson’s scoop woke up the international legal community, and the rest has been a matter of extraditing Priebke, selecting a venue for his trial and finding elderly witnesses willing to testify.

None of this has been easy. Leading to today’s scheduled opening of the trial, pro-Hitler graffiti has been appearing on Roman walls, and some witnesses and victims’ relatives say they are receiving anonymous death threats.

The trial is expected to last less than a month; the outcome is anything but certain. Central to Priebke’s defense will be the 1948 sentencing of Kappler: The judge found him solely responsible for the massacre. Priebke’s lawyer said he also will cite what he asserts is an exculpating article of the Italian penal code governing the treatment of soldiers who follow orders during war.

“This is just a technical defense,” Di Rezze said. “I’m on the side of the victims, because it’s the only way you can be.”

If the defense fails, the elderly Priebke could draw a life sentence. But that isn’t really the point, said Paladini, the museum curator.

“Man has this terrible disease in his soul,” she said, sitting at a wooden table surrounded by her faded letters and sad black-and-white wartime photos, just one floor down from where her husband was tortured so many years ago. “We get crueler and crueler, and we don’t ever seem to learn anything.”

The modern-day horrors of the former Yugoslav federation and Rwanda are on her mind, she said. But maybe the orderly, plain-view conclusion of the Priebke affair can change something: “If the truth comes out, then maybe people will improve and we won’t do these things anymore.”