Erich Priebke was a captain in the SS who served in the German Security Police in Rome during the occupation. On March 24, 1944, the occupying forces killed 335 men and boys in reprisal for a partisan attack in the city the day before. Priebke helped compile the lists of those to be killed, kept those lists on the day and, by his own admission, killed two of the victims himself. Italian courts know the case by the name of the place on the southern edge of the city where it happened, the Fosse Ardeatine.
For half a century nothing happened to him. He slipped out of a British prisoner-of-war camp in 1946, reached Argentina in 1948 and lived there under his own name, much of that time in the resort town of Bariloche. In the spring of 1994 an American television crew found him and put the question to him on camera. Within days he was under arrest. Argentina sent him to Italy in November 1995, and over the next three years he was tried, released, retried and finally sentenced. On March 7, 1998, the military court of appeal in Rome sentenced him to "ergastolo," life imprisonment, for aggravated and continuing homicide in complicity, and on November 16, 1998, the Court of Cassation rejected his appeal. Because of his age he served the sentence under house arrest in Rome. He died there on October 11, 2013, at the age of 100.
Priebke was born on July 29, 1913, in Hennigsdorf, in Brandenburg. After primary school in Hennigsdorf he served a commercial apprenticeship at the Hotel Esplanade in Berlin.
The trade took him abroad. From 1933 to 1935 he worked as a hotel secretary at a grand hotel in Rapallo on the Italian Riviera, and in 1935 he worked at the Savoy in London. On July 1, 1933, while he was in Italy, he joined the Nazi Party through its Foreign Organization.
In 1936 he returned to Berlin and worked briefly as a commercial clerk for the armaments firm Rheinmetall-Borsig. On December 1, 1936, he entered the Gestapo. He joined the SS in 1937, became a Kriminalassistent in January 1938 and moved into the main office of the Security Service in April 1940. That year he was promoted twice, to SS-Untersturmführer in April and SS-Obersturmführer in December, and from August 1940 he served as a Kriminalkommissar in Department IV of the Reich Main Security Office.
He was then posted to Rome, presumably for his Italian, to the police attaché's office at the German embassy, under Herbert Kappler. His work there was administrative: files, minutes and translations. By the time German forces occupied Rome after Italy's armistice with the Allies on September 8, 1943, Kappler commanded the Security Police and Security Service in the city, and Priebke served under him. He received the Iron Cross Second Class for his part in locating Mussolini in 1943, and in November of that year he was promoted to SS-Hauptsturmführer, the rank of captain. By early 1944 he was Kappler's deputy.
On March 23, 1944, partisans of the armed Roman resistance attacked a column of German police troops of the "Bozen" regiment in central Rome. The attack killed 26 men outright, and the toll rose to 32 within hours and to 33 by the next day.
The German high command ordered a collective reprisal: ten Italians for every German killed. The order came from Hitler's headquarters, and the task of carrying it out fell to Kappler. His office drew up lists of men to be killed. The first list, ten for each of the 32 dead, held 320 names; when another of the wounded died, Kappler added ten more.
On March 24, 1944, 335 men and boys were killed. None of them had taken part in the attack. The Argentine Supreme Court, working from the documents Italy supplied with its extradition request, set out who they were. One hundred fifty-four were held at the disposal of the German military tribunal while under police investigation. Twenty-three were held at that tribunal's disposal awaiting trial. Three had been condemned to death by it and sixteen sentenced by it to terms of between one and fifteen years. Seventy-five were Jews, taken because they were Jews. Forty had been arrested for political reasons and were held at the disposal of the German police command, and ten more were held there for reasons of public security. Ten had been arrested near the scene of the partisan attack. One had been acquitted by the German military tribunal. Three were never identified. The Argentine court described them as civilians and soldiers who had no part in the fighting, most of them Italian citizens.
The number itself told a further story. The reprisal's own terms called for 330, and five men were killed beyond even that ratio. The Italian courts later found that Priebke knew of the five. His role was the lists. With Kappler he helped prepare them, and on the day he was in charge of them. The Court of Cassation would find in 1998 that he coordinated the killings "in posizione di assoluta preminenza organizzativa," in a position of absolute organizational preeminence, and was present from beginning to end. Because the lists were his, the court held him responsible for the five as well, men who had been killed, in the court's words, to "eliminare testimoni pericolosi," to eliminate dangerous witnesses.
Priebke never denied being there. In 1994 he admitted to the television crew that found him that he had been present, and at his second trial he admitted killing two men with his own hand. He always maintained that he had acted on an order he could not refuse.
When the Germans left Rome in June 1944, Priebke went north with Kappler's office, first to Verona and then to Brescia, where he led the local post of the Security Police and Security Service. American forces captured him at Bolzano on May 13, 1945. He gave his real name.
He spent about twenty months in British custody at a camp near Rimini and escaped in 1946. He stayed for a time in Vipiteno, the South Tyrolean town the Germans call Sterzing. In October 1948 he found refuge in a Franciscan monastery in Bolzano, with help arranged through a bishop. He obtained a Red Cross travel document in the name of "Otto Pape" and left for Argentina later that year by the escape route that carried a number of former Nazis to South America.
Kappler had not escaped justice. An Italian military tribunal sentenced him to life imprisonment in 1948 for the reprisal. He escaped to Germany in 1977 and died there.
In Argentina, Priebke worked first as a waiter in Buenos Aires and then at a hotel in San Carlos de Bariloche, the Andean resort town with a large German-speaking community. Later he ran a butcher's shop there. After West Germany and Argentina restored relations in 1952, he obtained a German passport and a German war pension. He chaired the association of its German school.
He lived openly and used his own name. In 1993 he dined with two Italian members of the European Parliament who did not know who he was. Italy had issued a warrant for him after the war in connection with the reprisal, but it had never been served.
In the spring of 1994 an American television news team, working with help from the Simon Wiesenthal Center, traced Priebke to Bariloche. The interview was recorded in the town and broadcast in early May. He confirmed that he had served in the Security Police in Rome and that he had been present at the reprisal, and he said he had been following orders.
Italy moved within days. A military prosecutor in Rome found the old, unexecuted wartime warrant and the Italian Justice Ministry opened formal extradition proceedings. The investigating judge at the Rome military tribunal issued a new order for his arrest on May 9, 1994, and he was detained in Bariloche. Because of his age and health, Priebke was held under house arrest in Bariloche while the request was heard. The Argentine government said publicly that it would hand him over if the request was in order.
Italy's request described the charge in the words of its own military law. Priebke was accused of having, as a member of the German armed forces hostile to the Italian state, together with Kappler and other German soldiers and in a series of acts in pursuit of a single criminal design, acted with cruelty toward the victims and caused the deaths of 335 people, most of them Italian citizens, soldiers and civilians who were taking no part in military operations, in Rome on March 24, 1944, during the state of war between Italy and Germany.
On May 4, 1995, the federal judge in Bariloche granted the request. On appeal, in August 1995, the federal court of appeals at General Roca reversed the decision by two votes to one. The majority held that the extradition treaty with Italy drew no distinction between homicide, war crimes and crimes against humanity, that the case was one of homicide, and that under Argentina's fifteen-year limitation for homicide the prosecution had lapsed long before. The dissenting judge called the case one of war crimes committed during a war and on the occasion of a war, and so beyond any limitation period. The public prosecutor took the case to the Supreme Court.
On November 2, 1995, the Supreme Court of Argentina decided case 16.063/94, "Priebke, Erich s/ solicitud de extradición," by six votes to three. The controlling opinion held that the killing of 75 Jews who were neither prisoners of war nor held for any tribunal or police authority, among the 335 dead, "configura prima facie delito de genocidio," constituted prima facie the crime of genocide. The classification of crimes against humanity, the court held, depended not on the will of the requesting or the requested state but on the principles of ius cogens of international law, and on that footing there was no limitation period for crimes of that kind. Its operative words were these: "se revoca la sentencia apelada y se hace lugar a la extradición de Erich Priebke por la muerte de las trescientas treinta y cinco personas, por la que fuera solicitada." The appeals court judgment was reversed, and Priebke's extradition was granted for the deaths of the 335 people for whom it had been sought.
He left Argentina on November 20, 1995, fifty years to the day after the opening of the Nuremberg trials, and was flown to Rome.
Priebke went on trial before the military tribunal of Rome in May 1996, at the age of 82. The charge was "concorso in violenza con omicidio continuato in danno di cittadini italiani," complicity in violence with continuing homicide against Italian citizens, under the military penal code of war. He admitted taking part and said he had obeyed an order he could not have refused.
During the trial, prosecutors and lawyers for the victims' families asked for the presiding judge to be removed for bias in the defendant's favor. A lower court rejected the request, and the trial went on.
On August 1, 1996, the tribunal gave its verdict. It found Priebke guilty of taking part in the killings but excluded the aggravating circumstances of premeditation and cruelty, granted him general mitigating circumstances, the "attenuanti generiche," held them equivalent to the aggravations that remained, and on that basis declared the offense extinguished by the passage of time. Proceedings could not continue, and the tribunal ordered his release.
He did not leave the building. Relatives of the victims had heard the verdict in a crowded corridor, scores of protesters tried to force their way into the courthouse, and Priebke stayed inside the courthouse for about eight hours while the government considered what to do. Germany had issued its own warrant for him through the prosecutors in Dortmund, with an extradition request, and the Justice Minister ordered him rearrested on that basis. On August 2 he was taken to a prison in Rome. The terms of his extradition from Argentina barred his transfer to any third country, and Argentina's foreign minister said he was no longer an Argentine resident, so the German request stayed in suspense while the Italian case went on.
The military prosecutors and the civil parties took the bias challenge to the Court of Cassation. On October 15, 1996, Italy's highest court overturned the ruling that had refused to remove the presiding judge and, with it, annulled the August judgment. A new trial was ordered. On February 10, 1997, the Court of Cassation settled a dispute over jurisdiction and held that the retrial belonged to the military courts.
By then Priebke had a co-defendant. Karl Hass, a former SS major, had testified for the prosecution at the first trial and admitted taking part in the reprisal. In late 1996 the military prosecutor in Rome began proceedings against him, and the two men were tried together. The second trial opened in April 1997. Priebke was held under house arrest in a religious house outside Rome during the hearings. In June 1997 he read a long statement to the court. He said the order had come from Hitler, that he could not have avoided carrying it out, that his own death would not have saved a single victim, and that he had never killed anyone before or after that day.
On July 22, 1997, the military tribunal of Rome convicted both men. It held that no limitation period applies to war crimes. It sentenced Priebke to fifteen years and reduced the term to five; Hass received ten years and eight months, reduced to eight months, and because he had already spent about that long under arrest he was released. The prosecution had asked for life for Priebke and 24 years for Hass. Both sides appealed: the prosecution for heavier sentences, and Priebke, he said, to clear his name.
The military court of appeal of Rome heard the appeals early in 1998. Before the verdict Priebke read a statement lasting about fifty minutes. He said that it did not matter who he was or what he had done, only what he represented, and that Germany, where he was born, had taken away his passport and wanted to put him on trial.
On March 7, 1998, the court gave judgment. It defined the offense as "concorso in violenza con omicidio aggravato e continuato," complicity in violence with aggravated and continuing homicide, under articles 13 and 185 of the military penal code of war, read with articles 81, 110, 575, 577 numbers 3 and 4, and 61 number 4 of the penal code, in the deaths of "335 (trecentotrentacinque) persone." It found premeditation proved against Priebke, who had helped prepare the lists and the plan before the order was carried out, and held that the aggravating circumstance of cruelty applied to both men. It found it "inconfutabilmente provato," proved beyond refutation, that Priebke had worked with Kappler on the lists, and it held him responsible for the five killed beyond the ordered number.
The operative part reads: "in parziale riforma della sentenza impugnata, escluse per entrambi gli imputati le circostanze attenuanti," setting aside, for both defendants, the mitigating circumstances the tribunal had allowed, and then: "CONDANNA Karl Hass ed Erich Priebke alla pena dell'ergastolo e, in solido, alle spese del secondo grado di giudizio, con ogni altra conseguenza di legge." Both men were sentenced to life imprisonment and ordered jointly to pay the costs of the appeal. Because a crime punishable by life imprisonment is not subject to the limitation rule of the penal code, the court held that the question of time no longer arose. Priebke was 84.
Both men appealed to the Court of Cassation. The First Criminal Section heard the case on November 16, 1998. The deputy military prosecutor general asked the court to annul the judgment in part, on the mitigating circumstances alone, and send it back for a new hearing on that point. The court declined. Its decision, number 12595 of 1998, reads: "Rigetta i ricorsi degli imputati e li condanna al pagamento in solido delle spese processuali." The defendants' appeals were rejected and they were ordered jointly to pay the costs. On a narrow point of one civil party's costs the court annulled the appeal judgment without remand. The life sentences were final.
The court's reasons answered the defense one argument at a time. The order to kill was so plainly criminal that no defense of obedience could stand: under article 40 of the military penal code of peace, a subordinate who carries out an order whose execution "costituisce manifestamente reato," manifestly constitutes a crime, is liable for it. The killings violated "diritto bellico," the law of war, and "dei più elementari principi umanitari," the most elementary humanitarian principles. The plea of necessity failed because "Non vi è alcuna prova in atti," there was no evidence in the record, of any real threat to the officers' lives had they refused. Premeditation and cruelty were upheld against both. The court refused the mitigation for officers acting under a superior's pressure, finding that the officers had acted in "concorde collaborazione," in concerted collaboration, and it refused general mitigation because of the extreme gravity of the crime.
Priebke spent little of his sentence in prison. Because of his age, the courts allowed him to serve it under house arrest in Rome, in his last years at the residence of one of his lawyers, under constant police protection.
The conditions changed several times, and the small freedoms he was granted angered Rome's Jewish community. In June 2007, at 93, he was given permission to leave each day to work in his lawyer's office as a translator and clerk. A military judge soon suspended the permit, finding that the defense had not properly told the authorities how and when he would travel, and the permission was later withdrawn. From 2009 he was allowed out to shop, to go to the pharmacy and to attend church.
His hundredth birthday, on July 29, 2013, brought protests and clashes in Rome. At that time a civil suit by victims' families seeking compensation was still in progress.
Erich Priebke died in Rome on October 11, 2013, at the age of 100, still under house arrest and still serving his life sentence. His lawyer announced the death and released a final written interview and video statement, recorded that July, in which Priebke denied the established facts of the Nazi genocide of the Jews. A funeral arranged for October 15, 2013, in Albano Laziale, south of Rome, was halted amid protests.
Every stage of the Priebke case turned on time. Under Italian law a crime punishable by life imprisonment cannot be extinguished by prescription; a lesser one can. The charge itself, homicide in complicity under the military penal code of war, carried life only with aggravating circumstances such as premeditation and cruelty. When the tribunal of 1996 excluded those aggravations and weighed the remaining ones as merely equal to the general mitigating circumstances, the offense fell within a limitation period of thirty years, which had run out decades earlier. The court of appeal and the Court of Cassation reversed that chain of reasoning at its root: with premeditation and cruelty proved and no mitigation allowed, the penalty was life, and prescription did not apply.
Argentina's courts faced the same question in another form. Italy argued that its law provided life imprisonment, which could not lapse; the General Roca court held that Argentine law gave homicide a fifteen-year limit. The Supreme Court resolved the conflict by classifying the conduct as a crime against humanity, governed by peremptory rules of international law that no state's limitation statute could override.
Priebke's central claim, made in Bariloche in 1994 and repeated at both trials, was that he had acted under orders and would himself have been killed had he refused. The tribunal of 1997 accepted that he acted under orders as a mitigating circumstance. The court of appeal rejected the claim of necessity, finding no real threat to him from his superiors, and the Court of Cassation held there was no evidence of any such threat.
He was also suspected of other conduct in Rome, including mistreatment of political prisoners and a part in the deportation of Jews from Italy. He was never charged with any of it, and no court made a finding on it.
His own account of his part in the reprisal changed over time. In the 1994 interview he admitted being present but denied taking part in the killings; at trial he admitted killing two men.
July 29, 1913: Erich Priebke is born in Hennigsdorf, Brandenburg.
July 1, 1933: He joins the Nazi Party while working in the hotel trade in Italy.
December 1, 1936: He enters the Gestapo; he joins the SS in 1937.
November 1943: He is promoted to SS-Hauptsturmführer while serving under Herbert Kappler in Rome.
March 23, 1944: A partisan attack in Rome kills 33 German police troops.
March 24, 1944: 335 men and boys are killed in Rome in reprisal; Priebke helps prepare and keep the lists.
May 13, 1945: American forces capture him at Bolzano.
1946: He escapes from British custody near Rimini.
1948: Kappler is sentenced to life by an Italian military tribunal; Priebke leaves Italy for Argentina.
May 1994: An American television crew interviews him in Bariloche; he is arrested and held under house arrest.
May 4, 1995: A federal judge in Bariloche grants Italy's extradition request.
August 1995: The federal court of appeals at General Roca reverses the extradition, two votes to one.
November 2, 1995: The Supreme Court of Argentina grants extradition, six votes to three.
November 20, 1995: He is flown from Argentina to Rome.
May 1996: His first trial opens before the military tribunal of Rome.
August 1, 1996: The tribunal finds him guilty but declares the offense time-barred and orders his release; he is rearrested on a German warrant.
October 15, 1996: The Court of Cassation annuls the August judgment and orders a new trial.
February 10, 1997: The Court of Cassation assigns the retrial to the military courts.
April 1997: The retrial of Priebke and Karl Hass opens.
July 22, 1997: The military tribunal of Rome sentences Priebke to fifteen years, reduced to five.
March 7, 1998: The military court of appeal of Rome sentences Priebke and Hass to life imprisonment.
November 16, 1998: The Court of Cassation rejects their appeals; the life sentences become final.
June 2007: A permit to work outside house arrest is granted, then suspended and later withdrawn.
2009: He is allowed out to shop, visit the pharmacy and attend church.
July 29, 2013: His hundredth birthday brings protests in Rome.
October 11, 2013: Erich Priebke dies in Rome, under house arrest, at 100.
October 15, 2013: A planned funeral in Albano Laziale is halted amid protests.