Erich Priebke, a former German SS officer behind one of the worst massacres in Italy during World War II and an important figure in Italy’s struggle to reckon with its wartime past, died Friday in Rome. He was 100.
The Italian newspaper La Repubblica reported his death, citing an announcement by Priebke’s attorney.
In Rome, two sites have come to represent the battles and brutality that wracked the city and country during the war: Via Rasella, a street not far from the Trevi Fountain, and the Ardeatine Caves on the outskirts of the capital. Their significance in Priebke’s life became public five decades after the war, when ABC’s Sam Donaldson confronted him on camera about the following history:
Priebke was second in command at the Gestapo headquarters in Rome on March 23, 1944, when a bomb exploded in Via Rasella and killed as many as 33 Germans marching along the street.
That incident enraged the highest ranks of the Nazi leadership. Years later, Priebke would say that Adolf Hitler personally responded with the order to execute 10 Italians for every German killed.
Nazi troops in Rome, whose commanding officers included Priebke, exceeded that demand. Over the next 24 hours, they trucked 335 Italian men and boys out of the city and called them five at a time into the Ardeatine Caves where, by candlelight, they shot the victims in the back of the head.
Other atrocities claimed more Italian lives, but no mass killing in Italy was as methodical, said Alessandro Portelli, author of “The Order Has Been Carried Out,” a definitive account of the massacre and its transformative effect on Rome. Priebke admitted to killing two of the victims and checking off the others’ names as the troops led them in.
In July 1997, a military court convicted Priebke to 15 years, suspending all but five years. Priebke’s appeal of that ruling turned out to be a tactical mistake: The conviction was upheld, and he was sentenced to lifetime imprisonment. Because of his age, he served his term under house arrest.
