Erich Priebke

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Erich Priebke in Rome

Erich Priebke (born July 29, 1913 in Hennigsdorf , Brandenburg province ; † October 11, 2013 in Rome , Italy ) was involved in the shooting of hostages at the Ardeatine Caves during World War II as a German SS Hauptsturmführer . He was sentenced to life imprisonment as a war criminal in Italy in 1998 , which was however commuted to house arrest for reasons of age .

Life

Until 1944

Priebke was a trained hotel manager and worked in various hotels in Europe until 1935. From 1933 he belonged to the NSDAP . When he returned to Germany in 1936, on the recommendation of a cousin, he became an interpreter and translator for Italian in the Gestapo's press office . He soon became a civil servant and was transferred to the Gestapo criminal service, where he was responsible for contact with other police services, especially with fascist Italy . In the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA) he was subsequently active in Office IV (“Research and Fight against Opponents”). He was transferred to Rome by Reinhard Heydrich because the commander of the Security Police and the SD of Rome, Herbert Kappler , had requested an employee. Priebke saw himself as “number two” behind Kappler. From February 1941 Priebke worked at the German embassy in Rome as a liaison officer to the Italian police, most recently with the rank of SS-Hauptsturmführer .

The massacre in the Ardeatine Caves

On March 23, 1944 , a group of the Resistancea carried out an assassination attempt on German soldiers of the SS police regiment "Bozen" in Via Rasella in occupied Rome . A remote-controlled bomb killed 33 soldiers and two uninvolved Italian passers-by. At Kappler's suggestion, the German army command in Italy decided to shoot 10 hostages for every German killed. On March 24, 1944, at the request of the Germans, the Italian command transferred 335 civilians who were shot in the Ardeatine Caves (Fosse Ardeatine) , an unused quarry near Rome. One of those involved was Erich Priebke. The higher officers of the SS, including Priebke, formed the firing squads and shot the first twelve victims with their own hands. Priebke then probably led the list from which the "death row inmates" were struck off after their shooting. After the shooting of the hostages in groups of five, Priebke discovered that five more civilians had been shot than intended.

After 1945

After the war, Priebke spent 20 months in English captivity on Italian soil. After fleeing the camp near Rimini , he lived undisturbed with his family in Sterzing until October 1948 . Then hid him Franciscans at the request of Bishop Alois Hudal in the Franciscan monastery of Bolzano . With the help of church authorities, Priebke obtained a passport from the International Red Cross under the false name "Otto Pape" from Latvia and thus escaped from Genoa to Argentina via the so-called "rat line" . There he soon lived again under his real name and with valid Argentine papers in Bariloche , where he became chairman of the sponsoring association of the German school and enjoyed a high reputation, especially in the German community. His fellow citizens were not fully aware of his past, and silence was maintained in the German embassy. After diplomatic relations between the Federal Republic of Germany and Argentina were resumed in 1952, Priebke received a German passport again. His involvement in the massacre in Italy was first mentioned in 1991 by Esteban Buch, who reported on Nazis who had lived in Bariloche since the 1950s. In 1993, German investigators filed an extradition request, and Priebke was placed under house arrest in Argentina . In 1994 he interviewed Sam Donaldson, a reporter for ABC News , after an investigation by the station determined his whereabouts. This sparked outrage among those who had not forgotten the massacre and Italy demanded his extradition.

Resumption of the investigation and trial in Italy

The Roman military prosecutor Antonino Intelisano, who was responsible for the district of Rome and did not belong to the general authority, accidentally discovered large quantities of yellowed files in a cupboard in the General Military Attorney's Office in Rome in 1994 during an investigation into the Erich Priebke case. This closet became known as the " closet of shame "; in it no less than 2,274 cases of forgotten Nazi war crimes in Italy had been “temporarily archived”.

In 1995 Priebke was transferred to Italy and acquitted in August 1996 after a trial before a military court in Rome. The acquittal led to global protests.

On October 15, 1996, the Court of Cassation declared the acquittal null and void. In a new trial, a sentence of 15 years was imposed. Due to amnesty laws, the sentence was reduced by ten years and at the same time the remand detention was credited. In the spring of 1998, Erich Priebke was finally sentenced to life imprisonment by a military appeals court in Rome. Despite his conviction, he remained unapologetic and claimed in an interview with the Süddeutsche Zeitung on May 3, 2000 : “The Wiesenthal Centers were the masterminds behind the staging that is taking place against me today ”.

After the sentencing

Due to his health, Priebke was serving his house arrest, which was not strictly enforced. At the beginning of June 2007, his lawyer managed to allow Priebke to move freely in Rome with restrictions and after announcing to the police. Amos Luzzatto , a leading representative of the Jewish community, accused the court of circumventing Priebke's prison sentence. On June 19, 2007, the easing of house arrest was withdrawn.

Priebke's defense attorneys pleaded an order emergency on his behalf , which the prosecution and the plaintiffs denied. Priebke's old age and poor health were cited by critics of the procedure as grounds for a pardon or amnesty .

For Priebke's 90th birthday in July 2003, his lawyer Paolo Giachini organized a public celebration.

In June 2010, Erich Priebke was discussed as a candidate of the NPD for the office of Federal President .

In October 2010, he was granted relief from prison. On July 24, 2013, the Italian newspaper La Repubblica published a video in its online edition showing Priebke with a companion and two bodyguards on a walk through Rome.

On the occasion of Priebke's 100th birthday, the Mayor of Rome, Ignazio Marino , advocated that this time there should not be a birthday party like ten years earlier. "Rome is obliged to preserve the memory of those who fought for the freedom of the city against the occupation by Nazi fascism and who fell victim to German terror," said Marino. The mayor responded to an appeal by the Association of Italian Partisans of World War II and the Jewish Community of Rome . There were clashes in front of Priebke's house in Rome, seven neo-Nazis were arrested.

Priebke remained a staunch National Socialist and showed no remorse for the massacre.

death

Erich Priebke died on October 11, 2013; most recently he lived in an apartment belonging to his lawyer.

Argentina refused to be buried in Bariloche, where Priebke lived for many years . The chairman of the Jewish community in Rome proposed that the body be transferred to Germany and buried at his birthplace in Hennigsdorf in Brandenburg . Hennigsdorf also refused with reference to the current cemetery statutes. Priebke is not a resident of the city and a special right to burial, for example in a family grave, cannot be recognized. Ultimately, the Catholic-traditionalist Brotherhood of St. Pius made one of its chapels in Albano Laziale near Rome available for a private funeral service. The funeral mass took place on October 15th, but had to be broken off after clashes between around 500 protesting residents and neo-Nazis who had arrived. The authorities then ordered Priebke to be buried in a secret location. Florian Abrahamowicz , a priest who was expelled from the Pius Brotherhood in 2009 for denying the Holocaust , later defended the funeral service in a radio interview with the words that Priebke was “my friend, a Christian, a loyal soldier”.

Fonts

  • Erich Priebke with Paolo Giachini: Autobiography: “Vae victis” , Rome: Associazione Uomo e Libertà, 2003.

literature

  • Joachim Staron: Fosse Ardeatine and Marzabotto. German war crimes and resistancea. History and national myth-making in Germany and Italy (1944–1999). Schöningh, Paderborn et al. 2002, ISBN 3-506-77522-7 . Full text online at Digi20 of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek.
  • Gerald Steinacher . Nazis on the run. How war criminals escaped overseas via Italy. 1946-1955. , StudienVerlag, Innsbruck u. a. 2008, ISBN 978-3-7065-4026-1 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Joachim Staron: Fosse Ardeatine and Marzabotto. German war crimes and resistancea. History and national myth-making in Germany and Italy (1944–1999). Schöningh, Paderborn et al. 2002, ISBN 3-506-77522-7 , p. 330f.
  2. ^ Joachim Staron: Fosse Ardeatine and Marzabotto. German war crimes and resistancea. History and national myth-making in Germany and Italy (1944–1999). Schöningh, Paderborn et al. 2002, ISBN 3-506-77522-7 , p. 67.
  3. ^ Joachim Staron: Fosse Ardeatine and Marzabotto. German war crimes and resistancea. History and national myth-making in Germany and Italy (1944–1999). Schöningh, Paderborn et al. 2002, ISBN 3-506-77522-7 , p. 66f.
  4. ↑ Herbert Lackner: "The swastika drivers: explosive details about the flight of high-ranking Nazi criminals" , profile online from August 13, 2008, accessed on August 28, 2011
  5. ↑ According to information provided by Graham to the Agenzia Nazionale Stampa Associata , May 10, 1994, quoted by Uki Goñi , Odessa: The true story
  6. ^ Esteban Buch (1991), El pintor de la Suiza Argentina, Editorial Sudamericana (Buenos Aires). ISBN 978-950-07-0663-6
  7. ↑ J. Friedrich: The atonement wants to be satisfied. The verdict against SS man Erich Priebke aroused outrage around the world. In: taz , August 12, 1996; Manfred Messerschmidt : Maybe a military justice case. Does the indignation about the mild sentence against SS-Hauptmann Erich Priebke conceal an atonement? In: taz, 17./18. August 1996; Gerhard Schreiber : The Priebke Case: Where's the Atonement? The guilt has been proven, but the protests against the verdict continue. In: Rheinischer Merkur , 23 August 1996
  8. ^ Quotation from Ernst Klee : Das Personenlexikon zum Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945 . Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, second updated edition, Frankfurt am Main 2005, ISBN 978-3-596-16048-8 , p. 473
  9. ↑ stern.de on August 11, 2005: Nazi criminal Priebke is on vacation in proper style ( memento of the original from October 16, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. ; accessed on October 20, 2013 @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.stern.de
  10. ^ Paul Kreiner: Freedoms of a prisoner Saxon newspaper, June 14, 2007
  11. ↑ Erich Priebke: When a war criminal turns 100 . Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger July 29, 2013.
  12. ^ Songwriter Frank Rennicke's revival campaign for a troubled party Zeit Online June 7, 2010
  13. ^ Article at Spiegel Online, accessed on October 6, 2010
  14. ↑ http://video.repubblica.it/cronaca/priebke-badante-e-bodyguard-la-passeggiata-a-roma/135797/134331
  15. ↑ Nazi criminal Erich Priebke turns 100 No regrets, but new fans ( Memento from July 31, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Tagesschau.de, accessed on July 29, 2013
  16. ↑ 100 years and still no regrets
  17. ↑ Süddeutsche from July 30, 2013; "Neo-Nazis celebrate 100th birthday of old Nazis"
  18. ^ Riots at Priebke's funeral ( memento from October 16, 2013 in the Internet Archive ), tagesschau from October 16, 2013
  19. ^ Former SS officer: Nazi war criminal Priebke is dead Spiegel Online, accessed on October 11, 2013
  20. ^ FAZ: Jewish community in Rome: Priebke buried in Germany
  21. ↑ Hennigsdorf sees no basis for burial of Nazi criminals ( memento of the original from October 15, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . In: Berliner Morgenpost , October 14, 2013.  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.morgenpost.de
  22. ↑ Piusbrüder enable funeral service for Nazi criminals in Spiegel online from October 15, 2013.
  23. ^ Franz Haas: Peace be to the mass murderer. nzz.ch, October 22, 2013, accessed on October 22, 2013
  24. ↑ Memorial service for Nazi war criminal Priebke canceled in Frankfurter Allgemeine on October 16, 2013
  25. ^ Outrage over priests defending Nazi criminal Priebke. In: derstandard.at . October 18, 2013, accessed October 18, 2013 .
personal data
SURNAME Priebke, Erich
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German SS officer
DATE OF BIRTH July 29, 1913
PLACE OF BIRTH Hennigsdorf
DATE OF DEATH October 11, 2013
Place of death Rome