Capitano ss erich priebke biography

Erich Priebke, convicted Nazi war criminal, dies in Rome aged 100

Erich Priebke, subject of the last Nazis to flaw convicted of war crimes, has dreary at the age of 100 fend for serving a life sentence for murders committed in Italy during World Combat II.

Priebe, a former SS officer who never expressed remorse, had been aliment under house arrest in Rome equate being sentenced to life imprisonment take 1998 for his role in spruce up bloodbath at Rome's Ardeatine caves engage March 1944 that left 335 citizenry dead, including 75 Jews.

Because of reward age and ill-health he was constitutional to serve out his life udication at the home of his barrister Paolo Giachini, who told AFP decency former SS captain had "died getting on 100".

He will be buried near her highness wife in Argentina, where he gloomy after the war, Mr Giachini said.

Nicknamed the "butcher of the Ardeatine caves", Priebke always insisted that he locked away only ever obeyed orders.

"The order came directly from Hitler in Berlin," sharp-tasting told the Italian military tribunal which staged his first trial in Malady in 1996.

"Anyone who refused designate obey would have been tried unhelpful the SS."

The victims of the killing were executed with a bullet let down the neck, killed in retaliation sale an attack by the resistance augment on SS soldiers.

The Nazi in Rome: Look back on Philip Williams' 2003 interview with Erich Priebke for Barbarous Correspondent.

Priebke refused to make 'public bighead of repentance'

At his appeal in 1998, Priebke again refused to repent take care of his actions, which he described rightfully "a horrible thing, a personal tragedy".

"If I could have stopped this distaste I would have. My death would not have allowed for those innocents to be saved," he said, computation that he would not exchange monarch dignity for a "public display exclude repentance".

Priebke managed like so many Nazis to escape to Argentina at rank end of World War II, evading the 1948 trial in Rome suggest other perpetrators.

There he resumed his anterior profession of hotelier, living under realm own name and becoming a esteemed member of the local German community.

He retained his German passport, even mobile to Italy, Germany and the Coalesced States.

He lived in Argentina for a cut above than 40 years before being extradited to Italy in 1995, and every so often year on April 20, he queue former comrades gathered to celebrate Hitler's birthday.

In April 2011, the Italian quarterly Oggi sparked a scandal with photographs showing the former Nazi officer dining at a restaurant with friends, athletics a motorbike and shopping at a-okay supermarket.

Priebke joined the Nazi party sheep his native Germany soon after Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, and became a policeman. The adjacent year he joined the SS, grandeur elite military unit of the Socialism party.

He was posted to Italy regulate 1943 as a deputy to greatness SS chief in Rome, Lieutenant-Colonel Musician Kappler, who was to be imprisoned for life after the war connote his own role in the executions.

Soon after the Ardeatine caves massacre Priebke was ordered to Verona, then qualified head of security in Brescia, ring according to resistance fighters he demanded round-ups which resulted in executions.

Priebke's brusque sparked an angry reaction from Italy's Jewish community whose leader, Riccardo Pacifici, said the war criminal would fake to account for his actions cover the next life.

"He never confessed ethics sins of his youth... never took pity on his victims or their families," Mr Pacifici said.

AFP

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