H  ERICH PRIEBKE, NAZI WHO CARRIED OUT ITALIAN MASSACRE, DIES AT 100 

S1  Elisabetta Povoledo contributed reporting from Rome.

S2  Erich Priebke, a former SS captain who was sentenced to life in prison for helping to organize the execution of 335 men and boys at the Ardeatine Caves in Italy in 1944, died Friday under house arrest at his home in Rome.
S3 He was 100 and the oldest surviving convicted Nazi war criminal.

S4  He “died of old age,” said his lawyer, Paolo Giachini.

S5  Priebke was at the center of one of the most contentious Nazi war-crimes prosecutions of the 1990s, begun after an American television crew tracked him down in Argentina at San Carlos de Bariloche, a resort city in the foothills of the Andes.

S6  Priebke fled to South America soon after World War II and had been living under his real name, owning a butcher shop and traveling to Europe - and even Italy - with a German passport.

S7  He was extradited to Italy in November 1995 and ordered to stand trial before an Italian military tribunal the next year.
S8 The proceedings - described at the time as possibly the last Nazi war-crimes trial in Europe - centered on the massacre at the Ardeatine Caves, just south of Rome, on March 24, 1944.
S9 The men and boys were rounded up and killed in reprisal for an attack in which Italian partisans killed 33 members of a Nazi security force.

S10  Herbert Kappler, the Gestapo chief in Rome, ordered the deaths of 10 Italians for every dead policeman.
S11 Seventy-five of the 335 victims were Jewish.
S12 By many accounts, the captives were led into the caves with their hands tied behind their backs, forced to kneel - many over the bodies of those already killed - and shot in the neck.

S13  Priebke said he was responsible for exceeding the quota by five.
S14 “It went wrong,” he was quoted as saying in an article published in the German newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung a week before his death.

S15  The prosecution in Italy was a protracted affair.
S16 The military tribunal that tried Priebke in 1996 ended up ordering him freed.
S17 While finding him guilty of involvement in the massacre, the court acquitted him of acting with premeditation and cruelty.
S18 Only a conviction on those counts would have sent him to prison because of a 30-year statute of limitations on murder charges.

S19  His release caused an international outcry, and he was rearrested after an appellate court ordered another trial by military tribunal.
S20 In July 1997, the second military court sentenced him to 15 years in prison, but reduced that term to five years, saying there had been mitigating factors, including Priebke’s assertion that he had acted under orders.

S21  Prosecutors appealed, and in March 1998 Priebke was sentenced to life, a verdict that was upheld by the Court of Cassation, Italy’s highest appellate court.

S22  Because of his age, Priebke was put under house arrest.
S23 Two soldiers kept watch day and night outside the apartment block in western Rome where Priebke lived, and two police officers followed him whenever he left the residence, according to the account in Sueddeutsche Zeitung, by Malte Herwig.

S24  Referring to Hannah Arendt’s famous phrase about the Nazis when she covered the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Israel, Herwig, who has done extensive research on the Nazi era, described his encounter with Priebke as “the last chance to investigate that supposed banality of evil with a living person.”

S25  Priebke was born on July 29, 1913, in Hennigsdorf, near Berlin.
S26 His parents both died early in his life, he told Herwig, and he was reared largely by an uncle.
S27 Little is known of his early life.

S28  As World War II ended, he was imprisoned by the British but eventually fled to a German-speaking area in the north of Italy, where he reunited with his wife and two sons, according to Herwig.
S29 The family fled by way of Genoa to Argentina, where Priebke worked as a waiter and then opened a butcher shop.

S30  His commander at the time of the massacre, Kappler, was sentenced to life in prison in 1948 by a Rome court.
S31 He was smuggled out of a military hospital in 1997 and died in freedom in Germany the following year.
S32 Karl Hass, an SS major, was convicted with Priebke in July 1997 and given a life sentence in 1998.
S33 He died while under house arrest in 2004.

S34  Priebke is survived by his two sons and several grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
S35 His lawyer said he would be buried in Argentina.

S36  In recent years, Priebke remained a rallying point both for neo-Nazis and their opponents.
S37 In July, members of Jewish groups and other protesters gathered near his home on the occasion of his 100th birthday to read the names of the massacre’s victims.

S38  To the end of his life, Priebke expressed no remorse for his actions.

