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Erich Priebke

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Erich Priebke

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Also known as Priebke

Hauptsturmführer (Captain) in the Waffen SS, convicted of war crimes in Italy (1913-2013)

Music · MusicBrainz

Type
Person
Country
DE
Active from
1953-06-25

via MusicBrainz · CC0

Key facts

Born
( 1913-07-29 ) 29 July 1913, Hennigsdorf , German Empire
Died
11 October 2013 (2013-10-11) (aged 100), Rome, Italy
Allegiance
Nazi Germany
Branch
Schutzstaffel
Rank
Hauptsturmführer
Unit
Allgemeine SS Gestapo

via Wikipedia infobox

~19 min read

Encyclopedic overview

Erich Priebke (29 July 1913 – 11 October 2013) was a German mid-level Schutzstaffel (SS) commander in the Sicherheitspolizei (SiPo) of Nazi Germany. In 1996, he was convicted of war crimes in Italy for commanding the unit which was responsible for the Ardeatine massacre in Rome on 24 March 1944 in which 335 Italian civilians were killed in retaliation for a partisan attack that killed 33 men of the German SS Police Regiment Bozen. Priebke was one of the men held responsible for this mass execution. After the end of World War II in Europe, he fled to Argentina, where he lived for almost 50 years.

In 1991, Priebke's participation in the Rome massacre was denounced in Esteban Buch's book El pintor de la Suiza Argentina. In 1994, 50 years after the massacre, Priebke felt he could then talk about the incident and was interviewed by American ABC News reporter Sam Donaldson. This caused outrage among people who had not forgotten the incident and led to his extradition to Italy and a trial which lasted more than four years.

Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Erich Priebke” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.