Lawyers for former SS Capt. Erich Priebke have called for the resignation of Italy’s justice minister for having ordered Priebke re- arrested after a military court set him free.
At the same time, prosecutors in two Italian cities have re-opened an investigation into two other former Nazis suspected of carrying out war crimes at a World War II concentration camp in northern Italy.
Priebke, 83, was declared guilty on Aug. 1 of involvement in the March 1944 massacre of 335 civilians, some 75 of them Jews, at the Ardeatine Caves south of Rome.
But the military court said after a three-month war crimes trial that Priebke could not be punished because the crimes fell under a 30-year statute of limitations.
Protesters, including militant young Jews, kept Priebke barricaded in the courthouse for eight hours, until Justice Minister Giovanni Maria Flick ordered him re-arrested and taken to a civilian jail.
Flick at the time said he was ordering Priebke arrested while Italian authorities considered a request by Germany for his extradition.
At a news conference Saturday, lawyer Carlo Taormina, who recently joined Priebke’s defense team, maintained that Germany had not made such a request at the time Flick ordered Priebke jailed.
Taormina said he wanted Flick investigated for abuse of office or illegal arrest, and he called for his resignation.
Meanwhile, military prosecutors in the northern Italian cities of Verona and La Spezia have begun investigating possible war crimes carried out in and around the concentration camp of Fossoli.
They are looking into the activities of Karl Titho, the Fossoli camp commander, and his assistant, Hans Haage.
Titho is now 85; Haage is 90. Both men are living in Germany.
“Prosecutors have placed Karl Titho and Hans Haage under investigation for violence and homicide against civilians and repeated violence against prisoners of war,” Defense Minister Beniamino Andreatta said in a statement last Friday.
Thousands of Italian Jews, political prisoners and foreigners were shipped to Nazi death camps from Fossoli, which is located in northern Italy near Modena. Writer Primo Levi was interned there.
Investigators say Titho and Haage carried out the execution of 67 prisoners on July 12, 1944, in reprisal for the killing of seven German soldiers in Genoa.
An Italian investigation into the massacre was interrupted in 1960 under unclear circumstances.
The case was reopened two years ago after hundreds of files documenting Nazi crimes were discovered during the Priebke investigation.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
