Former Nazi SS Capt. Erich Priebke has refused to talk to an Italian prosecutor seeking to question him here in connection with a war-crimes case Italy is launching against him.
Priebke, 82, dismissed the questionnaire presented to him by the Italian prosecutor as “childish” and bemoaned his inability to bring forward witnesses to defend his wartime past.
Priebke said in an interview with the Argentine official news agency TELAM that he felt like “the last of the Mohicans.”
“There are no witnesses to defend me,” he said.
“Back then you did not ask questions, you obeyed orders,” he added. “For instance, I didn’t know about Jews being shot. I am innocent.”
Despite his protestations of innocence, Priebke has in the past admitted to taking part in what has been described as the worst war crime to have taken place on Italian soil.
Priebke was a captain in the Nazi SS and the wartime deputy to Herbert Kappler, the Gestapo chief during the Nazi occupation of Rome.
After a partisan bomb attack in Rome on March 23, 1994, killed 33 SS stormtroopers, Kappler ordered 10 Italian civilians to be executed for every dead German. There was an immediate mass roundup and the hostages were massacred in the Ardeatine Caves at the southern outskirts of Rome.
A total of 335 people were killed, included 77 Jewish civilians.
Priebke’s primary responsibility during the massacre included crossing off the names of those people killed, but he admitted after the war to personally shooting two prisoners in the neck.
“I went in with the second or third party and killed a man with an Italian machine pistol,” read a statement signed by Priebke while under Allied custody after the war.
“Towards the end I killed another man with the same machine pistol,” read confession, which was taken in August 1946 and has been circulated by the Argentine chapter of the Simon Wiesenthal Center.
Priebke was also reportedly involved in the deportation of thousands of Italian Jews to concentration camps.
The Ardeantine Caves massacre has become the country’s chief symbol of Nazi brutality in the eyes of Italians and particularly of Italian Jews.
Kappler was arrested and sentenced to life imprisonment in connection with the massacre.
Priebke spent 20 months in custody after the war, but he escaped in 1946 from a prisoner-of-war camp run by the British.
In an interview published last year in the Rome daily La Repubblica, Priebke said he, his wife and children lived for two years in northeastern Italy after securing the help of a Franciscan friar.
He also said he got help from the Vatican when he and his family decided to flee Italy in 1948. He has been living in Argentina without concealing his identity every since.
Then last year, after nearly 50 years of quiet life in Bariloche, a picturesque ski resort in southern Argentina with a sizable German colony, Priebke was tracked down by ABC Television, which located him with the help of the Simon Wiesenthal Center.
Italian authorities requested Priebke’s extradition from Argentina after a broadcast of ABC’s “PrimeTime Live” in May 1994, in which Priebke admitted to partaking in the killings at the Ardeatine Caves.
Argentina granted the extradition request, but it has been under appeal ever since.
After waiting for Priebke’s extradition for more than a year, Italian authorities decided to try Priebke in absentia for crimes against humanity.
Last week, in what was the first step in the in-absentia proceedings, Italian prosecutor Antonio Intelesano presented Priebke with a list of 12 questions, asking the former SS officer about his responsibilities in Rome during 1944, the number of prisons and prisoners under his command and his part in rounding up Jews in the occupied city.
But on the advice of his attorney, Pedro Bianchi, Priebke remained silent throughout the two-hour session, which was presided over by Argentine Judge Leonidas Moldes.
Priebke addressed the court only once to say, “I will only answer questions in Rome, and only if and when I am extradited.”
His lawyer – who specializes in defending serial killers and right-wing extremists – later called the proceedings “a travesty.”
Moldes, who signed the original extradition order against Priebke, dismissed as “unimportant” Priebke’s refusal to sign a statement summarizing the proceedings.
“The statement is valid, even if unsigned by the accused, because there were witnesses present,” Moldes said.
Meanwhile, the extradition ordered by Moldes last year is expected to be upheld by a provincial court. The case is expected to move to Argentina’s Supreme Court later this year.
Although much attention has been focus Priebke, he is not the only Nazi war criminal still living that country.
Leaders of the Argentine Jewish community last year compiled a list of several other suspected former Nazis living in the country.
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