Italy wants an accused former Nazi, Erich Priebke, who allegedly helped carry out a 1944 reprisal massacre of 335 Romans, to be extradited from Argentina.
With the help of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, Priebke, now 80, was tracked down in a town in the Argentine Andes by ABC Television, which broadcast an interview with him last week.
Both military and civil Italian authorities began preliminary paperwork on the case over the weekend, and an extradition request was expected to be signed as early as Monday.
On Sunday, the Italian media quoted Argentina’s foreign minister as saying that if Priebke’s Nazi past can be proven, he will be turned over to the Italians.
Priebke was a captain in the Nazi SS and reportedly wartime deputy to Herbert Kappler, the Gestapo chief during the Nazi occupation of Rome.
After a partisan bomb attack in Rome on March 23, 1944, killed 33 SS stormtroopers, Kappler ordered 10 Romans 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.
Five additional people were killed, and the dead included 75 Jews.
Priebke’s alleged responsibility during the massacre included crossing off the names of those people killed, but he admitted after the war to having personally shot two prisoners in the neck.
He also was reportedly involved in the deportation of thousands of Italian Jews to concentration camps.
The Ardeatine Caves massacre was the worst war crime carried out in Italy and has become the country’s chief symbol of Nazi brutality for Italians and particularly for Italian Jews.
Priebke spent 20 months in custody after the war, during which he confessed his crimes, but he escaped from a German prisoner of war camp run by the English in 1948.
If returned to Italy and put on trial, he could face life imprisonment.
Italian Jews said they wanted justice, not a vendetta, to be carried out.
“Justice demands that sooner or later those who have stained themselves with crimes against humanity pay for their faults,” said Rome Chief Rabbi Elio Toaff. “Terrible events such as this cannot be forgotten.”
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