In September 1943, Italy signed an armistice with the Allies who had landed in Sicily weeks earlier. Germany responded by pouring troops into central and northern Italy, occupying cities, disarming Italian soldiers, and restoring control by force.
As the fascist government collapsed, resistance grew. Italian partisans, many of them former soldiers, communists, and ordinary civilians, took to the mountains and the streets to fight the occupiers.
The German response was swift and brutal. In Rome, after a partisan attack killed 33 German soldiers, the Nazi command ordered a merciless reprisal.
On March 24, 1944, in the Ardeatine Caves outside Rome, German forces murdered hundreds of civilians and political prisoners. One of the main perpetrators of the massacre was Erich Priebke.
Erich Priebke was born on July 29, 1913, in Hennigsdorf, then part of the German Empire. His parents died when he was young, and he was largely raised by an uncle.
As a young man, Priebke worked as a waiter in Berlin, at the Savoy Hotel in London, and later on the Italian Riviera. He married Alice Stoll, and together they had two sons.
On January 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed German chancellor by President Paul von Hindenburg. In July of that year, Priebke joined the Nazi Party.
In December 1936, Priebke joined the Gestapo, the Nazi secret police, and later the SS.
World War II began on September 1, 1939, when Nazi Germany invaded Poland. Italy entered the conflict on June 10, 1940, joining Germany in war against Britain and France.
Under Benito Mussolini's fascist regime, Italy hoped to expand its power and restore the glory of ancient Rome. Italian units fought alongside German forces in North Africa, the Balkans, and on the Eastern Front, but military defeats, supply shortages, and heavy losses gradually weakened both the army and the regime.
Because of his knowledge of Italian, Priebke was deployed to Rome from 1941, where he served under SS-Sturmbannführer Herbert Kappler.
In July 1943, after the Allies invaded Sicily, Mussolini was deposed and arrested. Shortly afterward, Italy signed an armistice with the Allies.
Germany reacted immediately by occupying central and northern Italy, disarming Italian forces, and taking control of Rome. Mussolini was later freed by German paratroopers and installed at the head of a German-controlled puppet state in northern Italy.
Under the occupation, arrests, executions, and deportations became part of daily life. Resistance groups grew bolder, and attacks against the occupiers became more frequent.
The occupiers responded with collective punishments. Civilians were executed. Hostages were taken away, and entire communities were kept in fear. In this atmosphere, the Ardeatine Caves massacre was soon to follow.
The immediate trigger came on March 23, 1944. In the afternoon, around 3 p.m., a bomb exploded on Via Rasella near the center of Rome. The attack was carried out by members of the Italian communist resistance.
The explosion struck a marching unit of the 11th Company of the SS Police Regiment Bozen, made up mostly of Tyroleans. Thirty-three Germans were killed and dozens more were wounded.
The timing of the attack was symbolic, falling on the anniversary of the notorious fascist Blackshirts, which Mussolini founded on March 23, 1919. The message was clear, but the German response to this symbolic act was immediate and merciless.
After the attack, German occupation authorities ordered reprisals. Italian hostages were to be executed at a ratio of 10 Italians for every German soldier killed.
Names were selected from prison lists. Jews awaiting deportation, political prisoners, resistance members, and men arrested simply for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Some had been imprisoned for months, others only days, and many had never been convicted or formally charged. Among them were teachers, workers, lawyers, officers, artists, priests, fathers, sons, and brothers. Some families later learned that more than one of their relatives had been taken away.
One of the officers involved in organizing the massacre was Erich Priebke, who held the rank of SS-Hauptsturmführer, equivalent to a captain in the U.S. Army. He personally helped compile the lists of those selected to die.
The night before the massacre, Priebke went through police records containing the names of suspected anti-fascist sympathizers and ordered the arrest of additional political prisoners to make up the required number of hostages. He also added some prisoners to the list simply because they were Jewish.
On March 24, 1944, the prisoners were taken by truck to the Ardeatine Caves on the outskirts of Rome. Their hands were tied with rope to restrict their movement.
Inside the caves, they were led forward in groups of five and ordered to kneel. The shots were aimed at the back of the head.
Priebke entered with the second or third group and shot one man with an Italian submachine gun. Toward the end, he shot another man with the same weapon.
As the executions continued, names were checked off the lists one by one. Bodies piled up on the floor of the cave, and further victims were forced to kneel on the dead.
The killing lasted for hours, and the prisoners waiting outside heard the shots echoing from inside the caves. After the last executions, explosives were detonated to seal the tunnels. Some victims may still have been alive when the rock collapsed on them.
In total, 335 people were killed, again more than the German high command had ordered. According to later investigations, this happened because Priebke, who supervised the executions and checked the lists of victims, failed in the confusion to notice that five extra prisoners had been brought by mistake.
After the liberation of Rome on June 4, 1944, the sealed caves were opened and the truth was finally revealed. Inside the Ardeatine Caves, bodies were found buried under fallen rock and dust, stacked one on top of another exactly as they had fallen.
The air was heavy and the space narrow, making the recovery slow and painful. Many victims still had their hands tied with rope, and some were unrecognizable due to injuries and decomposition. Personal items, scraps of clothing, documents, and rings were carefully collected to help families identify their loved ones.
In the following years, most of the 335 victims were identified. Seventy-five of the murdered were Jewish. The youngest victim was 15 years old, the oldest was 74.
The Ardeatine Caves massacre, which became one of the strongest symbols of Nazi brutality in occupied Italy, was not the end of Erich Priebke's wartime activities.
According to some testimonies, Priebke was involved in the events that led to the La Storta massacre. As Allied units were entering Rome, 14 political prisoners were taken from the notorious Via Tasso prison and executed near the village of La Storta outside the city.
Most of the victims were socialists connected to the Matteotti Brigades or members of the underground military resistance. Among the murdered was the socialist trade unionist and former deputy Bruno Buozzi.
On June 14, 1944, Priebke became a liaison officer at the headquarters of the fascist National Republican Guard in the city of Brescia. There he took part in raids, arrests, and anti-partisan operations aimed at destroying resistance networks in northern Italy.
Hundreds of prisoners, resistance fighters, and suspected partisans captured between Lombardy and Veneto passed through the Canton Mombello prison before being transferred to German headquarters, where Priebke often personally led interrogations.
One former partisan courier, Agape Nulli, who was arrested at the age of 18, later recalled: "I remember the day of the interrogation." Priebke entered the room, pointed a finger at me and suddenly asked: "Have you read the Bible?" I answered that I had not. I understood that it was a trick question meant to find out whether I was Jewish. Then he asked where my brothers were hiding. They were partisans too, but I could not know that, because I had already been in prison for more than a month. That ended my interrogation.
Others had less luck. Bruno Gillardoni was brought back to his cell half-dead after hours of interrogation during which he hung from the ceiling on a rope. Others were sent to concentration camps and died there.
World War II in Europe ended on May 8, 1945. Priebke was arrested and held in a British prisoner-of-war camp in the Italian city of Rimini, but he escaped in 1946.
He later claimed that his escape was enabled by a Catholic ratline organized by Austrian Bishop Alois Hudal. Under the false identity of Otto Pape, he eventually fled to Argentina, where he settled in the city of Bariloche in Patagonia.
For nearly 50 years, Priebke lived there openly and unpunished. He worked as a waiter and later opened a delicatessen. Over time he became a prominent figure in the local German-Argentine community and traveled freely between Argentina and Europe.
In 1994, an ABC News investigation tracked Priebke down in Bariloche. During an on-camera interview, he openly admitted his role in the Ardeatine Caves massacre and defended his actions by claiming he was only following orders.
In a later interview with the newspaper La Repubblica, Priebke said: "Yes, I killed in the Ardeatine Caves, I shot. It was an order. Once, twice, three times, I don't remember exactly. What difference does it make? I was an officer, not an accountant. We weren't particularly interested in revenge either. The soldiers killed on Via Rasella were from Tyrol, more Italian than German. But Kappler was adamant, he even forced the cooks to shoot. We executed more men again. It was a mistake, but they were all terrorists anyway, so nobody really cared."
After lengthy legal proceedings, Priebke was transferred back to Italy in 1996 for trial. He was ultimately sentenced to life in prison for his role in the massacre.
Because of his age, he spent his final years under house arrest in Rome, where he died on October 11, 2013. He was 100 years old.
His request to be buried in Argentina next to his wife was rejected. The Diocese of Rome banned any funeral ceremony in Catholic churches in the city. His hometown in Germany also refused to accept his remains, fearing the grave could become a pilgrimage site for neo-Nazis.
After the diocese refused to hold a funeral, Priebke's family turned to the traditionalist Society of Saint Pius X to arrange a ceremony in Albano near Rome. The funeral was eventually held without the presence of any of Priebke's relatives, because unrest outside the church between fascist sympathizers and anti-fascist demonstrators prevented his family from entering.
Italian authorities later seized the coffin and buried Priebke's body in a secret location near Rome.