Erich Priebke, a former SS officer who helped organize the execution of 335 Italian men and boys in 1944, then went to Argentina and spent the next fifty years running a butcher shop under his own name, died last week, aged 100.
Priebke was extradited to Italy in 1995 and had to be tried twice since he was acquitted the first time after the state failed to prove he acted with premeditation and cruelty. The second go round, a military tribunal (somewhere, Dick Cheney is smiling his crooked smile) got the desired result, but since Priebke was then 95 he was placed under house arrest.
Mr. Priebke went to his grave having never expressed any remorse for his acts. He said the problem was he exceeded his quota in the shootings by five. "It went wrong," he told Suddeutsche Zeitung a week before his death.
After the Catholic Church denied Priebke burial in Rome and the Argentine government dittoed, Priebke's son suggested his dad be interred in Israel, to make the Jews happy.
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