Rome bans Nazi demonstrations

Rome’s security officials today banned a planned demonstration by a right-wing group seeking a pardon for former Nazi captain Erich Priebke, who was convicted for a wartime massacre of 335 civilians.

Prefect Achille Serra’s office announced the decision, citing security concerns after learning that several groups opposed to the pardon also were planning counter-demonstrations on Friday.

The capital’s left-leaning mayor, Walter Veltroni, said in a statement that the demonstration demanding that Priebke be pardoned would have represented “an intolerable affront to the Jewish community, to the entire city and its memory.”

“If there needs to be a demonstration, it should be for the victims,” Veltroni said.

Priebke was convicted in 1997. A military appeals court upheld his conviction in 1998 and stiffened his sentence to life imprisonment, a term he is serving under house arrest in Rome.

The atrocity occurred on March 24, 1944, 24 hours after a partisan attack in central Rome that killed 33 members of a Nazi military police unit. The Nazis decided to slaughter 10 Italians for every slain German and to do so immediately. The site of the slaughter was an abandoned quarry now known as the Fosse Ardeatine, the Ardeatine Graves, off the ancient Appian Way.

They raced to find victims, raiding prisons for dozens of political prisoners, taking 75 Jews, and adding common criminals and residents from near the site of the partisan attack. The Nazis’ zeal was such that they corralled five more men than the 330 they sought.

Those killed included Catholics, Jews, atheists; communists, monarchists, ex-Fascists; soldiers, labourers, professors, a priest. The youngest was 15, the oldest in his 70s.

When it was done, the Germans blew up the entrance to the caves, seeking to hide the act. After the war, the former Gestapo chief in Rome, Herbert Kappler, was sentenced to life for the killings, but he escaped in 1976 and died free in Germany.