Nazi No More: Italian protesters jeer at funeral for convicted Nazi war criminal Erich Priebke. Image by Getty images

Nazi war criminal Erich Priebke was secretly buried in an anonymous grave in a cemetery inside the walls of an Italian prison complex, an Italian newspaper reported on Thursday.

La Repubblica said the coffin of the man convicted of one of Italy’s worst wartime atrocities was taken from a military airport and buried on the grounds of the undisclosed prison late last month.

It said the grave was marked by a simple wooden cross with no name but merely a number so family members would be able to identify it. The prison graveyard had been abandoned for years and was overgrown with weeds, the paper said.

Forwarding the News

Thoughtful, balanced reporting from the Forward and around the web, bringing you updated news and analysis each day.

Terms(Required)

I agree to the Forward's Terms of Service and Privacy Policy

Email(Required)

Priebke’s lawyer did not respond to several telephone requests for comment. Italian officials had no comment.

The former SS officer died last month, aged 100, in Rome, where he spent the end of his life under house arrest for his role in the killing of 335 civilians at the Ardeatine Caves in Rome in 1944.

The Catholic Church denied him a public funeral Mass and neither Italy nor his native Germany wanted the body, fearing his burial site could become a place of pilgrimage for neo-Nazis.

Priebke, who called himself “the last prisoner of war,” was extradited to Italy in 1995 from Argentina and definitively convicted in 1998 after several appeals.

An aide to the Gestapo chief in Rome at the time of the massacre, Herbert Kappler, Priebke admitted to helping draw up a list of the civilian victims, ticking their names off as they were shot in the back of the head, and to personally shooting two of them.

The executions were in reprisal for a partisan bomb that had killed 33 German soldiers a day before.

Priebke said he had had to obey the orders or he would have been killed.

The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.

Now more than ever, American Jews need independent news they can trust, with reporting driven by truth, not ideology. We serve you, not any ideological agenda.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.

Readers like you make it all possible. We’re near the end of our Passover Fundraising Drive, and we have a very ambitious goal of $127,000 by April 21.

This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism you rely on. Make a Passover gift today!

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Make a Passover Gift Today!

$90 $180

$360

Other amount