Given that more than 9,000 innocent Italian civilians, many of them women and children, died in Nazi massacres during the dreadful last 18 months of the second world war, it is amazing how few of the perpetrators have been brought to justice. Only five members of the German occupying forces were ever imprisoned in Italy for war crimes; and with the death last week, aged 100, of Erich Priebke, the former SS captain who in 1944 helped organise the execution of 335 men and boys at the Ardeatine Caves south of Rome, none of them is now still alive. Hundreds of others were, of course, involved in these crimes, but none of these has ever been punished. And now, it seems certain that none will be.
Of the 11 men remaining on the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s list of ‘most wanted Nazi War Criminals’, only one, Gerhard Sommer, has been accused of an Italian war crime; and he, though condemned in absentia to life imprisonment by an Italian military court in 2005 for participating in the especially brutal massacre of 560 people in a Tuscan hill village in August 1944, is living, aged 92, peacefully in Germany, free of any German charge against him.
These Nazi atrocities were mostly inspired by Hitler’s efforts to repress Italian resistance during the frantic last months of German occupation by ordering that ten Italians should be killed for every German murdered by partisans.
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