Jorge
Priebke goes on anti-Semitic rant over failure to find
a resting place for father Erich, who oversaw a massacre
The son of a former SS officer provoked a storm of outrage by suggesting his
father be buried in Israel, after a number of countries
refused
to inter the Nazi’s remains.
“Where should my father be buried?” asked Jorge Priebke, whose father, Erich,
died last week at the age of 100 after serving a life
term for a 1944 massacre near Rome. “For me, even in
Israel. That way they’d be happy,”
Priebke made his comments to the Italian news agency ANSA from his home in southwestern
Argentina. “It is almost all an injustice. Why don’t
people look at what is happening in the Middle East,
Syria, Iran or even to those poor people at Lampedusa
who die in the Mediterranean? Why do they continue, instead,
to pick on someone from a war era that ended more than
60 years ago?”
The International Business
Times quoted Priebke as adding, “They should stop being
such a pain in the neck, they are resentful, they’ve
been a pain in the neck to the world since before Christ.”
The comments came after Rome’s
mayor, police chief and the pope’s right-hand man all
refused to grant Erich Priebke a church funeral in the
city where he participated in one of the worst massacres
in German-occupied Italy. His adopted homeland of Argentina
and his hometown in Germany have also refused to accept
his body for burial.
Priebke spent nearly 50 years
as a fugitive before being extradited to Italy from Argentina
in 1995 to stand trial for the 1944 massacre at the Ardeatine
Caves outside Rome, in which 335 civilians were killed.
He died last Friday in the Rome home of his lawyer, Paolo
Giachini, where he had been serving his life term under
house arrest.
“He is an ignorant racist
sympathetic to the Nazis,” Efraim Zuroff, head of the
Simon Wiesenthal Center, told IBT UK about the younger
Priebke. “What he cares about is the memory of his father
but unfortunately for him and especially for us his father
was a Nazi murderer. It is exactly this kind of anti-Semitic
comment that helped create the background for the rise
of the Nazi party.”
The death of Priebke has raised
a torrent of emotions over how best to lay to rest someone
who perpetrated war crimes and denied the Holocaust that
killed 6 million Jews. It has tested the church’s capacity
for mercy and forgiveness and its need to prevent public
scandal. There is a seemingly intractable conflict between
respect for the dead and that owed to the millions of
victims of the Holocaust.
Rome’s archdiocese said Monday
it had told Giachini to have the funeral at home “in
strict privacy” and that Pope Francis’ vicar for Rome,
Cardinal Agostino Vallini, had prohibited any Rome church
from celebrating it.
But Giachini refused, pressing
instead for a private church Mass. The archdiocese responded
by reminding all Roman priests that they must abide by
Vallini’s decision.
Separately, Rome’s police
chief and the government prefect for the capital announced
they would prohibit “any form of solemn or public celebration”
for Priebke because of public security concerns. Rome
Mayor Ignazio Marino said the city would allow neither
a church funeral nor a burial for him.
It was a rebuke by both church
and state that was greatly appreciated by Rome’s Jewish
community, which has long resented having Priebke living
in its midst, particularly after he was granted small
freedoms from his house arrest like going to church.
“Any demonstration of honor
— civil or religious — would be an intolerable affront
to the memory of those who fell in the fight for freedom
of Nazism and fascism,” said the head of Italy’s Jewish
communities, Renzo Gattegna.
During his trial, Priebke
admitted shooting two people and rounding up victims
in retaliation for an attack by resistance fighters that
killed 33 members of a Nazi military police unit. He
insisted he was only following orders.
In his final interview released
upon his death, he denied the Nazis gassed Jews during
the Holocaust and accused the West of inventing such
crimes to cover up atrocities committed by the Allies
during World War II.
Rabbi Riccardo Pacifici, chief
rabbi of Rome’s Jewish community, suggested Priebke be
cremated and his ashes dispersed in the air “like those
of our grandparents,” ANSA reported. “He would be cremated
while dead, unlike the millions of children who went
into the ovens and for whom Priebke never had pity.”
In a telephone interview,
Priebke’s lawyer said he never intended to make a political
or public event out of the funeral, but said that as
a practicing Catholic, Priebke deserved a Catholic funeral
and burial.
“It’s a question of a right
to religious liberty,” he said.
But not even Priebke’s adopted
homeland of Argentina, where he lived in the mountain
resort of Bariloche, would take him: Foreign Minister
Hector Timerman said his remains wouldn’t be allowed
in Argentine territory.
Giachini suggested Priebke
might be buried in his native land, noting that he “really
loved Germany.”
In Berlin, Foreign Ministry
spokesman Martin Schaefer said a German citizen could
be buried in Germany but that no request had been made
by any family members about Priebke.
Priebke was born in Hennigsdorf,
a small town north of Berlin. The town administration
pointed Monday to local rules that give only residents
a right to burial in its cemetery, German news agency
dpa reported. Exceptions are possible in cases where
people have family graves there, but the Priebke family
doesn’t have any.
timesofisrael.com
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