The
son of late Nazi war criminal Erich Priebke has sparked
moral outrage by suggesting his father should be buried
in Israel, after a number of authorities around the world
refused funeral rites for his corpse.
"Where should he be buried? To me also Israel would be good, so that they're happy," Jorge Priebke, told Italian Ansa news agency.
"It's unfair," he
added, referring to the controversy over his Priebke's
funerals. "Why they always pick up on someone [for things happened] during war time, more
than 60 years ago.
"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," Jorge Priebke said.
Efraim Zuroff, the head of
the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, told IBTimes UK Priebke's
son didn't even deserve a response.
"He is an ignorant
racist sympathetic to the Nazis. What he cares about
is the memory of his father but unfortunately for him
and especially for us his father was a Nazi murderer," said Zuroff, who wrote a book on the Jewish Nazi-hunting organisation's'activity
titled Operation Last Chance: One Man's Quest to Bring
Nazi Criminals to Justice
"It is exactly
this kind of anti-Semitic comment that helped creating
the background for the rise of the Nazi party."
Zuroff suggested Priebke's
body should be sent back to Germany and incinerated.
"The victims of
the Nazis had their bodies burnt and their relatives
had no place to go [to mourn them]. That's exactly what
he [Priebke] deserves," he said.
Priebke a former Schutzstaffel
(SS) captain died aged 100 in Rome, where he was serving
a life sentence over the so-called Ardeatine Caves massacre.
On 23 March 1944 he oversaw
the execution of 335 Italians in retaliation for an attack
by partisan troops that had killed 33 German soldiers.
Those executed were shot in
the back of the head in the ancient Ardeatine Caves in
central Rome. Victims included political dissidents,
underage boys, about 80 Jews and a Catholic priest.
Priebke never showed remorse
for his crime nor for the horrors of the Nazi regime.
In an interview recorded months
before his death, he denied the Holocaust and defended
Adolf Hitler and the Nazi ideology.
He claimed Jews were partially
to blame for their persecution and that death camps and
gas chambers were a lie made up by the US after the war.
Thus the Vatican refused him
a church funeral, citing a canon law that bars ceremonies
for manifest sinners who refuse to repent.
Rome's mayor said he would
ban a public funeral. He was echoed by the mayor of the
small town of Pomezia, who insisted there was no room
for Priebke's body in the local WWII German military
cemetery.
"This unrepentant
mass murder does not deserve a funeral in the City from
where he took innocent Christians and Jews to their death," said Rabbi Abraham Cooper associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center.
Burial was also denied by
Priebke's native town of Hennigsdord, on the outskirts
of Berlin, and by Argentina, where the Nazi criminal
lived for about 50 years after the war.
"Foreign Minister
Hector Timerman has given the order not to accept the
slightest move to allow the return of the body of Nazi
criminal Erich Priebke to our country," the Argentinian foreign ministry tweeted.
Priebke's son is still living
in San Carlos de Bariloche, where his father was discovered
working as a teacher in 1994.
He was extradited to Italy
where he was sentenced to life in prison in 1998 but
was later allowed to serve his term under house arrest
due to his advanced age and poor health. ibtimes.co.uk
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