Cloaked by predawn twilight and extensive police secrecy, a former Nazi officer returned to Italy Tuesday to face his past.
Military Prosecutor Antonino Intelisano said former SS Capt. Erich Priebke, extradited from Argentina, arrived early in the morning at Rome's Ciampino airport.Reporters were locked out of the airport and couldn't see the special jet, a Falcon 900, carrying Priebke, Interpol agents and medical staff from Argentina to the airport, just a few miles from the Ardeatine Caves where German soldiers shot to death 335 civilians in 1944. Priebke says he checked off the victims' names as they went to their deaths.
Priebke, 82, used a German passport to enter Italy, the Italian news agency ANSA reported, quoting passport control officers.
The extradition was seen as an important victory for Italian prosecutors and diplomats. It was only the fourth time Argentina has agreed to return fugitives accused of World War II atrocities. Priebke had lived in Argentina under his own name since escaping from a prisoner-of-war camp in 1946.
He is scheduled to appear in a military court for a preliminary hearing on Dec. 7. If convicted, he could face life in prison.
"This will be the last of the Nazi war criminal cases," said Shimon Samuels, European director for the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Los Angeles-based group that tracks Nazis. The center believes that the other war criminals have been tried, have died or were too low-level for prosecutors to pursue after so many years.
Intelisano refused to give details about Priebke's arrival, saying he would talk to reporters later in the day. But the Italian news agency AGI reported that Priebke arrived just as dawn broke over the airport south of Rome.
Priebke, who lost a 17-month extradition fight, is accused of helping to organize the massacre in Nazi-occupied Italy to avenge 32 German soldiers slain in an ambush by Italian partisans.
Priebke has admitted taking part in the slayings but claimed he had to obey orders from Nazi command. The victims' bodies, including 71 Jews and several Roman Catholic priests, were buried by rocks and dirt after the caves were dynamited.
Priebke was placed under house arrest in Argentina 17 months ago after admitting to an ABC-TV interviewer that he took part in the massacres.
Intelisano, the lead prosecutor in the case, said he planned to interrogate Priebke this week, Priebke's health permitting.
Some Jewish leaders appealed for a civil trial on charges of crimes against humanity, but Italy did not add genocide to its legal codes until 1967 and cannot apply it retroactively.
Priebke's extradition on Monday fell on the 50th anniversary of the start of the Nuremberg trials. Twelve of 21 high-ranking Nazi figures were sentenced to hang at the end of the first trial, and nearly 200 more Nazis were tried in 12 other trials at Nuremberg.
Thousands more were tried by national courts around the world.