Italy, September 1943. The Second World War has raged for over four years, and the country is beginning to collapse. After years of fighting alongside Nazi Germany, Italy signs an armistice with the Allied forces, who had invaded Sicily just weeks earlier.
In response, German troops pour into central and northern Italy, occupying cities, disarming Italian soldiers, and restoring control through violence. As Fascist rule in Italy crumbles, the resistance begins to rise. Italian partisans, many of them former soldiers, communists and ordinary civilians, take to the hills and streets to fight against the occupiers.
The German response is swift and brutal. In Rome, after a partisan attack kills 33 German soldiers, the Nazi command orders a ruthless reprisal. On 24 March 1944, in the Ardeatine Caves outside Rome, German forces murder hundreds of civilians and political prisoners. One of the main perpetrators of this massacre is Erich Priebke.
Erich Priebke was born on 29 July 1913 in the town of Hennigsdorf, then part of the German Empire. His parents died while he was still young, and he was largely raised by an uncle. As a young man, Priebke worked as a waiter in Berlin, at the Savoy Hotel in London, and later on the Italian Riviera. He married Alicia Stoll, and together they had two sons.
On 30 January 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany by President Paul von Hindenburg, and in July of the same year Priebke joined the Nazi Party. In December 1936, Priebke entered the Gestapo, the Nazi secret police, and later joined the SS. The Second World War started on 1 September 1939 when Nazi Germany invaded Poland.
Italy entered the conflict on 10 June 1940, joining Germany in the war against Britain and France. Under Benito Mussolini’s Fascist regime, Italy hoped to expand its power and revive the glory of ancient Rome. Italian troops fought alongside German forces in North Africa, the Balkans, and on the Eastern Front, but military defeats, shortages, and heavy losses gradually weakened both the army and the regime.
Because of his knowledge of Italian, Priebke was stationed in Rome beginning in 1941, where he served under SS-Sturmbannführer Herbert Kappler. In July 1943, after Allied forces invaded Sicily, Mussolini was removed from power and arrested. Soon afterwards, Italy signed an armistice with the Allies. Germany reacted immediately by occupying central and northern Italy, disarming Italian forces, and seizing control of Rome.
Mussolini was later rescued by German commandos and installed as head of a German-controlled puppet state in northern Italy. Under occupation, arrests, executions, and deportations became part of daily life. Resistance groups grew bolder, and attacks against the occupiers became more frequent. The occupiers responded with collective punishments – civilians were executed, hostages were taken, and entire communities were threatened.
In this atmosphere of fear and violence, the Ardeatine Caves Massacre would soon follow. The immediate trigger came on 23 March 1944. In the afternoon, around three o’clock, a bomb exploded in Via Rasella, near the centre of Rome. The attack was carried out by members of the Italian communist resistance.
The explosion struck a marching unit of the 11ᵗʰ Company of the SS Police Regiment Bozen, made up largely of South Tyroleans. 33 Germans were killed, and dozens more were wounded. The timing of this attack was symbolic, as it was the anniversary of the infamous Fascist Blackshirts, which had been founded by Mussolini on 23 March 1919. The message was clear, but the German reaction to this symbolic act was immediate and ruthless.
Following the attack, the German occupation authorities ordered reprisals. Italian hostages were to be executed at a ratio of ten Italians for every German soldier killed. Names were drawn from prison lists – Jews waiting for deportation, political prisoners, resistance members, and men arrested simply for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Some had been imprisoned for months, others for only a few days, and many had never been sentenced or formally charged. There were teachers, workers, lawyers, officers, artists, priests, fathers, sons, and brothers. Some families would later discover that more than one relative had been taken. One of the officers involved in organising the massacre was Erich Priebke, who held the rank of SS-Hauptsturmführer, an equivalent of captain in the U.S. Army.
He personally helped compile the lists of those selected for death. On the night before the massacre, Priebke went through police records containing the names of suspected resistance sympathizers and ordered the arrest of additional political prisoners in order to complete the required number of hostages. Moreover, he put some inmates on the list simply because they were Jewish.
On 24 March 1944, the prisoners were transported in trucks to the Ardeatine Caves on the outskirts of Rome. Their hands were bound with rope to limit their movement. Inside the caves, they were led forward in groups of five and ordered to kneel. Shots were fired into the back of their heads. Priebke went inside together with the second or third group and shot a man with an Italian machine pistol. Toward the end, he shot another man with the same gun.
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As the executions continued, names were crossed off the lists one by one. Bodies piled up on the cave floor, and the next victims were forced to kneel on top of the dead. The killings lasted for hours, while prisoners waiting outside could hear the gunshots echoing from inside the caves.
After the final executions, explosives were detonated to seal the tunnels. Some victims may still have been alive when the rock collapsed on them. In total, 335 people were killed, five more than the number ordered by the German High Command. According to later investigations, this happened because Priebke, who supervised the executions and checked the lists of victims, failed to notice in the confusion that five additional prisoners had been brought in by mistake.
After the liberation of Rome on 4 June 1944, the sealed caves were opened, and the truth was finally revealed. Inside the Ardeatine Caves, officials found bodies buried beneath collapsed rock and dust, piled one on top of another exactly as they had fallen.
The air was heavy and the space was narrow, making the recovery slow and painful. Many victims were still bound with rope, some unrecognizable because of injuries and decomposition. Personal belongings, scraps of clothing, documents, and rings were carefully collected to help families identify their loved ones. In the years that followed, most of the 335 victims were identified.
75 of the murdered were Jews. The youngest victim was 15 years old. The oldest was 74. However, the Ardeatine Caves Massacre, which became one of the clearest symbols of Nazi brutality in occupied Italy, was not the end of Erich Priebke’s wartime activities. According to some accounts, Priebke was involved in the events that led to the La Storta Massacre.
As Allied troops entered Rome, 14 political prisoners were taken from the notorious Via Tasso prison and executed near the village of La Storta outside the city. Most of the victims were socialists connected to the Matteotti Brigades or members of the underground military resistance. Among those murdered was the socialist trade unionist and former member of parliament Bruno Buozzi.
On 14 June 1944, Priebke became liaison officer to the headquarters of the Fascist Republican National Guard in the city of Brescia. There, he participated in raids, arrests, and anti-partisan operations aimed at destroying resistance networks in northern Italy. Hundreds of prisoners, resistance fighters and suspected partisans captured between Lombardy and Veneto, passed through Canton Mombello prison before being transferred to German headquarters, where Priebke often personally conducted interrogations. One former partisan courier, Agape Nulli, who had been
arrested at the age of 18, later recalled: “I remember the day of the interrogation. Priebke entered the room pointing his finger at me and suddenly asked: ‘Have you read the Bible?’ I answered no. I understood it was a trick question to find out whether I was Jewish. Then he asked where my brothers were hiding.
They were also partisans, but I could not know because I had already been in prison for more than a month. My interrogation ended there. Others were far less fortunate. Bruno Gilardoni was brought back to his cell half dead after hours of interrogation hanging from the ceiling by a rope. Others were sent to concentration camps and died there.” The Second World War in Europe ended on 8 May 1945.
Priebke was arrested and held in a British prison camp in the Italian city of Rimini, but in 1946 he escaped. He later claimed that the escape had been assisted by a Catholic ratline organised by the Austrian bishop Alois Hudal. Using the false identity “Otto Pape,” he eventually fled to Argentina, where he settled in the town of Bariloche in Patagonia.
For nearly fifty years, Priebke lived there openly and without punishment. He worked as a waiter and later opened a delicatessen. Over time, he became a prominent figure within the local German-Argentine community and travelled freely between Argentina and Europe. In 1994, an ABC News investigation tracked Priebke down in Bariloche.
During an on-camera interview, he openly admitted his role in the Ardeatine Caves Massacre and defended his actions by claiming he had only followed orders. In a later interview with the newspaper La Repubblica, Priebke stated: “Yes, at the Ardeatine Caves I killed. I fired. It was an order.
Once, twice, three times. I do not remember exactly. What difference does it make? I was an officer, not a bookkeeper. We were not even particularly interested in revenge. The soldiers killed in Via Rasella were from Tyrol, more Italian than German. But Kappler was uncompromising. He even forced the cook to shoot.
We executed five extra men. It was a mistake, but they were all terrorists anyway, so nobody really cared.” After lengthy legal proceedings, Priebke was brought back to Italy for trial in 1996. He was eventually sentenced to life imprisonment for his role in the massacre. Because of his age, he spent his final years under house arrest in Rome, where he died on 11 October 2013. He was 100 years old.
His request to be buried in Argentina alongside his wife was rejected, while the Diocese of Rome banned any funeral ceremony in Catholic churches in the city. His hometown in Germany also refused to accept his remains, fearing the grave could become a neo-Nazi pilgrimage site.
After the Diocese refused to conduct the funeral, Priebke’s family turned to the traditionalist Society of Saint Pius X, which agreed to hold the service in Albano near Rome. The funeral ultimately took place without any of Priebke’s relatives present, as rioting outside the church between fascist sympathizers and anti-fascist protesters prevented his family from entering.
Italian authorities later seized the coffin and buried Priebke’s body in a secret location near Rome. Thanks for watching the World History Channel. Be sure to like and subscribe and click the bell notification icon so you don’t miss our next episodes. We thank you and we’ll see you next time on the channel.
Disclaimer : This content may be created by AI for entertainment purposes. Any resemblance to real persons, events, or places is coincidental.
