Rot in Hell, Erich

[frankthring]

That is if there is a Hell....either way, the LAST nasty Nazi is dead ! This is
Captain Erich Priebke, Waffen SS, who was personally responsible for the
Adreatine Caves Massacre outside Rome in 1944. He executed 335 males,
aged fifteen to late seventies, all picked off the streets at random, a German
retaliation for the death on the preceding day, 23rd March, of 33 Nazi
soldiers in a partisan bomb attack.
Extradited from Argentina, where he spent fifty years, Priebke went on trial
in Italy in 1997. Due to his age he was placed under house arrest - he never
regretted the killings, some of which he administered with his own pistol,
calling the victims "Communist scum".
It remains the biggest wartime massacre in Italy and the caves today are a
place of prayer.

[andy at handiwork]

We weren't all that good at rooting out the nazis just after the war were we?

[Essex Lad]

andy at handiwork wrote:

> We weren't all that good at rooting out the nazis just after
> the war were we?

Well some of them were quite useful ? those ones who had invented/developed rockets and such like; even some of the "medical" ones from the camps we used their research ? although of course we'd never admit it.

[frankthring]

In my opinion Andy & Essex Lad, the failure of the Allies to pursue Nazis
after the war is a shameful blot on our postwar history. The American
record is particularly bad, worse than ours in fact, and the Odessa SS-
escape organization was aided by several Roman Catholic clergy based in
Rome (and a Pope who was decidedly pro-Nazi), though their tenets seem
to have been a) forgiveness to all sinners b) virulent anti-communism.
But the British Govt not only turned a blind eye to catching major war
criminals, they positively made it difficult. When one of the two survivors
of the 1940 SS machine gun massacre of over 100 men of the Norfolk
Regiment turned up at the War Office to demand a search for the killers, he
was at first laughed at. Only his desire to see the officer in charge brought
to trial - and search for extra evidence - paid off (the men had been taken
prisoner on the Dunkirk retreat, the SS swine was traced, convicted and
hung).

[andy at handiwork]

'...a Pope who was decidedly pro-Nazi...'

To be fair, and you wont hear me say that too often about a pope, there is now considerable evidence, and support (some of it from Israeli scholars) for Pius XII, to show that far from being pro-Nazi, he was actually responsible for saving as many as 800,000 Jews during the war. He chose a diplomatic route rather than a confrontational one with Hitler and Mussolini, which made it appear that he was 'silent'.

The day after Pacelli's election as Pope (March 3, 1939), the Nazi newspaper, Berliner Morganpost, stated its position clearly: ?The election of Cardinal Pacelli (Pius XII) is not accepted with favour in Germany because he was always opposed to Nazism.?



That said, there were obviously elements of the Catholic hierarchy who helped nazis to escape retribution after the defeat.

[locationsfinder]

Pius Xii did absolutely nothing and said absolutely nothing to save the 1K Jews who were deported from Rome in 1943. His Xmas broadcast in 1942 trivialised and denied the Holocaust as it was happening and made no criticism of anything German. He also organised a concord agreement between the Vatican and the Nazis in July 1933 by which the German Centre Party, supported by many German Catholics would withdraw from politics completely. This allowed Hitler to rapidly consolidate his power. Pius Xii did quite a lot to make things easier for the Nazis. Perhaps worse, when the mass-murder of the Jews and other minorities was quite well known by 1944, he did nothing to help the 400K or so Jews of Hungary, a diplomatic effort would have been possible given that it was obvious that Germany would lose the war by then. The only people who oddly behaved with more credibility than he were Franco, and the pro-Nazi Finnish government who did not deport any Jews. Mussolini gave a lot of lip service to the issue of race but also did not deport Jews.