Former SS man jailed for cave murders

The Italian military court finally made its peace with history and with public opinion yesterday by sentencing the former Nazi SS officer Erich Priebke to five years behind bars for his role in the 1944 massacre of Italian civilians at the Ardeatine Caves outside Rome.

The sentence, welcomed by Jewish leaders and groups representing the victims' families, was one of the most tortuously reached legal decisions in Italian history, taking a full 53 years to come to fruition and involving a number of startling setbacks along the way.

Last year the same court chose to let Priebke go on the grounds that he and others had been forced to carry out the massacre under severe pressure from the Gestapo - an extenuating circumstance that automatically downgraded his acts from crimes against humanity to an ordinary act of violence now covered by the statute of limitations.

That decision caused such an outcry in political circles that it was eventually annulled in the high court and sent back for a retrial.

Yesterday's decision was therefore just as much about setting the record straight as it was making a momentous judgement about Italian history. The massacre at the Ardeatine Caves, in which 335 men and children were rounded up and shot in retaliation for a partisan bomb attack on an SS unit, was not only one of the most brutal acts against civilians in Italy during the Second World War but has become a symbol of anti-Fascist resistance in present-day Italy.

For years, Priebke lived quietly in Argentina until the Simon Wiesenthal Centre tracked him down in 1994. When he was extradited to Italy the following year, he managed to revive all the old conflicts between the anti-Fascist majority and those Italians who remained loyal to Benito Mussolini to the very last. The military court, representing some of the most reactionary historical interests in the country, instinctively sided with the view that old demons are best left unstirred.

Much of public opinion, particularly the centre-left government now in power, took violent exception to the court's deliberations and demanded that the country's heroes be properly vindicated. The mess created by the whole Priebke affair has highlighted just how little thought modern Italy has given to its ambivalent feelings during the war - when the country was tugged into polarised pro-Fascist and pro-Communist camps - and any sense of guilt that might have arisen.

Yesterday, Priebke was finally sentenced to 15 years in jail, but given his advanced age - 84 - 10 of them were suspended. A second former SS officer, Karl Hass, was sentenced to 10 years and eight months, but he was told he would have to serve none of them. Both men spent long periods of their lives enjoying the protection of a number of foreign governments. Hass, at least, was used as an intelligence agent and had his identity protected by being declared officially dead.