Nazi trial reopens bitter wounds for Italy

ON March 23rd, 1944, Ada and Umberto Pignotti crossed Rome to visit in laws who owned a shop in the central Via Quattro Fontane. Times were hard for a couple who had been married just three months earlier.

In March 1944, Rome was a war zone, occupied by German forces who had declared it ran an "open city" i.e. a demilitarised area but who continued to use it as a vital road and rail transit point for arms and supplies being sent to fight off the Allied beach landings at Anzio, 100km south.

The Pignotti family reunion in Quattro Fontane was interrupted by an enormous explosion.

A patrol of German soldiers had been blown up by the partisans in nearby Via Rasella. Thirty two soldiers died instantly and another died that night in hospital.

Soon the whole area had been cordoned off by the Germans. Not long after that, the Nazi soldiers kicked down the door of the Pignotti apartment building. They forced their way in to every apartment, rounding up all the men and leading them out on to Via Quattro Fontane where they were made to line up on the footpath with their hands behind their backs.

Ada Pignotti, now an elegant, petite 75 year old, was 23 then. She remembers the scene vividly: "The soldiers were shouting and kicking, and if anyone tried to resist them they got badly beaten with rifle butts. They took my Umberto and his brother away ...

"Later, they rounded us up, too, and the last time I saw Umberto he was standing there on the footpath with his hands behind his head ... We had four children with us who were terrified and crying. It was chaotic and frightening. I wanted to say something to Umberto, but I couldn't because the soldiers kept pushing us on, shouting at us."

About a month later, Ada Pignotti received a letter from Gestapo HQ in Rome telling her to come and collect her husband's belongings. Umberto Pignotti was one of 335 men and boys (some as young as 15) executed at the infamous "Fosse Ardeatine" (Ardeatine Caves) massacre on March 24th, 1944.

Hitler had been enraged by reports of the partisan ambush and had ordered that 50 Italians be killed for every dead Nazi soldier. Only with difficulty was the Fuhrer persuaded to settle for 10 Italians to every German.

Civilians like Umberto, known partisans held in German detention and 55 Roman Jews thrown in by way of good measure by the Italian Fascist Head of Police, Pietro Caruso (acting with the approval of Mussolini, then heading his puppet Salo Republic in Northern Italy) were loaded on to lorries and taken to the Ardeatine caves, south of Rome.

The 335 were unloaded and walked into the caves where they were made to kneel before being shot in the back of the head. The killings started at about 2 p.m. and finished at about 8 p.m. By the end, the victims were forced to clamber on to the dead bodies of their compatriots before being shot.

As the victims were unloaded off the lorries, an SS captain stood by with a list, ticking off their names. The bookkeeper's name was Erich Priebke, and this week at a Rome military tribunal, 52 years after the event, he has finally been brought to trial for his part in one of the grimmest pages of Italy's bloody second World War history.

Priebke was "discovered" in Argentina in May two years ago by an ABC TV crew, acting on a tip off from Marvin Heir of the Simon Wiesenthal Foundation in Los Angeles.

Priebke was living under his own name and running a hotel in the Andean ski resort of Bariloche. The ABC crew simply doorstepped him and pulled off a journalistic scoop when Priebke admitted on camera that not only had he been a witness to the Ardeatine massacre but he had killed at least one person.

NOT only the Wiesenthal Foundation but also the celebrated Nazi hunter, Beate Klarsfeld, had been aware by 1989 that Priebke was living in Argentina. Even though both organisations informed Italian authorities, no extradition requests for the former SS captain were filed until the ABC interview was screened two years ago.

Priebke himself has explained that, following his escape from a British prisoner of war camp near Rimini in 1948, he was helped out of Italy by a Vatican controlled "Rat line" run by Hungarian Bishop Alois Hudal. (The claim has to be taken seriously since Priebke's duties in Rome included handling relations with the Vatican's Secretariat of State).

Priebke has also claimed that he returned to Italy on at least three different occasions in the last 50 years thanks to the help of retired Italian military officers. It is possible that the trial may unearth some of the mysteries of Priebke's escape, indicating whether it was his skill or a culpable lack of Italian political will that allowed him go on living as a free man for so long.

WHAT is certain is that the prosecution will attempt to dismiss Priebke's oft repeated assertion that he was merely acting on orders. Rather, the prosecution will produce evidence of his SS militancy and also testimony from people tortured by him at the Rome Gestapo HQ in Via Tasso.

The case against Priebke is imposing, and he himself allegedly told his lawyer this week that "only a miracle will save me".

Even though he is now 82, he faces life imprisonment if found guilty.

Such a sentence may satisfy some, but not Ada Pignotti. During a break in the opening day of the trial on Wednesday, she pulled out of her handbag the dog eared German military letter informing her of her 29 year old husband's execution.

With tears in her eyes, she said: "This is all that remains of my Umberto... I'd kill him [Priebke] if I could. If I lived to be 200 years old, I could never forgive him."