They were sure they had gotten away with it. Hundreds of Nazi war criminals, with massacres, murders and torture behind them in Italy since September 8, 1943 From then on, they felt safe. At the beginning of the 1960s, military justice closed their files to the archives, with a shameful provisional archiving. All done.
It is April 1994. In Bariloche, a holiday town in the Argentine Andes, A crew from the ABC news television channel arrives. Sam Donaldson, fierce reporting and a very well-known face in the USA, he had a name in his pocket: Erich Priebke. Captain of the SS in Rome, specialized in interrogations in the cells of via Tasso – the Gestapo prison – but above all one of the executioners of the Fosse Ardéatine. In 1948, he took a boat to Buenos Aires, under the false name of Eight popes. Since then, no one has looked for him. “Erich Priebke?” Donaldson stops him in the street and calls him. He smiles and responds. “Were you in the Gestapo in Rome? “Yes…”. He doesn't deny anything, he doesn't try to escape the interview. It is justified by defining the 335 victims of the Fosses Ardéatines as “terrorists”. He gets in the car and leaves.
The affair explodes and no one can act as if nothing had happened. In Italy, the military prosecutor reopens the case. It's a Pandora's box: in this wardrobe – which Franco Giustolisi will define as “shame” – there was 695 archived files.
This is the context. There is a question that has only received partial answers to date: Who protected war criminals for so long? Why were the files set aside? And again: what happens when Priebke arrives in Italy? Who will help him face justice? Valerio Cataldi's investigation with Andrea Palladino.
