Erich Priebke’s real crime: his revisionism?

Wehrmacht Captain Erich Priebke was in Rome in 1944 when thirty of his comrades in arms were cowardly murdered, blown up by a bomb planted in via Rasella by Communist-led partisans. Another hundred of his comrades in arms were wounded by the same bomb, a large number of them permanently blinded. He was especially disturbed on learning that an eleven-year-old Italian boy had also been killed, his body cut in two by the blast.

So, just a minute: what man, what woman, in such circumstances, could keep a cool head? One may add that Priebke was among those who received the order from Berlin, transmitted by his superiors, to execute the following day, in reprisal, approximately ten men for each victim. A new horror after a first horror.

The Jewish, communist and other associations that yesterday took the initiative of organising loathsome acts of violence against the attempts to transport Priebke’s coffin to a church certainly had in mind the “crime” of which they accused him, but it may be asked whether in their eyes the real crime of the scapegoat was his revisionism (see his interview-testament, in Italian, of July 2013). At a time when, on the strictly historical and scientific level, the revisionists have won victory after victory, the panic overtaking the enthusiasts of the “Holocaust” or “Shoah” religion is understandable. And the conditions required for Italy to adopt, in its turn, a special ad-hoc law against revisionism need to be created, do they not?

October 17, 2013