We must bury this Nazi war criminal, let his grave be a reminder

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/24/bury-nazi-war-criminal-erich-priebke-grave

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Argentina has a problem with dead Nazis. Allowing the return of the body of Nazi war criminal Erich Priebke, who died in Rome aged 100, would be "an affront to human dignity", the country's foreign minister, Héctor Timerman, recently proclaimed via Twitter.

The country's officials appeared to have no such qualms when it came to living Nazis, many of whom escaped prosecution in Europe after 1945 by finding refuge in the South American state. Priebke, too, lived there peacefully for almost half a century until the former German SS officer was extradited following international pressure in 1995. He faced trial in Rome for his role in the 1944 massacre at the Ardeatine caves, in which 335 Italians were murdered. Priebke was eventually sentenced to life imprisonment but was put under house arrest because of his advanced age.

Now that he is dead, no one wants his body. Rome's mayor refused permission for Priebke to be buried anywhere in the city, and Vatican officials banned any Catholic church in the city from holding a funeral. Even his German home town of Hennigsdorf, near Berlin, doesn't want him back. Finally, the ultra rightwing Catholic Society of St Pius X offered to perform a ceremony for Priebke at a chapel in Albano Laziale, outside Rome. His funeral there was supposed to take place on the 70th anniversary of the Nazi roundup of Roman Jews. Except, it didn't. Protesters kicked and spat at the hearse. Rightwing extremists clashed with anti-Nazi demonstrators until the police finally intervened and whisked the tainted corpse away to a military airport for safekeeping.

Priebke's body has become a source of international embarrassment because it reminds us of the collective failure to bring to justice in a timely manner those that perpetrated these horrors. Hence the reluctance of German, Italian and Argentinian officials to receive the tainted relic. The fact that this man, like many others, was able to live most of his life without being held to account for his crimes puts to shame the half-hearted efforts of the Italian and German judiciary to prosecute Nazi war criminals after 1945.

In death, it seems, war criminals are more dangerous than when they were alive. Like kings, they have two bodies: a living, breathing mortal shell during their lifetime, and a symbolic body after death. While he lived under house arrest, Priebke was little more than an old man long past his moral sell-by date, occasionally receiving quiet visits from rightwing admirers. In death, his corpse has become a focal point of protest since it serves as a symbol of the horrors of Nazi occupation during the second world war.

Some fear that his final resting place could become a shrine for neo-Nazi sympathisers. "Spreading his ashes, like they did to Adolf Eichmann, would stop his grave becoming a pilgrimage destination," said Riccardo Pacifici, president of Rome's Jewish community. Indeed, this has happened before. German neo-Nazis staged memorial marches to the grave of Hitler deputy Rudolf Hess in Wunsiedel, Germany, until the family put a stop to that by having the corpse exhumed and cremated and the ashes scattered at sea.

Eichmann's remains were dealt with in a similar way after his execution in Israel. The bodies of Adolf Hitler, Eva Braun and Josef Goebbels were buried and exhumed no less than three times. They remained at a Soviet garrison in East Germany until 1970, when they were finally cremated and their ashes thrown into the Elbe river, no less than a quarter century after their deaths in Berlin. But it is not only the remains of Nazi war criminals that have posed such problems for governments. Osama bin Laden's body was swiftly disposed of at a secret location by his American capturers for similar reasons.

In death, the enemy's body becomes a representation of his politics. Thus, his captors face a dilemma: the body has to be shown as proof that evil has been vanquished. But it also needs to disappear to prevent it becoming idolised. The dead body of Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi was on display at a meat market in Misrata for four days before it was buried in a secret location in the desert.

It seems we cannot allow our enemies the dignity of a proper burial. After the attack on the Boston marathon, morgues in the city refused to accept the body of bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev. The idea that evil men do not deserve human treatment even in death goes back to Creon, the mythological King of Thebes, who let refused to allow his enemy Polynices to be mourned or buried: "It cannot be."

Nothing much seems to have changed. Do we really have to fear the dead so much that we need to make their bodies disappear? In doing so, we try to exorcise the demons from our own history rather than confronting them. Priebke was part of a monstrous deed, but he was not a monster. Germany should take his body back and allow him to be buried here. His grave could serve as a reminder – not of the ideology that died with him, but of the horrors committed in its name.

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