I am forever asking myself what I can do for those who have not survived.” Simon Wiesenthal In April 1994, an ABC News camera crew carefully staked out their man. They had located Erich Priebke in San Carlos de Bariloche, an Argentine resort city in the foothills of the Andes where nineteenth-century German immigrants had constructed Alpine houses. Like many Nazis implicated in mass killings, the former SS captain had fled Europe after the war and led a seemingly normal existence ever since. He ran a delicatessen and even traveled back to Europe on occasion, never bothering to change his name. His past looked to be well behind him—until the day he was confronted by ABC’s pugnacious reporter Sam Donaldson as the camera rolled. Priebke’s claim to infamy was his role in organizing the execution of 335 men and boys, including seventy-five Jews, in the Ardeatine Caves on the outskirts of Rome on March 24, 1944. Italian partisans had killed thirty-three Germans earlier, and Herbert Kappler, the Rome Gestapo chief, ordered the massacre on the principle that ten Italians should die for every dead German.
