In 1991, Priebke's participation in the Rome massacre was denounced in Esteban Buch's book El pintor de la Suiza Argentina.

[3] In 1994, 50 years after the massacre, Priebke felt he could then talk about the incident and was interviewed by American ABC News reporter Sam Donaldson.

[6][7] Little is known of his early life but Priebke told interviewers that his parents died when he was young and that he was reared mainly by an uncle before earning a living as a waiter in Berlin, at The Savoy Hotel, London, and on the Italian Riviera.

[12] On 24 March, led by SS officers Priebke and Karl Hass, the victims were killed inside the Ardeatine caves in groups of five.

Priebke was responsible for the list and his complicity in those 5 additional killings ruled out any possible justification for his behaviour on the basis of "obedience to official orders.

Priebke put some on the list simply because they were Jewish (sending Jews to the camps, however, he said he had never done, for practical reasons: "We needed the railway cars for other things").

[7][14] Some of these prisoners had simply been residents of Via Rasella who were home at the time of the bombing; others had been arrested and tortured for resistance and communist-related activities.

Since the Allied invasion of Italy in 1943 and the subsequent overthrow of Mussolini, Communist anti-Fascists and members of the Italian Resistance had been practising guerrilla warfare against Axis troops.

[citation needed] In post–World War II trials, Priebke was set to be tried for his role in the massacre, but he managed to escape from a British prison camp in Rimini, Italy, in 1946.

[16] Though alleged to have been responsible for war crimes, Priebke lived in Argentina in the town Bariloche as a free man for 50 years.

In March 1994, an investigative team from ABC News, led by producer Harry Phillips, tracked Priebke to San Carlos de Bariloche after finding mention of his participation in the Ardeatine massacre in a locally written book they found in a used bookstore.

The book, El pintor de la Suiza argentina, by Esteban Buch[3] named Priebke as part of a clique of Nazis living in Bariloche since the early 1950s.

Over the next several weeks, the ABC News team searched archives in Buenos Aires, Washington, D.C., London, Berlin and Jerusalem, uncovering numerous documents chronicling Priebke's background and involvement with the notorious Nazi Gestapo in Italy.

Among documents discovered in the Public Records Office in London was a confession, written a few months after the end of World War II, in which Priebke confirmed his role in the Ardeatine Caves Massacre.

A document uncovered at the Yad Vashem Museum in Israel indicated that Priebke signed off on the transport of Italian Jews to death camps.

He justified his actions by saying that he only followed orders from the Gestapo chief of Rome, Obersturmbannführer Herbert Kappler, and that, in his view, the victims were terrorists.

When testifying after the war, Kappler explained that Priebke had been ordered to make sure that all the victims were brought to the caves and executed, and to check the list of people who were to be killed.

[citation needed] Donaldson's news report showed how openly Priebke could live in Argentina and how little remorse he felt for his actions.

His lawyers argued that the case could no longer be criminally prosecuted because the crime of murder was subject to a statute of limitations of 15 years under Argentinian law.

[citation needed] In May 1995, an Argentinian federal judge accepted the Italian demand for extradition on the grounds that cases of crimes against humanity could not expire.

The Italian military prosecutor, Antonio Intelisano, argued that UN agreements to which Argentina was signatory expressly state that cases of war criminals and crimes against humanity do not expire.

[5][10][17] He was put on a direct flight from Bariloche to Ciampino, a military airport close to the Ardeatine caves, where the executions had been carried out many years earlier.

The day after, Germany asked Italy to keep Priebke imprisoned until their demand to have him extradited was processed, as they wanted him put on trial for the murders of two people that he had personally shot.

[20] A number of Italian conservative figures defended Priebke on the grounds that he was only acting to obey orders: Italian journalist Indro Montanelli, who had lost two friends in the massacre of the Fosse Ardeatine, nonetheless wrote a private letter to Priebke that was later published in Il Giornale on 2013 by Fausto Biloslavo, arguing that he was only following orders;[21] similar points of view were expressed by Vittorio Feltri, Giampiero Mughini, Vittorio Sgarbi, Guido Ceronetti, Anna Maria Ortese and Massimo Fini.

[27][30] The funeral eventually took place, albeit without the presence of any of his relatives, because his family was unable to enter the church due to the rioting.

[31] Eventually, the coffin containing Priebke's body was seized by the Italian authorities, taken to a military base near Rome and then buried "in a secret location" as his lawyer Paolo Giachini stated.