Protesters in Rome broke the funeral of convicted nazi war criminal Erich Priebke, a funeral that a notorious anti-semitic splinter catholic group attempted to have when the Roman Catholic church refused. 

“He should be cremated and chucked out to sea. There should never be a place where this person can rest in peace,” said Bruna Bernardini, a resident of Rome's centuries-old Jewish ghetto.

Erich Priebke was 100 years old when he died last week under house arrest in Italy.  Italians shouted “Executioner! Executioner!” and other epithets, and kicked the hearse as it attempted to move down a street in a Rome suburb, the local mayor unsuccessful in trying to ban the funeral himself.  Protesters made it inside the sanctuary where the funeral was being held, and police broke it up.  After dark, neo-nazi sympathizers clashed with normal people.

The indignity in death was more than earned. Priebke was a German SS officer who oversaw the killings of 335 men and boys, all civilians, at Rome's Ardeatine Caves in 1944.  It was a reprisal attack ordered by Adolf Hitler for the killing of 33 German soldiers in Rome by Italian resistance fighters.

And he almost got away with it.  After World War II, Priebke lived for nearly 50 years in an Andean resort town in Argentina until his identify was discovered.  When notified of his death, Argentina promptly refused to allow him to be buried there.

It was the Society of St. Pius X that attempted to hold Priebke’s last rites, a catholic splinter group long associated with anti-Semitism and holocaust denial.  Don Floriano Abrahamowicz, a St. Pius X priest, told Italian radio that the convicted nazi war criminal “Priebke was a friend of mine, a Christian, a faithful soldier.”