How An American TV Crew Tracked Down A Nazi | Nazi Hunters | Timeline

my name's dan snow and i want to tell you about history hit tv it's like the netflix for history hundreds of exclusive documentaries and interviews with the world's best historians we've got an exclusive offer available to fans of timeline if you go to history hit tv you can either follow the information below this video or just google history hit tv and use the code timeline you get a special introductory offer go and check it out in the meantime enjoy this video i thought i'm looking at a nazi war criminal this is incredible priebke had been one of the most important gestapo officers in rome during the war from all reports he had a certain brutality and efficiency about him this guy is right up there with mengele with eichmann what i felt in front of that man it was hate we were hoping that we could confront a couple of nazis in a german town in the andes i've interviewed a lot of people who have committed crimes and they usually run when they see someone like me [Music] argentina for half a century a haven for nazi war criminals until now in a historic move the government opens its post-war archives to the world one day in early 1994 at our program primetime live someone said why don't we do the story of how nazi war criminals came to argentina after world war ii the story will leave one of america's most celebrated television news teams to the scoop of a lifetime to one of the last remaining high-ranking nazis still at large ss captain eric priebkud with the greater liberalisation of the argentine administration the old junta days had gone new files were emerging suggested that a lot of nazis had indeed fled to south america and argentina the stories that have been coming out at the time were that the argentine government had been hiding something and i thought okay well can i go down there and find the nazi who's still alive perhaps abc news producer harry phillips is assigned the story i went down to buenos aires to poke through archives i spent hours and hours by myself going through files and sure enough i found a lot of nazis who we knew had traveled to argentina adolf eichmann joseph mengele the next task was to determine who was still a war criminal whose name i didn't have who might still be in the file we knew from the simon wiesenthal center that there was a man in argentina he called himself juan mauler but we suspected very strongly that he was a nazi named reinert cops who we knew was a nazi because there were records of him all i needed to do was confirm that juan mauler was reiner cops thanks to the simon wiesenthal center we knew that juan mahler was in veriloche living in hiding deep in the andes in this small german town [Music] the simon bezenthal center is a jewish human rights organization what neither they nor abc know is that reinhard cops aka one mahler will lead them to a much bigger fish the number two man in rome's gestapo eric priepka i worked with a woman in buenos aires named dalila herbst i hired her as a translator and a fixer and to do research with me and so we began asking questions harry called me and asked me to go down to bariloche to get in touch with a guy called juan maler we knew that cops was in barolote and we also knew that bara loche was a haven for for german migrants they built this german town in the andes baroloti is essentially an austrian german alpine resort in argentina for many germans and austrians barolo she was a real home from home the lakes were there the mountains were there the germans were there and a lot of them were nazis reinhard cops and various other ss men settled in body legend for these these austrian and german people they felt like they were in bavaria or in the alps somewhere they lived very openly they went to the opera they went to the cafes they had their restaurants for them was like a home away from home there were probably some covert toasts to hitler's birthday there i don't think it was an out and out sort of fourth reich but i think certainly it was a place where a lot of former nazis lived in bariloche i was quite afraid of asking who he was i knew that he had a small hotel and i called there and said if i could talk to mr juan male and they said he rented this hotel to us and they wouldn't give any sort of information and then i began to try to see where i could get this guy so i phoned his house and a german woman told me we don't know when he's coming back so i said well this is going to be a hard work i called harry and said we don't know when he's coming back [Music] after the war captain reinhard cox fled to argentina but not before helping thousands of his fellow nazis escape the allies reinhard cops was the spy he was the man going around handing out landing permits to argentina to his fellow nazis the rat line became the term used by the nazis who were you know running off the sinking ship of the third rife seeking safety the rat line ran from germany into either austria or switzerland from there to italy where they boarded ships to come to south america from his office in rome cops handled thousands of nazis on the run before long he orchestrated his own escape to bereloche argentina so i'm in contact with dalilah a lot she stayed in bara lochi while i had returned to the us for a time i remember asking delela to check names out all the time you know with the local community and so forth i was on my own there and absolutely bored so i went down and asked somebody at the hotel if they could give me a list of books just to read and know the story of body lodge and between those books were one called the painter of the argentine switzerland maybe the book a local history can shed light on the nazi fugitives who've made this area home i went to the most important bookstore in bariloche i asked the man and he said it disappeared so i went to several bookstores at night and it was exactly the same answer [Music] the next morning it was a beautiful day so i went down walking and there was a little kiosk [Music] and there it was i couldn't believe that [Music] and i found at the beginning the story of cops [Music] and three pages later there was a story of a man called eric pripke it was very shocking for me priepka had been one of the most important gestapo officers in rome during the war from all reports he was very very good at hunting down enemies of the state in italy and he had a certain brutality and efficiency about him had wide contacts with the italian fascist you know network in italy with priests in the catholic church when the third reich collapsed in 1945 eric priebke went on the run so priepka knew he had to leave italy there was an active network of priests who were working helping nazis escape the system for acquiring false documents is already in place in 1948 following the same rat line as reinhard cops eric priebke and his family escaped to buenos aires for 50 years he has eluded justice but now a team of journalists has stumbled onto his trail every day we're on the phone talking about names names names and finally delilah said to me i think you might be interested in a guy named eric pribke and i said is that name on our list she said no that name's not on our list but i i found his name in a bookstore and i don't know if it's true but this thesis talks about him being involved in some massacre in europe at first i was a little skeptical but after the second or third conversation we had on this i thought you know what this this sounds really promising but is the guy alive she said i don't know i said well find a phone book so i went and wanted to see if i could get his uh his telephone number and i just got you know a directory and sure enough i brought the phone book home because in the phone book she found him under his own name it was his name eric bripke his address and his phone number eric pribke except he had made one change instead of the h at the end of eric he was listed as e-r-i-c erico pribke it had to be the same guy so i called and a german woman again got me on the phone and said hold on a second and when he came to her phone and said hello i got afraid and hanged i couldn't you know react he was alive and perhaps even a war criminal living in hiding deep in the andes in this small german town it really was a heart-stopping moment the abc news team now hopes to expose not one but two nazis well we knew we were going to do a large story we had to do a total workout of research on eric pribke just to see if indeed this man was a war criminal argentina had admitted a huge number of nazis after world war ii the exact number no one knows to this date producer harry phillips returns to vera loche to stay under the radar his team needs a cover story delilah herbst came in as a small businesswoman from buenos aires who was interested in perhaps moving to barolote and looking at business prospects i was obviously going to be a an american or a canadian tourist that's the only thing i could do and pull off and i went out as a guy who was in town to do some fly fishing they focus first on tracking down reinhard cops [Music] ultimately i want to prove that juan mahler is rendered cops so i went to his house and i just kind of surveyed the area myself i did not knock on the door i wanted to just watch him but i didn't see him after a few days in berloche it became apparent to me that i might not see juan waller he hadn't come out of his house if he was in there he hadn't gone to his business i didn't know for sure if he was in town phillips worries priepka may have left town as well he digs deeper into his past we had to find out if the allegations against pribca were true so we had to do a lot of research to about his past in nazi germany we were shocked with the results we discovered records that showed that he was part of one of the worst atrocities perhaps the worst atrocity that occurred in the country of italy during the war i thought oh my god this guy is right up there with some of the worst nazi war criminals by 1944 priebke was the gestapo's second in command in rome as the war was going very much against the germans there was increasing partisan activity and one day in the spring of 44 33 german soldiers were blown up by a partisan bomb they decided to kill 10 italians for every nazi who died so that's 330 uh compared with 33 of the nazis that were killed they had 24 hours to find the required number of people the gestapo turn up and take away 335 people to be executed they should have had 330 they got 335. they rounded up five more than they should have some of them were jewish some of them were children some of them were very old men some of them were julius [ __ ] aquino's relatives when the german people came in the night a trunk stopped in front of this house of my grandparents and we see in this night they were 18 person and they're putting them away her grandfather his sons and his son's sons three generations are arrested they were driven up to the arduitoine caves eric prebka was the guy standing outside the caves checking the names off one by one they were led into these caves by ss men um with their hands tied behind their backs in groups of five the killing began at 3 30 p.m these victims would be lined up and the ss officer would shoot them with one shot in the back of the neck and the five would fall forward they asked to kneel and putting the head down he killed him only one shot you imagine inside this dark pit bodies piling up you know the screams of men it is horrible then five more would come right behind them and they will fall forward priebke was there with his roster however he did more than that he was one of the first to set an example by killing two of the individuals who were killed in that massacre it was the most savage vile reprisal and we had been working on this story for a couple of months now we knew that we were at the point where we really had to get shooting we were talking about privka and how we were going to pull this off we were hoping that we could possibly confront a couple of nazis in a german town in the andes where war criminals had been living for 50 years we want to see what he's doing today and to see what his life was like in hiding delilah herbst must trick the former gestapo man into meeting her i have to go to my room and call him from my room alone i can't be with other people to call him delela herbst concocted a story about herself being interested in opening up a delicatessen in berloche by coincidence he had apparently had some business like that and i told him that i had a friend who lived in bariloche and that my friend told me that he was a very intelligent businessman i had to think about something nice to tell him so he agreed to meet with her on march 28 1994 dalila arrives at a cafe in berlocchi to meet the man they think is a nazi war criminal and the goal was to check if pripke was eric prepke we brought a cameraman down to argentina and we began to do surveillance of [ __ ] kick we wanted to get as much video of this guy today as possible we had a camera that was a full-size videotaped camera and it was something that could not be concealed very easily we had to take a bit of a gamble and expose ourselves a little bit we were afraid that something might happen [Music] posing as a businesswoman an abc news researcher waits for the man she believes to be a war criminal we found a location in downtown veriloche across the street from a restaurant where delilah herbs set up a meeting with pripka [Music] i had to take a coffee alone with pripke and i had to check that pripke was brib cake she was presenting herself as a possible investor in a business in in baroloci it was not easy because they told me where i had to sit and where he had to sit our cameras were across the street we were in a kind of a stairwell and we were one floor above the street i remember worrying that primpkin would see us he looked like the most sweet a nice grandfather with his blue eyes an innocent look and i began talking about war and then i said you know my grandfather was born in berlin and his face changed berlin he said i'm from berlin [Music] i said what a coincidence and then i asked him did you have to kill somebody in the war and he said no because i was an officer in the german embassy in rome my coffee cup you know just it was you know just running the coffee all over the water moment i am an argentine jew what i felt in front of that man it was hate i wanted to run away from the place but you know i had to stay because i was working i thought i'm looking at a nazi war criminal this is incredible this man's been living in hiding a free man for 50 years after murdering 335 innocent civilians in rome when i wanted to say goodbye i just wanted to shake hands and i put my arm this way and it dragged and gave me a kiss in my cheek and i said goodbye it was very shocking for me very shocking for me we learned about his involvement with the local german school where he lived the precise times at which he would go places very important strategic information for us to have and he actually made a point of saying i am punctual i come out of the school at 12 o'clock noon exactly and walk home for lunch [Music] i called new york and i said i think i don't want to sound too certain of myself at this point but i think we've got a big fish here harry phillips the producer kept briefing me of course on his progress and there came a time when he said i think we're ready to go down to argentina and he laid out what he had and at that point we kicked into motion a a plan to have sam donaldson come from washington to confront eric pribka the abc team has failed to find reinhard cops [Music] they decide to go ahead with the story anyway hoping eric preepka won't get wind of them and vanish too i thought it was very important to bring bripke to justice and to tell the story of this particular nazi and what he did sam donaldson was the host of a weekend show in washington we really only had a couple of days during the week where we could have him in baraloche or in argentina at all for that matter so we had to get him to baroloci on a private jet it was one of those rarefied moments where i'm putting down an american express card to spend ten thousand dollars for a private jet to fly deep into the andes we were very hot for this story we felt that we were really on the verge of getting something possibly very big so we came one evening to verilochi we stayed at some hotel in the outskirts of town we instructed the pilots of the aircraft to go undercover i said you guys disappear now for 24 hours come back and meet us here at 3 pm tomorrow we should be all done by then and we got to get sam donaldson out of here gary phillips had arranged for a van to take us to this hotel on a lake we stayed there until the next morning when we started out to find the two germans we were going to have two camera crews at least two translators myself and sam donaldson descending on this quiet little town all at once people are going to be asking questions who are these people why are they here the cameras were in cases so it wasn't as if we got off an airplane with our cameramen holding their cameras on their shoulders when we checked into the hotel i instructed the crew to tell everybody that we were wealthy tourists i had just been there fishing i was now bringing my friends back we were to go out on the town we didn't say let's go out in the town and meet a bunch of german citizens here in argentina and have a beer with them we wanted to be safe because we were going to do something very provocative but we also wanted to succeed in what we were doing and so we had to talk very carefully about what our schedule was going to be we knew that he would come out at noon from his school and we knew that we had some hours before we would need to be there so we dedicated the first few hours to surveillance and staking out juan mauler's house even though we hadn't seen him at all we thought we'd better spend at least three or four hours with sam just in case he arrives and the next morning we set out first to find juan mahler it was a long shot at 7 00 am we were out on the street in front of juan mauler's house we couldn't put a camera directly in front of the house without being real obvious so we had cameras in vans i'm bleary-eyed because i've been up most of the night delilah is exhausted sam dalton fortunately is fresh and our camera crew is wired ready for something to happen i'm just about to say we might not get anything when suddenly the gate opens in front of his house and outsteps juan mauler [Music] it is the first time any of the ebc team has set eyes on the former ss officer and we found him where we thought we could find him i knew it was him immediately the first time i'd seen him and i yelled out to everybody there he is he's standing in the street all of a sudden a taxi came he got in it and a taxi took off before we could do anything so i yelled through the walkie-talkie sam he's coming your way and we went after his taxi i was terrified because i had lost sight of him i was too far behind and we were gonna panic and fortunately sam was right behind him as they pulled up to a pharmacy and donald said when i say jump all of you jump into the street sam and his crew leaped out of a vehicle and approached juan mauler who was exiting the pharmacy i was waiting on the sidewalk hi i'm sam donaldson of american television abc news introduced myself he saw the cameras he knew i was from american television and he knew that he was being videotaped he looked like a rat who'd been caught with the cameras on all sides but what do you know what you want well is your name reinhard cops excuse me but i have no time for that sam was asking him are you also raynard copps and juan mahler said no i am not so harry phillips took out a photo where you could see cops dressed up as a nazi this is not a footer stat of your membership in the nazi party no never had been a member i kept pressing him uh on this and i had his picture and i had other identifying marks from him as reinhard cops who look like the same guy you are reinhardt cops no no no no i was i was in 52. the german embassy here gave me the name the name of of mahler what was your name before mahler cops cops your name was cops yeah no it's not divorce we got him to admit that he's reiner cops second thing was sam now i had to ask him did you help nazis leave rome i pressed him on what he had done have you ever heard of the rat line something called the rat line no no no and after a little bit of questioning he admitted that too i know now that it was something like that but in those times i did not know now i guess he must have thought i've got to deflect this interest in me it was a real shock what he said next i was not in slaved albania in the ss ambushed on the street by abc news former ss officer reinhard kopps is growing desperate there's a lot of people here still not see a lot i tell you who are they pulled me up the street as if to whisper to me but i still had a microphone i thought wow i don't know what he's going to say but it's going to be very interesting and he whispered in sam's ear his name he is nervous he wanted out of there he wanted to deflect attention and so he decided to give up eric pribke it was priceless we were giddy is the best word to describe it it would be hours before they could confront prieca at the german school how quickly could word spread you know you have to realize this nazi community in argentina was full of rivalries and hatred there'd already been the case of adolf eichmann who was kidnapped in 1960. there was also lots of rumors that went around the nazi community in argentina that eichmann had been betrayed by one of these one of his fellow nazis as well saw a community where everybody was very suspicious of each other and they all lived in fear that they would be arrested or kidnapped who knows if these individuals are vindictive or whether they want to stop us or whether they feel that you know that we have just gotten something that could cause reinert cops to be arrested and thrown in jail but we only had half of our work done and we were now planning for the home run eric pribke he was our next person to go to [Music] the argentine caves massacre is an incredibly important fixture on this of italian cultural historical landscape to hide their crimes the nazis used explosives to seal off the caves and entomb their victims it was only after rome's liberation that the true horror of the massacre came to light the caves were opened later that year and there's a lot of very gruesome uh photography taken and a lot of testimony from the archaeologists and scientists who were there who helped dig it up it is totally emblematic of nazi brutality in june 1944 the allies entered rome fled north to the italian alps [Music] one day there's a knock on the door and the americans have come to arrest him they're rounding people up pripke openly admitted to the artichokes his participation he felt it was a legitimate act of war as following orders it was reprisal priebke has spent 18 months in a number of prisoner of war camps he decides after a period of time well i'm going to escape so one night he decides the way to get out the weakest part of this camp is the wire and uh so he manages to cut his way out the wire with two accomplices priebke knows that he can't just stay on the run all the time the best way to secure a happy future for himself and his family is to emigrate [Music] but priebus future is no longer secure four hours after confronting reinhardt cops the abc news team stakes out the school run by the former gestapo captain dalila had done great work telling us about his daily movement his schedule was so set that you could set your clock to it [Music] we knew where he was he was at the school at the primo caprara school eric was supposed to be there that morning helping with school children helping in the classroom delilah was insistent he will come out of that building at exactly 12.01 he will he will be punctual on two corners we had a van with a camera in them we had four walkie-talkies we were all in communication but for some reason his car was parked outside the school so now we knew that perhaps he would get into his car and drive somewhere meaning that we would have a very small opportunity to catch him we weren't ready for the fact that his car was parked outside the school the attention is ratcheted up and then at precisely 1201 he steps out of the school all the doors fly open and we converge on him fearful that he's going to jump into his car and drive away i approached him again i identified myself american television sam donaldson of american television sam is running across the street yelling send your pribcare and i'm having a heart attack because i'm thinking speak english please don't don't invite him to speak a foreign language sam donaldson said eric bripke and he turned round and smiled yes yes can we talk to you about what you did during world war ii i had no idea what he would say finally abc news anchor sam donaldson is face to face with fugitive nazi war criminal eric i've interviewed a lot of people who have committed crimes and they usually run when they see someone like me he clearly is not intimidated by us in any way made no sense here's a man that's committed terrible crimes why does he want to talk to a reporter you were in the gestapo in 1944 were you not in rome yes in rome yes yes i am eric pribke yes i was in rome you know the communists blow up to a group of our german australians yes for every german sorry 10 10 italian had to die he admitted to just about everything that he did but why did you shoot them they had not done anything you know that was our order donaldson is a man who wouldn't leave you a second without asking things he keeps asking and asking and asking but orders are not an excuse oh well this time aura was an order you man and and he was getting more and more agitated he said we didn't want to do it i didn't want to do it but i had to you were just following orders yes of course yes but i didn't shut anybody he actually denied that he had shot anyone personally but we had papers from a british prisoner of war camp where he had admitted shooting two people we had his confession you were there when they were shot the civilians i had some uh yes the first ones yes i saw them yes and you carried it out maybe i had to carry it at all yes and civilians died yes when sam raised the idea that perhaps he was a war criminal he was indignant you live in this time but we that lived in 1933 and i sent that i asked him whether old men should pay for the crimes they commit when they're young you know that was not a crime that was a shooting civilians in time of war is against all international people today but not in this time i'm sure delilah was enraged i felt proud because i said at least one i got one reporters are not supposed to be emotional on the story we're trying to get the facts and all of this but i did become emotional by this time how do you feel about the fact that six million jews were executed killed oh i feel very sorry about it i'm very very sorry but you did it many young men do things when they are old men like me now they're very sorry about it and finally i said to him many people think you should be executed for your crimes and at that point you could see a bell ringing in his head you know is this a good idea talking to this idiot you came over me right for i accepted not a nice man of you didn't you are not a gentleman and he slams the door and drives away it was a high like you only experienced once in a career we got on a phone and the reaction from new york is oh my god this sounds amazing so i said to harry i think we better get out of town as quickly as we can the worry that i had was that someone would realize it would be advantageous to get hold of that videotape and not let it leave beraluchi that was my worry abc news have captured nazi war criminals reinhard cops and eric priebke on tape it is a huge story they can't risk losing it we knew that we had to get sam out of town and so within two hours of the confrontation with pribco we called the pilots who were hiding in barolocy by the time sam got there they were just about ready to go and he left very quickly it's safe to say within six hours of that encounter those tapes were airborne for the united states it was better than the best luck i ever could imagine this is one of those moments where you just say everything went absolutely right we knew we had a great story that's all we knew initially good evening tonight we're going to tell the story of how thousands of suspected nazi war criminals escape justice when we put this story in the air what might happen to eric pripke was going to be the next story the broadcast airs six weeks after the 50th anniversary of the arteotine cave massacre the reaction in argentina was an explosion of media in italy the same thing happened because the italians actually believed that all of the perpetrators of that massacre in rome in 1944 were either dead or had been convicted within days of the broadcast priebre is arrested cops was hounded to the point where he vanished and fled the country apparently went to chile and with pripka in custody the media went crazy with pictures and stories and full page headlines it's perhaps the one story that i'm proudest of from the standpoint of making a difference that i think counts italy demands that preeta be sent back to rome there was a year and a half tussle in the argentine courts but he finally was extradited to italy to stand trial [Music] julius pizaquino who campaigned for his extradition attends the trial he never looked at me never because i was always the first person who speak about to him priebus brought to rome where he faces a military tribunal the tribunal finds him guilty of doing what he did but they have to set him free because he was acting under orders that old excuse huge outrage that he's been set free i mean it's almost riot outside the courtroom and so he's immediately rearrested [Music] he appeals the verdict twice and is finally sentenced to life [Music] when you're over a certain age in italy you can't actually be sent to prison he is now currently serving his sentence in an apartment in the centre of rome it made me very happy and that was on i know it's difficult but for me it's impossible to forgive to forgive it to forget it was a validation of the highest order you know to think that governments were taking action to prosecute this man based on our work human nature has not yet come to the point it seems to me where we can all just say forget it these kind of atrocities will not occur again but one way to try to prevent them is tell the story of how people who may have started out as ordinary human beings became murderers you

Channel: Timeline - World History Documentaries

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Keywords: History, Full Documentary, Documentaries, Full length Documentaries, Documentary, TV Shows - Topic, Documentary Movies - Topic, 2017 documentary, BBC documentary, Channel 4 documentary, history documentary, documentary history, cineflix, nazi hunters, german ww2, tv crew, american journalists, prime video, nuremberg trials, ww2 documentary, nazi germany, world war ii, erich priebke, erich priebke sam donaldson interview, erich priebke interview

Id: hu42C7rinEU

Length: 41min 57sec (2517 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 03 2021