The Choices of Free Will

During the Nazi regime in fascist Germany during the Second World War, millions of human beings experienced the premature culmination of their lives. Those millions were processed through a hugely successful enterprise envisioned by Adolf Hitler's Germany to make the world a better place. Largely by removing from it those elements of any society whose presence they deemed did not enhance the world community.

Those who suffered mental or physical disability or impairment, those whose gender orientation was suspect, those whose political views sought to undermine Fascist authority, and those whose ethnic and cultural origins bespoke an assault on the purity of the Nazi vision.

The enablers and the perpetrators who so willingly joined their fortunes with that of fascist Germany and Italy and other Axis countries, dedicated to the furtherance of their vision of a more ideal world set about their business with determination and dedication to the pursuit of that ideal world coming to fruition. They would undertake by any and all means possible and necessary to rid the world community of those incapable of investing it with value in their presence.

Gypsies and Jews were in particular favour of annihilation.

The movement to achieve a far better world through the elimination of sub-human hangers-on whose presence was regarded as an affront to the perfection of humankind was hugely successful. Not only were millions slaughtered in a concerted, well developed plan to muster technology and science to the necessity of obliterating their presence from the world, but those who fought the Axis Fascist alliance for the purpose of protecting civilization from barbarity posing as deliverance to the next order of civilization on the Allied side died in their millions as well.

With the passage of time since the advent and the end of World War II all too many of those known as Fascist criminal murderers lived lengthy lives denied their victims. There are those in current society, however, still demanding justice for those whose voice crying piteously for help was never heard before they perished. In their memory there are those who refuse to believe that it represents justice for the elderly murderers to breathe their last in the comfort of denial.

With enraged shouts of "murderer" and "executioner", relatively small groups of people dedicated to the memory of those whose lives were prematurely taken, committed to denying peace to their executioners, emerged in the public sphere to deny the rites of a funeral respecting the life and activities of Nazi war criminal Erich Priebke.

He lived to age 100. Year after year since the end of World War II this man was able to celebrate another year of living well in the embrace of his family. A family that would have liked to honour him as their head whose passing they would mourn.

Pope Francis' Rome vicar refused to enable a funeral for this man in a Catholic Church. Rome's chief of police concurred; his concern was for public order, knowing full well the huge contempt in which this war criminal was held by those whom his depraved killing spree on behalf of the Third Reich deprived of their lives.

One among many, Erich Priebke presided over one of the worst massacres to take place in German-occupied Italy. At the Ardeatine Caves outside Rome 335 civilians were slaughtered. No Jews, he asserted in an interview, were ever gassed en masse. The Holocaust was a feverish token of a collectively hysterical imagination.

 Into the breach stepped the schismatic Society of St. Pius X in the city of Albano Laziale south of Rome. They would celebrate the funeral Mass for Erich Priebke, since his values are theirs as well. They too have no use for Jews in civil society. As the hearse with Erich Priebke's coffin approached outside the walled compound of the Society of St.Pius X, the crowd responded shouting "We are all anti-fascist!".

And then, to ensure that no further critical chaos might ensue, the coffin with the body of the war criminal was taken into custody. By Italian authorities. The lawyer for the family of Erich Priebke spoke of an abduction of a corpse. The Italian police spoke of civil society, recriminations, violence, and the public peace.

There is no reason whatever that the family of Erich Priebke should enjoy the comfort of knowing a funeral Mass would give balm to the soul of a departed war criminal.

There is no forgiveness for the massively unforgivable.