Most major Nazi figures were cremated

Germany said Wednesday that it had not yet been asked to take the body of Nazi war criminal Erich Priebke from Italy, after a Jewish group said it should be cremated.

The remains of most major Nazi war criminals were burned and scattered, or buried in secret to prevent the graves from becoming pilgrimage sites for far-right militants.

Efraim Zuroff, who heads the Nazi-hunting Simon Wiesenthal Centre, told an Italian daily that cremation is “the most efficient way to leave no trace of a Nazi criminal like Priebke.”

Priebke, died Friday at the age of 100 following his trial for the Fosse Ardeatine massacre of 335 civilians outside Rome in 1944.

Here is a look at what happened to the bodies of some top Nazi leaders.

– Adolf Hitler: Hitler committed suicide as Soviet troops stormed Berlin in April 1945.

The identification of his body and its whereabouts remain the subject of considerable controversy.

– Joseph Goebbels: Nazi propaganda chief. He committed suicide and was buried with his family in the German state of Brandenburg, which surrounds Berlin.

In April 1970, KGB chief Yuri Andropov ordered a team to remove the bodies and burn them completely before throwing the ashes in a tributary of the Elbe river.

– Heinrich Himmler: Head of the German Gestapo. He was arrested by British forces and committed suicide on May 23, 1945.

Himmler’s body is believed to be buried in an umarked grave near Lueneburg, northern Germany.

– Adolf Eichmann: A key Holocaust organiser along with Himmler. He was tried for war crimes in Israel and hanged in 1962. He was cremated and his ashes scattered in the Mediterranean, beyond Israel’s territorial limit.

– Hermann Goering: Commander of the Luftwaffe. He was sentenced to death by the Nuremberg Military Tribunal in September 1946, but committed suicide just before he was to hang. His body was cremated and the ashes scattered in the Isar river, near Munich.

– Rudolf Hess: Hitler deputy. Found hanged in Berlin’s Spandau Prison in August 1987 and initially buried in Wunsiedel, southern Germany.

His grave became a gathering site for Nazi sympathizers, and his remains were exhumed in July 2011 and the grave destroyed.

“We wish to be rid of this brown ghost,” a local official was quoted as saying, in reference to the colour of Nazi officials’ uniforms.

Hess’ remains were to be cremated and the ashes scattered at sea according to the German daily Sueddeutsche Zeitung.

– Martin Bormann: Hitler’s personal secretary. The West German government determined in 1988 following DNA tests that remains found near the Lehrter Bahnhof, now Berlin’s central railway station, in December 1972 were those of Bormann.

They were burned and the ashes scattered in August 1999 in the Baltic Sea, “to avoid at all costs a monument being erected anywhere,” the German magazine Spiegel quoted an official of the state attorney’s office in Frankfurt as saying.

– Karl Doenitz: Commander of the German navy who was chosen by Hitler to succeed him as head of state in the last days of the war.

Doenitz was sentenced to 10 years in prison by the Nuremberg Tribunal, after which he lived in Aumuehle, northern Germany, until he died of a heart attack on December 24, 1980.

He was buried there, a ceremony which attracted old German sailors and a young German officer in uniform, according to The New York Times.