For a half-century, former Nazi SS captain and accused war criminal Erich Priebke lived in plain sight. Though he participated in the worst massacre of civilians in Italy during World War II, he never denied his actions or led the secretive life of a fugitive. Last week, 15 months after the first moves to bring him to justice, an Argentine appellate court overturned the extradition of Priebke, 82, to Italy. Immediately Germany asked for his extradition to face murder charges, and Priebke declared he would not fight the request.

A prisoner of the British after the war, Priebke admitted that he took part in the 1944 executions of 335 Italians in the Ar de a tine Caves, outside Rome. In 1946 he escaped from the prison camp, and by 1952 he had settled with his wife and two sons in the Andean ski resort of Bariloche. A respected member of the town's 250-strong German community--which included more than a few former Nazis--Priebke never concealed his name or his past. Locals who bought smoked meats and cheeses at the Viennese delicatessen that Priebke ran in the 1950s and '60s casually referred to it as the "Nazi deli." Remembers a 15-year resident of Bariloche: "A friend of ours used to say that she was sure he still had a picture of Hitler hanging in his closet, but he had the best cold cuts in town."

So when a U.S. TV news crew, tipped off by the Nazi-hunting Simon Wiesenthal Center, finally caught up with Priebke in Bariloche in May 1994, he answered their questions with astonishing aplomb. Yes, he was Erich Priebke, former officer in the SS. And yes, he was involved in the Ardeatine executions. "You know, that was our orders," he shrugged. "You know in the war that those kinds of things happen."

Priebke's "discovery" on American TV set off a legal tug-of-war. Italy's Justice Ministry immediately asked for Priebke's extradition to face charges of murder and crimes against humanity. Last May, after the case had been in the courts a year, an Argentine federal judge approved the Italian request. Last week an appeals court overturned the decision, ruling that the statute of limitations had run out on the homicide charges. Though Italy is filing an appeal with Argentina's Supreme Court, Priebke has chosen to face trial in Germany. "We trust German justice much more than Italian justice, especially in my case being German," said Priebke. "We want to travel as soon as possible."

If a trial follows, the prosecutor will have a statement signed by Priebke. According to this 1946 document, for each of 33 Germans killed in an earlier attack by Italian partisans in Nazi-occupied Rome, 10 Italians had to be executed. On March 24, 1944, Priebke, then 31 and his unit's second-in-command, helped round up prisoners already condemned to death. To fill the quota of 330, the unit picked out prisoners awaiting trial and 75 Jews. In broad daylight a total of 335 men, including a Catholic priest and a 14-year-old boy, were marched into the Ardeatine Caves in groups of five, hands tied behind them, and shot in the back of the neck. At the time, Priebke said he killed two of them.

Despite his admissions on paper and more recently on videotape, Priebke now insists he should not be tried, because he was only following orders. "I feel like the last of the Mohicans, as I have no witness," he told a reporter. "We wanted to oppose [the executions], but we were given the choice of obeying or being part of the list." He blames his former superior, Colonel Herbert Kappler, who was sentenced to life in prison in 1948 and died in 1978.

For the past year Priebke has been under house arrest in the third-floor quarters of a drab Bariloche building he has owned since 1955. In this usually neighborly, quiet town, residents are divided over the past. Only last year did the city council pass a resolution repudiating Na zism. Moreover, most people have stories similar to that of Claudio Pezzuoli, president of the local Italian association, who recalls learning a trick from Priebke as a child. "What does it say about the community of Bariloche that a person who thinks this way can be accepted?" Pezzuoli, 40, wonders. "He and how many others think like him?"

Enough that some locals persist in a campaign against the extradition. They argue that because Priebke has been a good neighbor and upstanding citizen for some 40 years, prosecutors should leave him alone. "He never hid anything, he never changed his name, he traveled to Europe whenever he wanted--and now this has left everyone with their mouth hanging open," says Mario della Janna, 67. "All this can't bring back the dead; it only disrupts the harmony of Bariloche."

That argument, of course, cannot sway the relatives of those who were murdered in the Ardeatine Caves. "For us the years haven't passed," says Giulia Spizzichino, who lost seven family members in the massacre. "The pain is very strong." She and other survivors traveled to Argentina last year to press for Priebke's extradition. Says Marco Giustiniani, 24: "It's our obligation to bring out the truth...to not forget our grandfathers."

--Reported by Kaitlin Quistgard/Bariloche and Toula Vlahou/Rome