German veteran, 90, jailed for Nazi war crimes

Former lieutenant found guilty of ordering execution of Italian villagers during second world war

A 90-year-old German former army officer was today found guilty of ordering the executions of 11 Italian villagers during the second world war, in one of Germany's last Nazi war crimes trials.

Josef Scheungraber was sentenced to life in prison for 10 counts of murder and one of attempted murder over the June 1944 killings in Falzano di Cortona, near the Tuscan town of Arezzo.

As a 25-year-old Wehrmacht lieutenant, Scheungraber ordered 11 civilians to be herded into a barn that was blown up as punishment for an attack by Italian partisans which killed two German soldiers, the Munich state court ruled. Only one person, a teenage boy, survived.

Scheungraber was the only officer present and his actions were "about revenge", said the judge, Manfred Goetzl. "He was not someone who allowed an important matter to be taken out of his hands," Goetzl said.

Scheungraber was acquitted of ordering the shooting of three Italian men and one woman before the mass burning.

During the trial, Scheungraber's defence team sought a total acquittal, arguing that prosecutors had provided no evidence of Scheungraber's personal guilt. Scheungraber, who commanded a company of engineers, maintains he was not in Falzano di Cortona when the killings happened, but was overseeing the reconstruction of a nearby bridge.

The prosecution acknowledged that there were no known living witnesses who heard Scheungraber give the order to kill the civilians. But they argued he was seen in pictures at the burial of the two German soldiers whose deaths provoked the act of revenge, and called a man who used to work with the former infantry commander to testify against him.

In the 1970s Scheungraber told the man, identified only as Eugen S, that he couldn't visit Italy because of what had happened during the war, which had to do with "shooting a dozen men and blowing them into the air", the man told the court. He did not remember Scheungraber saying he had given the order, although he said the defendant told the story "as if it were his decision".

The sole survivor of the incident, Gino Massetti, who was 15 at the time, described being rounded up by German troops and herded into the barn before it was blown up. "I heard a scream, and that was it then. They were all dead," he said.

Massetti told the court that just before the explosion he saw a man he assumed was an officer drive up on a motorcycle and give what appeared to be an order to the others. He could not describe the officer and didn't understand what he had said because it was in German, he said in court.

Relatives of Scheungraber's victims said they were happy with the outcome.

"This was a very important verdict for our family," said Angiola Lescai, 60, whose grandfather was among those killed in the barn. "We view this as a very beautiful gesture of reconciliation."

The mayor of Cortona, Andrea Vignini, said the area's citizens had waited 65 years to hear the verdict. "I think this ruling finally brings peace for the dead and the living," he said.

In 2006 Scheungraber was convicted of the same crimes by an Italian military court and sentenced in absentia to life in prison, but has served no time.

Scheungraber's lawyer, Klaus Goebel, said he would appeal against what he called "a scandalous verdict."

The verdict opens the possibility of further Nazi-era trials coming to trial. The Munich court has yet to decide when 89-year-old John Demjanjuk, who is charged with being an accessory to the murder of 27,900 people at the Sobibor camp in Poland, will go on trial.

The confessed Nazi hitman Heinrich Boere is expected to go on trial in Aachen, north-west Germany, in October for the 1944 killings of three Dutch civilians.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/aug/11/german-officer-war-crimes-jail