Germany/Italy

Ex-Nazi officer jailed for life

Article published on the 2009-08-11 Latest update 2009-08-11 13:54 TU

Josef Scheungraber sits in a Munich courtroom awaiting his judgement on 11 August 2009
(Photo: Reuters/Michaela Rehle)

A 90-year-old ex-Nazi officer was jailed for life on Tuesday for his involvement in the killing of 14 Italian civilians during World War II.

Josef Scheungraber was found guilty at a court in Munich of ordering the killings on 26 June 1944 in the town of Falzano di Cortona in Tuscany.

He had previously been sentenced in absentia in September 2006 to life imprisonment by an Italian military tribunal in La Spezia.

"These things take a long time, particularly in a country like Germany, that’s always had a hard time trying to deal with it’s Nazi past," correspondent Sabina Castelfranco told RFI.

On Tuesday, the German court convicted Scheungraber for the murder of 10 people. They had been targeted by his infantry battalion in retaliation for the killing of two German soldiers.

A 74-year-old woman and three men were shot dead in the street before soldiers forced 11 men aged between 15 and 66 into a farmhouse.

They blew the farmhouse up and Gino Massetti, the only man who survived the explosion, testified during the Italian trial.

During his hearing in Munich, Scheungraber said that he had handed the 11 males over to the military police, after which he "never heard what happened to them".

He had been charged with 14 counts of murder and one of attempted murder but was only convicted of 10 murders due to a lack of evidence.

Since the end of the war, Scheungraber had been working in a woodwork shop in the Bavarian town of Ottobrunn and had attended German army veteran marches.

His trial is expected to be one of the last cases dealing with Nazi-era atrocities in Germany. John Demjanjuk, an 89-year-old former Nazi death camp guard, was deported from the United States in May after being charged with being an accessory to the murder of 27,000 Jews. Last month he was declared fit to stand trial.

"It was a very serious attack at the time, in the Tuscan village of Falzano […] I think they would probably be very relieved that justice had been served," said Castelfranco, speaking from Rome.