MUNICH (AP) - A
90-year-old former German army officer was convicted Tuesday
of ordering the reprisal killings of 10 Italian civilians
who were herded into a barn that was blown up.
The Munich state court convicted World War II veteran Josef
Scheungraber on 10 counts of murder and one of attempted
murder, and sentenced him to life in prison. His lawyer said
he would appeal.
Scheungraber was a 25-year-old Wehrmacht lieutenant during
the June 1944 killings in Falzano di Cortona, near the Tuscan
town of Arezzo.
The court ruled that, after partisans had killed two German
soldiers, Scheungraber ordered 11 civilians to be herded
into a barn that was then destroyed. One teenage boy survived
the blast.
"It was about revenge," said the judge, Manfred
Goetzl.
Scheungraber "was the only officer present," Goetzl
said. "He was not someone who allowed an important matter
to be taken out of his hands."
Scheungraber drew several deep breaths after his conviction
was announced and listened to the judge's explanation with
his eyes closed.
However, Scheungraber was acquitted of charges that he also
ordered soldiers to shoot to death three Italian men and
one woman before the barn massacre. Goetzl said it could
not be proven that Scheungraber gave that order.
Scheungraber's lawyer, Klaus Goebel, said he would appeal
what he called "a scandalous verdict." Scheungraber
declined to comment.
Court spokeswoman Margarete Noetzel said Scheungraber would
not go to prison until the appeals process is finished. This
could take months.
A few relatives of Scheungraber's victims attended the judgment
and expressed satisfaction 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, who also attended,
said the area's citizens "have waited 65 years to hear
this verdict. I think this ruling finally brings peace for
the dead and the living."
Scheungraber, who commanded a company of engineers, maintained
he was not in Falzano di Cortona when the killings happened,
but was overseeing reconstruction of a nearby bridge.
His defense team had sought a total acquittal, arguing that
prosecutors had presented no evidence of Scheungraber's personal
guilt.
Prosecutors acknowledged they could provide no living witnesses
who heard Scheungraber give orders to kill civilians. But
they said he had been photographed at the burial of the two
German soldiers whose killings triggered the reprisals.
The court did hear from the sole survivor of the barn massacre,
Gino Massetti, who was 15 when German troops herded him and
10 others into the barn before it was destroyed.
"I heard a scream, and that was it then. They were
all dead," Massetti testified in October.
Just before the barn was blown up, Massetti recalled, he
saw a man he assumed was an officer arrive on a motorcycle
and give what appeared to be an order to the others. Massetti
could not describe the officer and didn't understand what
he had said.
Massetti said it was down to luck that he survived. He was
partly shielded from the blast after a heavy beam and a man
fell on top of him.
A former work colleague also testified that he remembered
Scheungraber saying to him once in the 1970s that he couldn't
visit Italy because of what had happened during the war,
which involved "shooting a dozen men and blowing them
into the air."
The witness, Eugen Schuh, testified he did not remember
Scheungraber saying he had given the order, but said the
defendant told the story "as if it were his decision."
In September 2006 a military court in La Spezia, Italy,
tried Scheungraber in absentia over the same crimes and convicted
him of complicity in murdering civilians. It sentenced him
to life in prison.
The defendant lives in Bavaria, and prosecutors said German
judicial authorities needed to evaluate the case themselves
before Scheungraber would face any punishment. His Munich
trial opened last year.
Scheungraber's conviction gives German prosecutors a boost
as they pursue two other Nazi-era cases.
The Munich court has yet to decide when 89-year-old John
Demjanjuk _ charged with being an accessory to the murder
of 27,900 people at the Sobibor camp in Poland _ might go
on trial.
The admitted Nazi hit man Heinrich Boere is expected to
go on trial in Aachen, northwest Germany, in October for
the 1944 killings of three Dutch civilians.
The top Nazi-hunter at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, Efraim
Zuroff, said Scheungraber's conviction would "inspire
additional trials."
"We hope that German prosecutors will be just as successful
in the case of Demjanjuk, Heinrich Boere and any other cases
they may take up," Zuroff said in a telephone interview
from Jerusalem.
ksl.com
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