Italian survivors of a wartime Nazi massacre have reacted angrily to a German court’s decision to abandon an investigation into eight former SS soldiers who have already been convicted in Italy for their role in the killing.
The former soldiers – who are still alive – were sentenced to life imprisonment in 2005 by an Italian military court for participating in the murder of more than 500 Italians, including more than 100 children, on 12 August 1944, in the Tuscan village of Sant’Anna di Stazzema.
While hunting for partisans, the SS shot villagers and pushed others into basements and threw grenades at them.
Germany has not allowed the extradition of the convicted soldiers, and on Monday a court in Stuttgart ruled it did not have evidence that pinned individual soldiers to the killings.
“Belonging to a Waffen-SS unit that was deployed to Sant’Anna di Stazzema cannot replace the need to prove individual guilt,” the prosecutors said at the end of a 10-year investigation.
An organisation representing survivors of the massacre said it would appeal against the decision in Germany, while the mayor of the village, Michele Silicani, said he would urge Italy’s justice minister to lobby Germany to reopen the case.
Enrico Pieri, who was 10 when the raid occurred and witnessed his family being executed, called the verdict “a scandal”.
“The shelving of this investigation offends the memory of Italians,” said Democratic Party senator Andrea Marcucci.
“Some of those convicted have given interviews in which they admitted their role in the massacre,” said Marco De Paolis, an Italian military magistrate .
De Paolis also disagreed with the decision by German prosecutors that the massacre was impromptu and not planned. “This was not a casual episode but a real massacre planned to the last detail,” he said. – source – Guardian
The massacre inspired Miracle at St. Anna, a novel by James McBride and a film “Miracle at Sant’Anna,” by the American film director Spike Lee which provoked a furious row (article here) when it was presented in Italy for the first time
[dw-post-more level=”1″]The film centred on the role of black soldiers in liberating Italy and included a story line about 1944 massacre in the Tuscan town of Sant’Anna di Stazzema.
By depicting the Partisans, the Italian resistance which fought against the Nazis and fascists in the last two years of the Second World War, as partially to blame for one of the worst massacres of the war, he put a large American boot into an issue which, though more than 60 years old, is for many Italians still a matter of acute sensitivity.
The Sant’Anna di Stazzema massacre was a Nazi German atrocity in the village of Sant’Anna di Stazzema, Italy, in the course of an operation against the Italian resistance movement in 1944, during the Italian Campaign of World War II.
On the morning of August 12, 1944, the 2nd Battalion of SS-Panzergrenadier-Regiment 35 of 16th SS Panzergrenadier Division Reichsführer-SS, commanded by SS-Hauptsturmführer Anton Galler, entered Sant’Anna and rounded up hundreds of local villagers and refugees, locking them up in several barns and stables.
The civilians (mostly women, children and older men, as the able-bodied men of the village fled into the woods) were then killed in groups with machine guns in the open air and with hand grenades in basements; the soldiers then set fire to the corpses. The victims included some 110 children (the youngest one, Anna Pardini, was only 20 days old). Also killed were eight pregnant women. The livestock were also killed and the whole village burned. All this took three hours.
Except for the divisional commander Max Simon {Sentenced to death for war crimes-later commuted to life in prison; pardoned 1954 and died in 1961}, no one was prosecuted for this massacre until July 2004, when a trial against ten former Waffen-SS officers and NCOs living in Germany commenced before a military court in La Spezia, Italy.
On June 22, 2005, the court found the accused guilty of participation in the killings, and sentenced them in absentia to life imprisonment: Werner Bruss (b. 1920, former SS-Unterscharführer), Alfred Concina (b. 1919, former SS-Unterscharführer), Ludwig Goering (b. 1923, former SS-Rottenführer who confessed he killed twenty women), Karl Gropler (b. 1923, former SS-Unterscharführer), Georg Rauch (b. 1921, former SS-Untersturmführer), Horst Richter (b. 1921, former SS-Unterscharführer), Alfred Schoneberg (b. 1921, former SS-Unterscharführer), Heinrich Schendel (b. 1922, former SS-Unterscharführer’), Gerhard Sommer, (b. 1921, former SS-Untersturmführer), and Ludwig Heinrich Sonntag (b. 1924, former SS-Unterscharführer).
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