A German court sentenced former SS officer Friedrich Engel, known as "the butcher of Genoa", to seven years in jail today for ordering the massacre of 59 prisoners in Italy during World War II.
The court in Hamburg ruled that Engel (93) had ordered their execution at a prison in Marassi on the outskirts of Genoa on May 19, 1944. The prosecutor had requested life imprisonment.
Judge Rolf Seedorf rejected handing down such a long sentence but agreed with the prosecutor's assessment that the killing was a particularly cruel act.
Engel's defence team used a strategy common in Nazi war crimes cases: that he was simply following orders from Adolf Hitler.
"I deny the accusation. I did not give the order," Engel, a member of the Nazi regime's notorious Waffen SS security service, said on the first day of his trial on May 7th.
The massacre was in reprisal for an attack on a German movie theater that killed five German soldiers and wounded 15 others. "They were all partisans, terrorists who participated in earlier actions against Germans," Engel said last year.
The prosecution charged that Engel was present at the execution in Marassi where the victims - from an Italian navy commando squad - were chained together in small groups and shot dead over a grave dug for them by Jewish prisoners.
Engel has said he was present only as an observer. But a 79-year-old witness directly implicated him, saying that he had supervised the shootings.
Engel has described the 59 as martyrs and said he did not hear the prisoners cry out for help when they were led away. "That is what touched me the most," Engel said.
He had already been sentenced in absentia in Turin, Italy, in 1999 for war crimes committed in northern Italy in 1944 and 1945. He became known as "the butcher of Genoa."
Last year, he caused an outcry in Italy, particularly among the Jewish community, when Italian television broadcast a German report showing him leading a quiet retirement in Hamburg.
"This story belongs in the past. After all these years it makes no sense to dig it up," Engel told the Turin daily La Stampa.
"For all these years I have always worked and tried to be a good citizen. It was a war," he said.
Italy has asked Germany to arrest and extradite Engel, but Germany has no legal provisions for extraditing its own citizens.
The number of trials of former Nazis has dwindled in Germany in recent years as the accused die of old age and witnesses become harder to find.
In February, former Nazi SS commander Julius Viel, who was convicted last year of murdering seven Jewish prisoners during World War II, died aged 84.
A federal court had been due to examine an appeal against his 12-year sentence for shooting the seven in Nazi-occupied
Czechoslovakia in March 1945, in what the judge described as an act committed "out of a lust for murder."
AFP