GERMANY:A GERMAN court has ruled that a 90-year-old former Nazi officer is fit to stand trial on charges that he ordered the massacre of 14 Italian men and women in 1944, writes Derek Scallyin Berlin.
White-haired Josef Scheungraber shuffled into a Munich courtroom yesterday, supporting himself on a crutch in his right hand and dressed in a traditional Bavarian woollen coat with a green rounded collar.
Shaking his head in disbelief at the jostling photographer scrum, he lowered himself into his chair before state prosecutors began reading the harrowing indictment.
As a 25-year-old army officer and company leader of Battalion 818, Mr Scheungraber is accused of ordering reprisal killings after partisans killed two of his officers and wounded a third near Felzano di Cortona, a hillside town between Sienna and Perugia.
With an impassive expression and bored blue eyes, Mr Scheungraber listened to a report of how troops, allegedly under his command, shot dead a woman and four men before destroying the village, house by house.
Before the eyes of the villagers, 11 youths and men were forced into the basement of a farmhouse which was then blown up with the men inside - on Mr Scheungraber's orders, prosecutors say.
"A few minutes after the explosion, screams, groans and whimpers could still be heard," said prosecutor Anton Winkler, "so the German soldiers shot at the rubble with their machine guns."
Mr Scheungraber's defence lawyers say the young soldier neither received any such orders for the massacre nor ordered them carried out.
"The events from the time should be cleared up by historians and not by jurists - at the expense of a 90-year-old's health," said defence attorney Christian Stünkel.
During the trial, Mr Scheungraber will be confronted with Gino Massetti, the sole survivor of the basement blast, who is now 79 years old.
Two years ago, his testimony resulted in an Italian court sentencing Mr Scheungraber in absentia to life imprisonment.
The Munich Nazi trial, likely to be one of Germany's last, has divided public opinion.
Mr Scheungraber lives in Ottobrunn, near Munich, where he runs a furniture shop and has served on the town council. He is active in veteran support groups and several supporters were present in court yesterday.
Outside, members of the organisation "Keine Ruhe!" (No Peace), protested against what they call a deferential "culture of silence" towards Nazi war criminals. They held up banners with the names of the Felzano victims.