ITALY: A Nazi massacre of 560 men, women and children in a Tuscan village in 1944 was premeditated and cannot be excused as officers following orders, Italian prosecutors told a military court yesterday.
Ten former German officers, now all in their 80s, are on trial in the port of La Spezia over the shootings in Sant'Anna di Stazzema, one of Italy's worst civilian massacres during the second World War. A verdict in the case is expected imminently.
"We cannot tolerate just any behaviour on the grounds that they were following orders. Obedience cannot be blind," public prosecutor Marco de Paolis told the court in his concluding remarks. "These men were not novices. They had fought on the eastern front . . . These were not people, though they were young, who did not know what they were doing," he told the courtroom packed with the victims' children and grandchildren.
Mr de Paolis has asked for the men, who have not travelled to Italy for the trial, to be given life imprisonment.
"It was a premeditated massacre of civilians," said lawyer Paolo Trombetti, representing village authorities.
Defence lawyers have argued the former officers were obliged to carry out orders and were threatened with death, and that they had believed they were travelling to the hill town for regular anti-partisan search operations.
They say the officers' actions were not premediated or organised. Without that, the men could, at most, be found guilty of crimes for which the statute of limitations has expired.
The massacre of villagers in Sant'Anna, in the early hours of August 12th, 1944, was one of many civilian shootings that occurred as German troops retreated to the "Gothic Line" of defence that cut across Italy.
However, they came to light only a decade ago, when a filing cabinet full of witness statements was found in Rome.
Italy was spurred to reopen investigations into Nazi war crimes in 1996, when a military court found former SS captain Erich Priebke guilty of involvement in another 1944 massacre but released him under the statute of limitations.
Italy's highest court ordered a retrial and he was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1998 for his role in the slaughter of 335 men and boys at the Ardeatine Caves, south of Rome.
Even if the 10 former officers are sentenced on Wednesday, they are unlikely to spend the rest of their lives in jail. Germany does not extradite its citizens and they are too old to serve prison sentences in Italy.- (Reuters)