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90-yr-old former Nazi gets life term

(China Daily)
Updated: 2009-08-12 10:59

After two German soldiers were killed in a partisan attack in Cortona, Nazi troops gunned down a 74-year-old woman and three men in the street on June 26, 1944, with Allied troops just a few kilometers away.

The soldiers then forced 11 males aged between 15 and 66 into the ground floor of a farmhouse, which they then blew up.

Only the youngest, Gino Massetti, survived, but with serious injuries. Six decades later, Massetti testified during the Italian trial.

People protest in front of a Munich court August 11, 2009, against the crime of 90-year-old German Josef Scheungraber. [Agencies]

Massetti was 15 when German troops herded him and others into the barn before it was destroyed. "I heard a scream, and that was it then," he said. "They were all dead."

Massetti told the court that just before the barn was blown up, he saw a man he assumed was an officer drive up on a motorcycle and give what appeared to be an order to the others. But, he testified, he could not describe the officer at all and didn't understand what he had said.

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He said it was down to luck that he survived, because he was partly shielded from the blast after a heavy beam and a man fell on top of him. The other man also survived the explosion initially but succumbed to his wounds, Massetti told the court.

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, identified in court as Eugen S, 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".

Scheungraber had told the Munich court that he handed the 11 males over to the military police, after which he "never heard what happened to them".

He is expected to be one of the last cases in Germany dealing with atrocities of the Nazi era.

One other case pending is that of John Demjanjuk, a 89-year-old Nazi death camp guard deported in May from the United States who has been charged with accessory to the murder of 27,900 Jews.

AFP - AP

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