Ex-Nazi commander given life for killing 10 Italian civilians

Josef Scheungraber, 90, was today found guilty of ordering the slaughter of 10 people who were herded into a barn that was then blown up in Tuscany in 1944.

Scheungraber, who has spent decades as a free man in his home town in Bavaria, was convicted by a Munich court and ordered to spend the rest of his life in prison.

The case is one of Germany's last Nazi trials; John Demjanjuk, a suspected death camp guard deported from America in May faces charges that he helped to murder nearly 28,000 people during the war. No date has been set for his trial.

Scheungraber was a 25-year-old Wehrmacht lieutenant when the killings took place in 1944 in Falzano di Cortona, near the Tuscan town of Arezzo.

The court found, at the end of an 11-month trial, that he ordered 11 civilians to be herded into the barn as a reprisal for the killing of two German soldiers by Italian partisans. Only one, a teenage boy, survived.

However, Scheungraber was acquitted of charges that he also ordered soldiers to shoot to death three Italian men and one woman before the barn massacre.

Scheungraber, who commanded a company of engineers, maintains that he was not in Falzano di Cortona when the killings happened, but was overseeing the reconstruction of a nearby bridge.

His defence team called for an acquittal last month, arguing that the prosecution had presented no evidence of Scheungraber's personal guilt.

The prosecutors acknowledged that they could provide no living witnesses who had heard Scheungraber give the orders to kill the civilians. But they said he had been photographed at the burial of the two Germans.

A former work colleague testified that he remembered Scheungraber telling him once in the Seventies that he could not 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, said that he did not remember Scheungraber saying that he had given the order, but said the defendant told the story "as if it were his decision".

Survivor Gino Massetti, 15 at the time, told the court that just before the barn was blown up, he saw a man he assumed was an officer ride up on a motorcycle and give what appeared to be an order to the other soldiers.