No letup in Nazi war crimes prosecution

BERLIN

Gino Massetti was only 15 when Nazi troops rounded him up with 10 other Italian civilians and forced them into a barn in Tuscany before blowing it up — a massacre carried out in revenge after partisans killed two soldiers.

Though Mr. Massetti, the lone survivor, couldn’t identify who ordered the slaughter, former Wehrmacht Lt. Josef Scheungraber was convicted of murder based on circumstantial evidence that put him at the scene as the ranking officer. He was sentenced to life in prison.

Scheungraber’s lawyer, Klaus Goebel, said he would appeal what he called “a scandalous verdict.” The 90-year-old Scheungraber declined to comment.

Though witnesses in such cases are rare and memories have faded over more than six decades since World War II, the case that concluded Tuesday underscores that it is still possible to win a conviction against Nazi war criminals, specialists say.

“Even old age cannot protect one from prosecution,” Norbert Frei, a historian at the Friedrich Schiller University in Jena, told Bayerischen Rundfunk radio.

An American lawyer who served as the U.S. Justice Department’s lead lawyer in the 2002 case against John Demjanjuk said the verdict has important implications for the German trial of the retired autoworker accused of being a guard at the Sobibor concentration camp.

“It’s going to be a similar body of evidence that is used against Demjanjuk, and the fact that you have a conviction in this case is a very promising sign for the Demjanjuk prosecution,” Jonathan Drimmer, now in private practice, said by telephone from his Washington office.

The 89-year-old Mr. Demjanjuk, charged as an accessory to the murder of 27,900 people at Sobibor, was deported from the United States in May after losing all appeals there. The same court where Scheungraber was convicted had not decided when Mr. Demjanjuk might go on trial.

The Demjanjuk case is another where there are no known direct living witnesses, and prosecutors are relying on historical documents in their attempt to prove he served as a guard at the death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland.

In its ruling, the Munich state court ruled that Scheungraber’s men exacted vengeance against the population of Falzano di Cortona, near the Italian town of Arezzo, after local partisans killed two German soldiers in June 1944.

“It was about revenge,” Judge Manfred Goetzl said.

Scheungraber, who was a 25-year-old in command of a company of engineers at the time, maintained he was not in Falzano di Cortona when the killings happened, but was overseeing reconstruction of a nearby bridge. However, the court said evidence presented over the past 11 months showed Scheungraber “was the only officer present to give the order.”

The court said he had ordered two of his men on a mission, and sent his driver to look for them when they did not return. When they were found dead, Scheungraber organized their burial; pictures showing him there were presented at the trial.

“The accused, who felt personally responsible for the deaths of two of his comrades, wanted to counter the fear, the hate and the helplessness of the soldiers, who expected protective measures on one hand, and revenge on the other,” the court said in its ruling.

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