Italy Convicts Ex-Nazis
January 14, 2007
The accused on Saturday were sentenced in absentia to life in prison for the killings in Marzabotto in 1944, the worst massacre on Italian soil during the war, the ANSA news agency reported.
In all some 17 former Nazis, now aged from 81 to 88, were accused in the case, but the court acquitted seven.
"This judgment has been reached in the name of the Italian people and in accordance with the law after a very difficult trial," said the head of the military court, Vincenzo Santoro.
The main officer accused, Marshall Walter Reder, had already been sentenced to life by a military court in Bologna in 1951 but was freed in 1985.
A week of killing
The residents of Marzabotto, a town near Bologna, and two neighboring villages, Grizzana and Monzuno, were killed in the period between from Sept. 29 to Oct. 5, 1944. The victims included some 300 women and 40 children under the age of two as well as five priests.
In court this week the Italian prosecutor Marco De Paolis said: "The members of the SS were not ordinary soldiers. They were like al Qaeda today, terrorists."
One witness, Gianfranco Lorenzini, who was 13 at the time of the massacre, said that the Nazis "threw newborns in the air and killed them with submachine guns, and raped the women."
In April 2002, then German President Johannes Rau visited Marzabotto and expressed his country's "profound sorrow" and "shame" for the massacre, asking pardon from the relatives of the victims.
The court also ordered a total of 100 million euros ($130 million) to be paid in damages, especially to some 100 representatives of the victims.