Tuesday,
September 16,
WWII Nazi "Falzano
Massacre" of 14 Italian Civilians Trial in
The
ANNOTICO Report
Josef Scheungraber, the
former commander of a German mountain infantry battalion, is accused of
ordering the killing of 14 civilians in the Tuscan
Since
Germany doesn
Now,
after consistent pressure, German prosecutors are about to bring to trial using many
of the same documents and witnesses ( 22
witnesses and three experts) who described the Massacre at the
HOWEVER,
The first issue will be to decide if the former
lieutenant is fit to stand trial. His former superior has already been ruled
too frail to try.
THEN, It is likely to be a
slow trial: The evidence is old, and hearing days are usually kept short in
Deutsche
Welle
September
15, 2008
Josef Scheungraber,
the former commander of a German mountain infantry battalion, is accused
of ordering the killing of 14 civilians in the Tuscan
The massacre was allegedly in retaliation for an attack by
Italian partisans that left two German soldiers dead.
But in a trial in
The accused "completely and thoroughly denies the
accusations in the charge sheet," said a statement read in court by one of
his two lawyers, Christian Stuenkel.
No-extradition rule
negates sentence
A handful of protesters gathered outside the courtroom holding
a placard reading "Mass Murderer Here! Give the Murdered a Name."
The former lieutenant has already been convicted once in
absentia in
The life imprisonment sentence, handed down in September 2006,
cannot be enforced because
German prosecutors in Munich are expected to present many of
the same documents and witnesses who described at the Italy trial how the
Germans shot three men and a woman on the first day of the reprisal.
The next day, 11 males were locked inside the ground floor of
the home of a villager, Ferdinando Cannicci, and it was blown up.
Only a teenager, Cannicci, now 79,
survived and he is one of the few eyewitnesses still alive today.
Two
decades as a town councilor
Scheungraber lived in Ottobrunn, a
At
He confirmed he had been an officer of Company 1, Battalion
818 of the Mountain Combat Engineers in
The indictment describes how Company 1 was near Falzano to hold up advancing Allied forces as the Germans
withdrew from
Field Marshal Albert Kesselring had ordered brutal reprisals
to be conducted on Italians if German troops were harmed.
Ambush
leads to reprisals
On June 26, partisans ambushed a three-man German patrol as it
was about to requisition a horse in Falzano.
Two Germans were killed without warning, but the third man got
away only slightly wounded and told his fellow engineers.
The company
Members of Company 1 shot up the area, with a German
anti-aircraft unit firing over it to scare off partisans.
Four people, including a 74-year-old woman, were shot dead
purely because they got in the way of the rampage.
Later, the Italians were forced to watch as charges were
placed under their homes in the hamlet and they were blown up.
The men aged 16 to 66 were herded into one house and it was dynamited.
22
witnesses are called
In
It is likely to be a slow trial: The evidence is old, and
hearing days are usually kept short in
In total, 22 witnesses and three experts have been summoned.
The first issue will be to decide if the former lieutenant is fit to stand
trial. His former superior has already been ruled too frail to try.
Munich lawyers said that the accused
Trial lawyer Goebel
The
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Italia
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