Ex-Nazi Officer Gets Life Sentence

[Richard]

The rule of law - there is no statute of limitations for war crimes.

And so it goes...

Richard's $.02

Ex-Nazi Officer Gets Life Sentence
Judy Dempsey, NYT, 11 Aug 2009

A Munich court on Tuesday sentenced a 90-year-year-old former Nazi officer, Josef Scheungraber, to life in prison for murdering Italian civilians as a reprisal for the killing of two Nazi soldiers.

In one of Germany’s last Nazi trials, he was convicted on 10 counts of murder and also found guilty of attempted murder.

Mr. Scheungraber had denied allegations that he ordered the killings in June 1944 in Falzano di Cortona, near the Tuscan town of Arezzo, when he was a 25-year-old German army lieutenant in command of a company of engineers. The trial began last September after the presiding judge, Manfred Goetz, said Mr. Scheungraber was fit to stand trial.

Prosecutors said that, after Italian partisans had killed two German soldiers, Mr. Scheungraber commanded his soldiers to shoot three Italian men and one woman. The prosecutors said he then ordered that another 11 civilians be herded into a barn that was then blown up.

Mr. Scheungraber’s defense team had urged an acquittal, saying there was no evidence of Mr. Scheungraber’s personal guilt. He had already been convicted of the same crimes by an Italian military court in 2006 and sentenced in his absence to life in prison. But he served no time in prison.

Prosecutors said there were no known living witnesses who had heard Mr. Scheungraber give the order to kill the civilians. They said, however, that he had been seen in photographs at the burial of the two German soldiers for whose deaths the reprisals were carried out.

During hearings last month, a former employee testified that he recalled Mr. Scheungraber saying to him in the 1970s that he could not visit Italy because of what had happened during the war which has to do with “shooting a dozen men and blowing them into the air.”

The witness, whose name was given as Eugen S., testified that he did not remember Mr. Scheungraber saying he had given the order, though he added that the defendant told the story “as if it were his decision.”

Gino Massetti, the sole survivor of the killings, said he was 15 when he was rounded up by German troops and put into the barn before it was blown up. “I heard a scream and that was it, then. They were dead,” he told the court last October.

Just before the barn was blown up, Mr. Massetti said, he saw an officer drive up on a motorcycle but he could not describe the officer nor understand what he was saying because he did not understand German. He said he had been partly shielded by the blast after a heavy beam and a man fell on top of him.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/12/wo...ef=global-home

Prosecutors said there were no known living witnesses who had heard Mr. Scheungraber give the order to kill the civilians. They said, however, that he had been seen in photographs at the burial of the two German soldiers for whose deaths the reprisals were carried out.

So now... attending a funeral makes one guilty of murder.

[nmap]

This seems like terribly meager evidence.

Now let's suppose that I wrote a paper in my ethics class....and the paper defended enhanced interrogation techniques.

So should I worry about being imprisoned for war crimes when I turn 90?

It makes almost as much sense as the trial at issue, IMO.

(That's OK. It beats the cost of a nursing home. )

[Richard]

Remember - this is a news summary of the trial - I'm sure the official transcript offers a more telling view of how the court reached its conclusion.

Richard's $.02