BERLIN (JTA) — A former Nazi lieutenant was sentenced to life in prison for ordering the murder of Italian civilians in June 1944.
Josef Scheungraber was found guilty Tuesday by a Munich court of 10 of the 14 murders for which he had been charged. The 90-year-old former Wehrmacht lieutenant had been living for decades in a town outside Munich, where he served on the town council.
The trial was one of several recent cases in which German courts are trying to bring to justice aging perpetrators.
Preparations also are under way to try alleged Nazi war criminals John Demjanjuk and Heinrich Boere. Both elderly men reportedly will require the presence of doctors in the courtroom.
Scheungraber, already sentenced in absentia to life in prison in Italy in 2006, was found guilty of ordering that villagers from Falzano, Tuscany, be murdered after partisans killed two of his men. Three civilians, including an elderly woman, were shot in the street, and all but one of the others was burned alive when explosives were set off in a
barn.
The sole survivor, Gino Massetti, then 15, testified at the trial.
