ROME – A military tribunal on Saturday convicted 10 former members of the Nazi SS in the 1944 slaughter of more than 700 people near Bologna – the worst civilian massacre in Italy during World War II, news reports said.
The 10 received life sentences for murder, while seven others were acquitted, the Italian news agency ANSA and state-run RAI television said. But none of the men was in custody. They were tried in absentia, and all are believed to be living in Germany.
The defendants, one former officer and 16 enlisted personnel of the 16th SS Division, were tried in a military court in the northern port town of La Spezia.
The 10 convicted men also were ordered to pay about $130 million in damages to the few survivors and relatives of the victims, the news reports said.
“I would have preferred to see all of them convicted. But justice is done – at least a little bit,” Ferruccio Laffi, a survivor, told ANSA.
The massacre occurred around Marzabotto, a mountain town south of Bologna, during a retreat by German troops. From Sept. 29, 1944, to Oct. 5, 1944, SS soldiers slaughtered more than 700 people – mostly children, women and elderly – in what was ostensibly a hunt for resistance fighters.
Nazi troops lobbed grenades at civilians locked in a house and sprayed machine-gun fire to hit a row of children, among other atrocities.
Two leaders of the SS division were convicted after the war in Italy for the killings, but investigations of lower-ranking soldiers by German and Italian prosecutors languished for decades.
In 2002, then German President Johannes Rau traveled to Marzabotto during a visit to Italy and expressed “sadness, mourning and shame” at the massacre.
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