GERMANY: A 93-year-old former SS officer dubbed "The Butcher of Genoa" was sentenced to seven years in prison yesterday.
A Hamburg court found Friedrich Engel guilty of ordering the execution of 59 Italian prisoners on a mountain pass near Genoa in 1944.
Presiding judge Rolf Seedorf called it a "terrible and illegal crime" but postponed sending Mr Engel to prison immediately. It is unlikely that he will serve his sentence.
Engel was head of SS security in Genoa when he ordered the execution of 59 local men in May 1944. They were arrested in connection with an attack on a nearby German cinema in which five soldiers died. The men were shot as they stood on a plank, and their bodies fell into a rough grave dug by Jewish prisoners.
During the trial Engel said he observed but did not order the shootings. Later he admitted signing the execution order, which followed Hitler's principle of "10-to-one" revenge for German deaths. A trial witness said Engel ordered a soldier to shoot again one of the victims in the grave who was still alive.
In his ruling, the judge acknowledged that the execution order came from Mr Engel's superiors in Rome. "But the particularly awful way the executions were carried out was your decision," said Judge Rolf Seedorf.
The prisoners were made to walk for over an hour from Genoa to the deserted Tourquino mountain pass during which time "their own death was before their eyes". In 1999, an Italian court found Engel guilty in absentia of 246 executions.
The case came to the attention of German prosecutors after a documentary team found Engel living in Hamburg.
