AP News, January 15th, 2007
Italian Premier Romano Prodi expressed dismay Sunday that the convictions of 10 former Nazi SS members in the 1944 slaughter of hundreds of civilians near Bologna have only "symbolic" value since the German defendants are unlikely to ever serve their sentences.
"It was one of the most savage crimes of the last war, a real massacre," Prodi said of the World War II slayings by retreating Nazi troops of more than 700 people in the small town of Marzabotto, in the Apennine mountains of north-central Italy.
An Italian military tribunal on Saturday convicted the 10 in the massacre and acquitted seven others. The German defendants were all tried in absentia and are believed to live in Germany.
Only last year did Germany amend its laws to allow extradition of its citizens to stand trial abroad within the EU. Prosecutors' offices were closed Sunday and it was not immediately clear whether the Italians had issued such a warrant.
The convictions hold only "symbolic value," Prodi said. "If (the convictions) could have been possible 40 years earlier, it would have had real value."
One of the survivors, Ferruccio Laffi, who was in court for the verdict, said in an interview on Italian state radio Sunday that "a little bit" of justice was done. The 78-year-old recalled how he had survived the massacre by hiding and later found 14 relatives slain.
The military tribunal also ordered the convicted defendants to pay some $129 million in damages to the few survivors and relatives of the victims. Italian state TV noted that there was little chance of any money being paid since many of the defendants are living on modest pensions.
For a week in late 1944, Nazi troops slaughtered more than 700 residents of Marzabotto _ most of them children, women or the elderly _ in what was ostensibly a hunt for resistance fighters. They lobbed grenades at civilians locked in a house and sprayed machine-gun fire to hit a row of children, among other atrocities.
Known as the "Butcher of Marzabotto," Walter Reder, a major in Adolf Hitler's elite SS guard, was captured after the war by British forces in Austria, convicted in Italy in 1951 and given a life sentence for ordering the deaths of hundreds of Italian villagers.
Reder was released from prison in 1985 at Austria's request because he was suffering from a serious stomach ailment. He died in 1991.
