90-year-old Nazi-era German officer sentenced to life in prison.
We have to be running out of these Nazi stories soon. The real ones I mean. I guess the fiction can go on forever.
Would a publisher please tell me how much a swastika on a book’s dust jacket increases sales?
Josef Scheungraber, a 90-year-old former German army officer, was convicted this week of 10 counts of murder and one of attempted murder. A Munich German state court sentenced him to life in prison.
Sixty-five years ago soldiers under Scheungraber’s command herded 11 Italians into a barn and blew it up. One of the 11, a teenage boy, survived the blast.
It was about revenge," said the judge, Manfred Goetzl.
It happened in Falzano di Cortona, near the Tuscan town of Arezzo. Local partisans killed two German soldiers in June of 1944. The massacre of 10 Italian civilians was a reprisal, the prosecution said.
Scheungraber, however, was acquitted of charges that he also ordered soldiers to shoot to death three Italian men and one woman. The judge ruled that it could not be proven that Scheungraber gave that order.
Scheungraber's lawyer, Klaus Goebel, said he would appeal what he called "a scandalous verdict."
Scheungraber does not have to go to prison until after the appeals process is completed.
A witness testified that Scheungraber had told him of the killings during the 1970s and that he did not remember Scheungraber saying he had given the order, but told the story "as if it were his decision."
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