ROME – Michael Seifert, a former Nazi SS prison guard known as “the beast of Bolzano” for his cruelty, died yesterday in an Italian hospital aged 86, officials said.
Ukrainian-born Seifert was serving a life sentence at the Santa Maria Capua Vetere prison in southern Italy. He died in the nearby Caserta hospital.
Seifert, tried in his absence by a military tribunal in Verona, was convicted in 2000 of nine counts of murder committed while he was an SS guard at a prison transit camp in Bolzano, in Italy’s Alpine South Tyrol area.
He acknowledged being a guard at the SS-run camp, but denied being involved in atrocities.
At his trial, witnesses testified that Seifert starved a 15-year-old prisoner to death, gouged out the eyes of another, and tortured a woman before killing her and her daughter. A witness said he laughed while torturing inmates.
In 2008, Seifert was extradited to Italy from Canada to serve his sentence. He had lived in Canada from 1951 until his extradition, which he fought. He was transferred to the hospital with a fractured femur on October 25th and underwent an operation for a gastric complication days ago. – (AP)