An Italian military tribunal has given life sentences in absentia to 10 German former SS men for massacring about 800 Italian villagers in 1944 as the Germans retreated before Allied troops.
The court in the northern military port of La Spezia said late yestrday it was sentencing 10 men and absolving seven, all from an SS unit which, while hunting partisans, laid waste to the villages of Marzabotto, Grizzana and Vado di Monzuno near Bologna.
Among the dead were at least 95 children and babies.
"I would have preferred to see them all condemned, but justice has been done, at least a bit," Ferruccio Laffi, who survived the killings but lost 14 relatives, told reporters.
The officer in charge of the operation, major Walter Reder, was extradited from Austria to Italy soon after the war and given a life sentence in 1951, but released in 1985.
None of the men who served under him, all now in their 80s, were in Italy for the tribunal and because of their age they are unlikely to be imprisoned. But Italy will try to get them to pay legal costs and compensation to victims' families and survivors.
"This sentence is handed down in the name of the Italian people, in respect of the law, at the end of a very difficult process," said the president of the tribunal, Vincenzo Santoro, reading out the sentence.
Prosecutor Marco de Paolis said he hoped it would bring some comfort to "the families of the victims and the survivors of those massacres, who still feel their pain today."