Italy indicts alleged ex-Nazis on massacre charges

An Italian court today indicted three alleged former members of the Nazi SS on charges of having carried out a 1944 massacre of 560 people in the Italian village of Sant’Anna di Stazzema.

Italy’s ANSA news agency said indictments were issued against Gerhard Sommer, 83, Alfred Schonenberg, 83, and Ludwig Sonntag, 80, all alleged to be former members of an SS Panzergrenadier Division.

The court in La Spezia, northwestern Italy, decided not to proceed with cases against two other former SS members and asked for further information on a third, the report said.

Judicial officials in La Spezia could not be reached for information after the ruling was issued.

The accused were not in court and there was no further information about them.

Last year, German prosecutors who have also been carrying out investigations in the case, recommended the prosecution of eight men.

Among those cited was someone referred to only as Gerhard S.

In 2002, German public television ARD interviewed a Gerhard Sommer from Hamburg who admitted being a company commander in the division, but he had little to say about the massacre.

“I have an absolutely pure conscience, and I don’t want now to know further about these things,” Sommer said.

In August 1944, some 300 of Hitler’s elite and ideologically fanatical SS troops surrounded the Tuscan village of Sant’Anna di Stazzema, which had been flooded with refugees, in what was supposed to be a hunt for partisans.

Instead, they rounded up all villagers they could find – 80% of whom were women, children and elderly – and began shooting them, according to witnesses.

Others were herded into basements and enclosed spaces and killed with hand grenades.

The Italian trial is scheduled to begin in April, ANSA said.