A court in Munich has sentenced the 90-year-old former German army commander Josef Scheungraber to life in prison for ordering a massacre of Italian civilians in 1944 in which 14 people were killed. As a Wehrmacht lieutenant, Scheungraber had ordered his soldiers to shoot three Italian men and a 74-year-old woman in the street. He ordered another eleven civilians to be herded into a barn that was blown up as punishment for an attack by Italian partisans which killed two German soldiers, the court ruled. In 2006 Scheungraber was convicted of the same crimes by an Italian military court and sentenced in absentia to life in prison, but has served no time.
During the trial, Scheungraber denied the charges. He maintained he had not been in Falzano di Cortona when the killings happened, but was in charge of overseeing reconstruction of a nearby bridge. The only survivor of the incident, Gino Massetti, who was 15 at the time, was the sole eyewitness to give evidence during the trial. He described being rounded up by German troops and herded into the barn before it was blown up. "I heard a scream, and that was it then," he said. "They were all dead."