German prosecutors say they had dropped their probe into a 93-year-old former Nazi SS officer over a World War II massacre in Italy because he suffers from dementia.
Gerhard Sommer, a former company commander of a mechanized infantry division, had been accused over the Nazis’ mass murder of 560 civilians in the Tuscan mountain village of Sant’Anna di Stazzema in 1944.
The prosecutors in the northern German city of Hamburg said that — had the man been deemed fit to stand trial — he would “with high probability have been charged with 342 cases of murder, committed cruelly and on base motives”.
On 12 August 1944, Nazi soldiers using machine guns and flamethrowers massacred almost all residents and refugees in Sant’Anna di Stazzema, including 107 children under 14 years. After decades of judicial inertia in Germany and Italy, the case resurfaced in the 1990s based on research by several historians.
In 2005, an Italian military court found that 10 members of the 16th SS “Reichsfuehrer” division, including Sommer, were personally responsible for the massacre and sentenced them to life in absentia.
— AFP
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