TEN former Nazi officers were given life sentences in absentia yesterday for the massacre of 560 men, women and children in a Tuscan village in 1944.

But the men, all now in their eighties and living in Germany, will escape punishment because they are too old to be imprisoned and will not be extradited to Italy.

The shootings at the village of Sant’Anna di Stazzema in the wooded hills of Tuscany were one of Italy’s worst civilian wartime massacres, carried out with cold-blooded brutality. The convicted men were from the 16th Panzer Grenadier Division of the Waffen SS.

Marco De Paolis, chief prosecutor at the military court in La Spezia, said: “Their behaviour cannot be excused on the ground that they were following orders. Obedience cannot be blind . . . These men were not novices. They had fought on the Eastern Front. Though they were young, it is not as if they did not know what they were doing.”

The courtroom was packed with the children and grand-children of the victims. Enio Mancini, who was 6 at the time of the massacre, said the trial had served to establish “justice and truth” and was a kind of catharsis. “It is a huge success, an almost unexpected one,” he said after the verdict. “We have waited 60 years for this.”

Carlo Gamba, who was 20 at the time, said the village was left “a smouldering ruin with a smell of burnt flesh”.

Signor Mancini was among a group lined up to be shot, but released on the orders of “a humane German officer” who fired into the branches of a chestnut tree instead. The rest of his family perished.

The German raid on Sant’Anna was ostensibly a sweep to flush out anti-Fascist partisans hiding in the woods and harassing German forces as they retreated north up the Italian peninsula in 1944 in the face of the Allied advance to establish the defensive Gothic Line.

On finding no partisans, the Germans rounded up villagers and mowed them down with machineguns. Others were herded into buildings which were then set on fire, or into basements into which hand grenades were thrown.

The atrocity came to light ten years ago when a journalist found a filing cabinet full of witness statements at a military tribunal in Rome. It was dubbed “the cupboard of shame” by the Italian press.

Italy began to reopen investigations into Nazi war crimes in 1996 when, after pressure from victims’ relatives, a Rome military court found Erich Priebke, a former SS captain, guilty of involvement in the murder of 335 men and boys at the Ardeatine Caves, outside Rome, in 1944.

Priebke, who had been extradited from Argentina, was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1998. This was commuted to house arrest because he is 92.

The ten men sentenced to life yesterday are Gerhard Sommer, Alfred Schoenenberg, Karl Gropler, Horst Richter, Heinz Ludwig Sonntag, Alfred Concina, Werner Bruss, Georg Rauch, Heinrich Schendel and Ludwig Gorin.

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