LEOPOLDA BARTOLUCCI weeps as she recalls the “beautiful August day” in 1944 when the Nazis massacred 560 people in Sant’Anna di Stazzema, her village in the wooded foothills of the Tuscan mountains.

“When people heard the Germans were coming they began to hide, fearing the worst,” Signora Bartolucci, who was ten, said. “But we didn’t know what the worst was.”

The SS troops arrived in a village crowded with refugees fleeing the Nazi retreat, lined up anyone they could find and gunned them down with bursts of machinegun fire.

Whole families were wiped out. Most of the victims were women, children and the elderly. Among those who could not run fast enough was Signora Bartolucci’s father, Adolfo. She still keeps his portrait in a locket hanging from her neck.

It is a day etched on the memories of the few survivors, but now, 60 years later, some sort of justice is finally in sight.

After the discovery of hundreds of war crimes files in a basement of the Rome Military Prosecutor’s office, and extensive investigations, a military court in the nearby port of La Spezia this week charged three former SS officers with the killings.

The three men, Gerhard Sommer, Alfred Schonenberg, and Ludwig Sonntag, were members of the SS Panzergrenadier Division hunting for Italian partisans.

All are now in their eighties, making it unlikely that Germany will extradite them to stand trial, or that they would ever serve prison sentences if convicted. But for villagers like Signora Bartolucci the mere fact that they will be tried, even in absentia, and that international attention is at last being focused on what happened that awful day, offers some relief.

“We want justice,” she told The Times as she stood outside the 16th-century village church that she tends, and where many of the victims were massacred. “We want to know who did it and, even more, we want to know why.”

The six decades simply melt away as the older villagers recall what happened that day, and the tears still flow freely.

They insist that there were no partisans in Sant’Anna di Stazzema, and that the SS troops rounded up innocent civilians. Those who were not shot in the open air were herded into basements into which hand grenades were thrown. The buildings were set on fire.

For Bianca Pieri, who runs the village shop with her husband Carlo Gamba and was 20 at the time, the shooting of women and children was the greatest atrocity. Eight of those killed were pregnant.

Her husband, now 78, had been deported to Germany before the massacre to work in a tank factory. When he returned in 1945 he found that his father and three brothers had managed to escape. His mother and his brothers’ wives and their small children were all dead. He said that the village was still a smouldering ruin with a pervasive smell of burnt flesh. Today there are just 400 people there and from the steep hills surrounding it wood smoke curls into the dank winter air.

Next to the church a Museum of the Resistance records the massacre by “ferocious and bestial” German troops, and on the village square the wooden figures of lost children dance in a circle, a replica of a photograph of dancing children kept in the museum.

Enio Mancini, the museum’s custodian, was seven at the time of the massacre. He was among a group lined up to be shot “for an eternal 10 or 15 minutes”, but then 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 memories live on, but much of the bitterness towards the Germans has faded. Signor Mancini acknowledges that the Nazis were probably aided and abetted by Italian Fascists who knew the terrain.

Signora Pieri said that last summer “a young German couple came and knelt in the square and just cried and cried”. She added: “We cried with them.”

A German firm is raising funds to replace the destroyed church organ, and ceremonies at Sant’Anna to mark the anniversary are to be matched by an exhibition in Berlin.

The trial, beginning in April, may complete the healing process, even in the defendants’ absence.

“Of course I would like to look these former SS officers in the eye, and ask them why,” Signor Mancini said. “But to hear them named and shamed will be a kind of catharsis. The trial will also help us to write the true story of what happened.

“And it is a message to all war criminals: there is justice, and sooner or later, justice will catch up with you.”

Explore World News

• World Agenda

• Iraq News

• US & Americas News

• Europe News

• Middle East News

• Afghanistan News

• Asia News

• Africa News

• Ireland News

Times Recommends

• Please help: maimed children of war want their lives back
• Cabal seizes diamond riches to buy power
• White House gatecrashers got to the president