Former German officer convicted of WWII killings

Source: AP

By MARIA MARQUART (AP) – 54 minutes ago

MUNICH — A 90-year-old former German army officer was convicted of murder Tuesday over the killings of Italian civilians during World War II, and sentenced to life in prison.

The Munich state court convicted Josef Scheungraber on 10 counts of murder and also found him guilty of attempted murder.

Scheungraber was a 25-year-old Wehrmacht lieutenant at the time of the June 1944 killings in Falzano di Cortona, near the Tuscan town of Arezzo. The killings came after partisans killed two German soldiers.

Prosecutors alleged that after partisans killed two German soldiers, Scheungraber commanded his soldiers to shoot three Italian men and one woman. They said he then ordered that another 11 civilians be herded into a barn that was blown up. He was charged with 14 counts of murder and one count of attempted murder.

Scheungraber, who was in command of a company of engineers, maintains he was not in Falzano di Cortona when the killings happened, but was in charge of overseeing reconstruction of a nearby bridge.



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They not only kill innocent people, they also have the purpose of trying to scare people, they use the bad methods of fear. Terrible...

Such barbaric actions are horrible.

Seems like a dumb thing to say but I've been really bothered about the anti-Obama talk lately. We should all keep this in mind when we want to compare a political opponent to this horrible time in history.

Unlike the SS.

human history. It is nothing short of myth to believe otherwise.

And most of them did buy into Hitlers propaganda. They considered there attack on Russia as
saving Wetern civilization and viewed the Russians as low-lifes. Reprisal killings did not bother
them at all.

And yes, I also find the cheaping of the word "Nazi" disturbing. Its an insult to those who suffered and died under them, and those who throw it around need to read up on their history.

I read it as well and it should be required reading for everyone. People have long mythologized the evil of the Nazis and ascribed all manner of weirdness to the movement. The true horror and evil is that the crimes of the Nazi are not unique and the fall to despotism and genocide is all too easy.

Utterly debunked by any scholarly survey whatsoever, and yet repeated ad nauseum. Supposedly non-political Wehrmacht soldiers used to go out an watch the Einsatzgruppen killings like it was a Saturday matinee, and every damn officer in the army knew exactly what was going on. In terms of supposedly "anti-partisan actions," which everyone knew meant outright murder of the civilian populations, the connection is even more clear and direct, with only the tactics in the Balkans being more overtly criminal than those in Italy.

West Germany never came to terms with its Nazi past, unlike in the east. It's a shame that militarism is making a comeback.

Because I've always heard that most of the neo-Nazi activity in Germany is based in the east.

...after the east was annexed. But prior to that, Nazi activity was extremely minimal in the east as compared with the west. It flourished in the east with the importation of nationalist ideology and with the collapse of the eastern economy.

You are full of it.

We had a visitor from germany at work. I asked her if they were taught about what the NAZIs did. She said yes. We discussed it.

Germany had mass protests in the 60's by students because of former NAZIs in government

'Since 1958 a stronger desire to confront the Nazi past came into being. In the 1960s environmentalism and anti-nationalism became fundamental values among left-wing Germans.'

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Germany

Germany also has zero tolerance about NAZIs anything.

considering that the East continued the policies of state police spying on everybody.

The official position wasn't that it was something they did; it was something they were duped or coerced into by the Germans in the west. I don't buy the idea that the east came to terms with their Nazi past at all, as the poster you reply to suggested; quite the opposite, where they were told that they weren't really responsible for it and it was the other, worse people who were really the fascists.

Only takes a little bit of "but this isn't really like what they were doing" sugarcoating and self-justification to go down a very similar path while convincing oneself that you weren't. Scary to think about, especially with the extent to which the DDR took it.

They did so in a much more brutal fashion as well. Most crimes of the Wehrmacht were done in well-publicized, pre-warned, relatively sanitary reprisal killings as a response to partisan activity.

The Red Army slaughtered & raped anyone they could find. Not just fascists & collaborators but liberated Russian slave laborers & POW's, Polish patriots (like the members of the AK), etc were massacred with a gusto never seen before or since.

It's selective history to assert otherwise.

The fascist murder machine was indeed efficient and orderly. That makes it worse than anything the Red Army ever did. The peasants making up the Red Army were often undisciplined and did things against the orders of their officers. It was well-known that the punishment for rape was death, but certainly many Red Armymen did it anyway. The Germans had a policy from high up, the Soviets had an unruly peasant army. Two very different things.

It's actually statistically impossible to say that the Red Army killed more civilians.

... But that doesn't really change the fact that Europe being a smoking ruin in 1945 between the Pyrennes and the Volga was pretty much entirely Germany's fault.

(Well, or Poland's, going by the Russians' especially ridiculous new orthodoxy. Somewhere an historian is crying..)

is far from the truth. It depended on where the Soviet Army was located. Death was very quick in coming if the victim was a Soviet citizen. No so quick if a Pole or Hungarian, and not at all if the victim was a German. The politruks whipped up a frenzy of hate against the Germans as the Soviet Army approached the borders of Germany. The soldiers were rather off handly informed that harsh rules of Soviet Army discipline would be very relaxed once they crossed into Germany. This relaxation of the standards of discipline was a direct result of decisions made in Moscow. Not by an unruly peasant mob in Soviet Uniforms. Discipline in the Soviet Army was every bit as strict and demanding as discipline in the German army.

The Germans encouraged bending or even disobeying orders - at least at the lower levels of the organization, say below divisional level - if it would get things done. The Soviets micromanaged quite a bit at all levels, and wouldn't stand for something like that most of the time.

You're absolutely right that the relaxation was a result of decisions from Moscow. It wasn't even relaxation, after a point, as much as an explicit command to go forth and get revenge on the German population. There's a pretty horrifying couple of chapters on that in William I. Hitchcock's The Bitter Road To Freedom, including quoting some of the relevant commands verbatim. (I'd recommend that book in general to folks at all interested in this thread of comments, anyway; it discusses the liberation of Europe chiefly from a civilian and humanitarian perspective.)

I know it doesn't make it right, but Germans in the Russian occupied areas received less of a reprisal than you would imagine given the scale of what the Germans did.

Army had marched from Stalingrad in the spring of 1943 to Polish border in the autum of 1944 without seeing a standing house, a living farm animal, or an intact village. Along the route, the many piles of bodies murdered of Soviet Citizens. All of it destroyed or killed by the Germans. While not right, the Red Army's conduct in Germany is somewhat understandable.

don't exist anymore and that's entirely due to the Germans. What happened to Western Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine is unbelievable.

I'm sorry, you do have to justify those numbers.

Damn those Yugoslavians for resisting the brutal occupation of their country. Look! They made us kill 10 of them for everyone of us they killed! Damn them to Hell and such.

Wasn't the number often closer to fifty or one hundred in the east, too?

only 5,000 were ever heard from again.

Also the entry of the Red Army into Germany in the winter of 1945 began thew largest number of rapes in world history.

In an ethnic cleansing of immense scale, the lands of eastern Germany were entirely cleansed of German civilians and they have never been allowed to return. German cities for 1,000 years like Stettin, Breslau and Konigsberg were emptied of their German populations entirely, and had their names changed to Scezin, Wroclow and Kaliningrad.

The Russian front was a truly awful place and the Red Army took no back seat in the terror of the eastern front.

Do you have any idea how many Russian towns and cities were entirely depopulated? Do you know how many million Russian soldiers died in German captivity? Do you know how many millions of Russian civilians were killed just by virtue of being Russian? Look at the total death tolls for WWII and look at what the Germans inflicted. Russia doesn't even come close. Not even a third as many.

It was hideous evil vs hideous evil.

return to the Soviet Union?

Of course, the Soviets killed or permanently imprisoned most of those - being captured in battle was considered treason under Soviet law.

Also aware that plenty of Soviet soldiers died in Soviet captivity after the war, as having been captured was declared treason sometime around the winter of 1941-2.

Its only a pantload if you don't know any history.

Its not selective history. Its only selective if you don't want to believe it.

Everything he said is true, and I can give you links if you want.

Death by 1 million cuts or death by 2 million cuts.

Your going to be dead long before either number is reached.

It was hideous evil vs hideous evil.

on the reprisal killings by Americans that have taken place in Iraq.

be forgotten. Besides, GWB said that history will not be able to judge him for 100 years.

...plus a :hi:

and I believe I did it when I was a moderator. :blush:

P.S. :hug: <-- That's your punishment.

West Germany welcomed Nazis into its leadership for decades. Its secret service and armed forces were staffed by them. Now, 64 years after the war ended, Germany roots out a few remaining ones.