Nazi butchers may have been shielded from justice for decades

By PETER POPHAM in Rome


Military Prosecutors in Italy believe Waffen SS troops who committed a series of atrocities against Italian civilians in the last phase of World War Two have been shielded from justice for decades by a secretive, Odessa-like organisation.

The prosecutors in the trial of seven former officers in Hitler's Waffen SS in the north Italian city of La Spezia, accused of the 1944 murder of 560 villagers in the Tuscan village of Sant'Anna di Stazzema, refused to put their suspicions on the record, declining to confirm or deny the stories that have surfaced this week in the Italian press.

But privately they are said to be convinced that only a meticulously organised, secret conspiracy explains the success of the soldiers responsible for this and other mass murders in evading justice for six decades.

Whatever its eventual verdict, expected in the next few months, the extraordinarily belated trial in La Spezia can only deliver symbolic justice: the seven accused, all in their 80s and living in Germany, have refused to travel to Italy. They are being tried in absentia. There are no plans to seek their extradition.

But all the same the trial has excited enormous interest among the survivors of Sant'Anna and their descendants.

In the trial's early days the village emptied out as practically everyone, including the extremely old, made the long journey down the mountain in chartered buses.

On the 60th anniversary of the massacre earlier this month, Germany's interior minister, Otto Schily, visited the village and participated in an emotional ceremony.

After the liberation of Rome in June 1944, German forces were slowly rolled back up the Italian peninsula, but they fought every inch of ground. Now they were fighting not only the British and Americans but also the Italian Partigiani, partisan groups who had sprung up after the fall of Mussolini to resist the Nazis.
To deny the partisans friendly cover, the Waffen SS repeatedly wiped out civilian populations.

Early on the morning of 12 August 1944, four columns of Hitler's 16th Panzer Grenadier division poured into the mountain village of Sant'Anna di Stazzema, high in the Appenines, and set about killing everyone they could find. In the course of the day, 560 men, women and children died. The Germans also burned the houses and killed the livestock.

Yet, despite the scale of the atrocities, and the fact that the identity of the killers - a single division of the Panzer Grenadiers is believed to have committed not only this one but all the other massacres as well - justice went missing for more than half a century.

The identity of the commanding officer, Anton Galler, was discovered as recently as 1999. He had died six years before.

Various explanations have been offered for this failure. The need for Italian national reconciliation after the vicious divisions of the war is one; the necessity, for the sake of the Western alliance, to stop hating Germans and start hating Communists.

For many years all the documents pertaining to the Sant'Anna massacre went missing. They were discovered in 1994 by a journalist rooting about in the basement of the military prosecutors' office in Rome, 600 files in a sealed cabinet with its door facing the wall.

But now the prosecutors at the military tribunal in La Spezzia believe they have hit on the true explanation.

The guilty soldiers have been protected for 60 years by a secretive organisation known by the acronym HIAG, standing for Hilfsgmeinschaft auf Gegenseitigkeit, or "Mutual Aid Association."

HIAG, it is said, has been busy protecting ex-members of the Waffen SS from justice ever since the end of the war. The group was a heterogeneous one. The Waffen SS included not only Germans but also Italians, Ukrainians, Bosnians and Norwegians. And HIAG's secret network included not only the veterans themselves but also younger neo-Nazis, Nazi skinheads and ordinary citizens above suspicion.

HIAG's tasks included monitoring all investigations into massacres like Sant'Anna's and sharing information to enable the suspects to agree on plausible, interlocking alibis. HIAG is also thought to have worked in tandem with other Odessa-like organisations, including Stille Hilfe a group active between Germany and Alto Adige, the predominantly German-speaking region of Italy's north-east, which was set up by a daughter of Hiter henchmann, Heinrich Himmler, and had a similar function.

- INDEPENDENT