Former SS lieutenant Gerhard Sommer, at the top of a most-wanted list of Nazis, has been declared unfit for trial by prosecutors in Germany, saying he has severe dementia.Rico says someday they'll be like the Mongols, just a dim bad memory...
Sommer, 93, was one of ten ex-Nazi officers found guilty in absentia in Italy of one of the country's worst civilian wartime massacres. He was convicted for his role in the murders of nearly six hundred civilians in the Tuscan village of Sant'Anna di Stazzema in August of 1944.
The Nazis, who were retreating in northern Italy ahead of Allied troops, surrounded the village early on 12 August and, in the space of a few hours, murdered men, women, and over a hundred children.
Sommer was serving at the time in an SS Panzer division. He now lives in a nursing home in Hamburg-Volksdorf and tops the Simon Wiesenthal Center's list of most-wanted Nazi criminals.
Hamburg lawyer Gabriele Heinecke, who has campaigned on behalf of the victims' families to put him on trial, said she was unhappy with the way specialists had reached the conclusion that Sommer was suffering from dementia.
When asked by Berlin website Tageszeitung if she thought dementia could be faked, Heinecke said: "Of course. In matters of pensions it's something that happens every day."
The decision to drop the trial comes as Oskar Groening, another 93-year-old former Nazi, described as The Bookkeeper of Auschwitz, is being tried in Germany on at least three hundred thousand counts of accessory to murder.
For years, attempts have been made to put Sommer on trial in Germany, and prosecutors in Hamburg said that, if he had been deemed fit, he would "with high probability have been charged with over three hundred cases of murder, committed cruelly and on base motives".
In 2012, the case was dropped for lack of evidence after a ten-year investigation, but it was eventually re-opened in August of 2014.
29 May 2015
Yet more non-dead Nazis
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