'Butcher of Genoa' convicted but judge spares him jail term

Justice finally caught up with 93-year-old Friedrich Engel yesterday when a Hamburg court sentenced the former Nazi SS officer known as the "Butcher of Genoa" to seven years' imprisonment for the mass murder of Italian civilians 58 years ago.

But the presiding judge, Rolf Seedorf, ruled that Engel should not serve his prison term because of his old age and the long interval since the crimes were committed.

It was probably Germany's last Nazi war crimes trial. Engel, a former SS major, had escaped justice for more than half a century because of legal blunders and apparent indifference on the part of the authorities. Until last year the frail pensioner was living quietly in a Hamburg suburb.

Yesterday, though, he was found guilty of what the judge called the "cruel and illegal killing" by firing squad of 59 innocent Italian civilians during a brutal reprisal massacre in the Turchino pass near Genoa in May 1944. The killings were in revenge for an attack by Italian partisans on a cinema used by German soldiers in which five Nazi marines died.

The prosecution's description of the massacre as "particularly cruel" was borne out by the German and Italian witnesses called to testify during the two-month trial.

They told the court the Italian hostages, mostly innocent civilians from Genoa, were rounded up by German marines and driven to a mountain pass outside the city. Next to an execution pit that already held the bodies of previous firing squad victims, the marines then proceeded to get drunk on a case of cognac before before lining up their hostages on a plank over the mass grave and shooting them dead.

One witness, Walter Emig, a former member of the German navy, told the court that Engel "clearly had the job of supervising the killings" – at one point ordering a lieutenant to "finish off" a hostage who was not immediately killed by the firing squad.

Throughout the trial, a neatly dressed Engel repeatedly denied the charges. In an interview he claimed Italian partisans had provoked the Nazis with "treacherous and underhand attacks" and cited an alleged order from Adolf Hitler to retaliate against attacks on German forces in Italy.

Engel claimed that Nazi naval officers had ordered the Genoa reprisal killings. "I did not dare disobey the orders of my superiors," he told the court. The prosecutor, Jochen Kulmann, maintained that the SS would not have given responsibility for such an operation to anyone else.

Engel worked as an import agent for a Hamburg timber firm after the war but retired almost 30 years ago. His case aroused the interest of the German justice authorities five times but inquiries were repeatedly dropped because of an apparent lack of evidence. Three years ago the Italian courts sentenced Engel to life imprisonment for his part in the reprisal killings of 246 civilians in Liguria during the last two years of the war. But as German law bars the extradition of Germans convicted of crimes abroad, Engel escaped serving the sentence.

The Hamburg state prosecutor's office was only spurred into taking action on Engel's case last year after pressure from Italy and the showing of a German television documentary that highlighted the fact that he had never been tried in Germany. Stung by the adverse publicity, the Chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, intervened and demanded to know why Engel had escaped the courts for so long.

Engel was first questioned by the German justice authorities at the end of last year – some 57 years after the event. He admitted in an interview: "I do feel a responsibility for the tragic event which weighs on my conscience."