Second World War, the last 2 Nazi life prisoners sentenced in Italy died

Vintage ward photo by Alfred Stork

Share

28 February 2021 The last two surviving German war soldiers, definitively sentenced to life imprisonment for the indiscriminate killing of Italian soldiers and civilians, are dead.

It is, as confirmed to the Ansa agency by the Military Attorney General Marco De Paolis, of the centenary Karl Wilhelm Stark, accused of various massacres committed in 1944 in various locations in the Tuscan-Emilian Apennines, and of Alfred Stork (97 years old) , held responsible for one of the massacres that took place on the island of Kefalonia in September 1943 against the soldiers of the Acqui Division.

He was convicted of the killing of "at least 117 Italian officers".

Neither has ever served a day in prison or home detention.

60 life sentences were inflicted by the Italian military judiciary after the discovery, in 1994, of the so-called 'Cabinet of shame', where hundreds of files of Nazi-fascist massacres had been hidden in 1960.

In fact, no life sentence was carried out because extradition or execution of the sentence in the countries of the condemned have always fallen on deaf ears.

The only ones to atone for the sentences inflicted in this trial season were the former SS captain Erich Priebke, painstakingly sentenced to life in prison for the massacre of the Fosse Ardeatine, and the corporal 'Misha' Seifert, the 'executioner of Bolzano', extradited from Canada and died during his detention in Santa Maria Capua Vetere.

Former sergeant Stark, part of the Wehrmacht's 'Hermann Goering' Armored Division, died on December 14th.

He was sentenced to life imprisonment for some of the massacres committed in the Tuscan-Emilian Apennines in the spring of '44, in particular those of Civago and Cervarolo, in the Reggio area, two villages where on March 20 a total of about 30 people were slaughtered - including the parish priest - and that of Vallucciole, in Aretino, where over 100 men, women and children were killed in retaliation.

In 2018 a Tg1 troupe found him in his home in a suburb of Munich: the elderly man, exchanging a few words at the door, said he could not regret "something never done" and that the trial had been "a farce" .

Stork only recently became known that he died on 28 October 2018. The former corporal of the Mountain Hunters (Gebirsgjager), had confessed in the past to the German investigators that he was part of one of the firing squads active at the 'Red House ', where the entire staff of the Acqui Division was killed.

"They told us that we had to kill Italians, considered traitors," he said.

The shootings went on from sunrise to sunset: "The bodies were piled in a huge pile one on top of the other ... first we searched them by removing the watches, in the pockets we found photographs of women and children, beautiful children" .

Stork has always ignored the Italian trial and has not even challenged the first instance sentence: the sentence to life imprisonment has thus become final.