Scheungraber’s lawyer, Klaus Goebel, said he would appeal what he called “a scandalous verdict.’’ The 90-year-old Scheungraber declined to comment.
Though witnesses in such cases are rare and memories have faded over more than six decades since the war, the case underscores that it is still possible to win a conviction against Nazi war criminals, experts say.
“Even old age cannot protect one from prosecution,’’ Norbert Frei, a historian at the Friedrich Schiller University in Jena, told Bayerischen Rundfunk radio.
An American attorney who served as the US Justice Department’s lead lawyer in the 2002 case against John Demjanjuk said the verdict has important implications for the upcoming German trial of the retired autoworker accused of being a guard at the Sobibor concentration camp.
In its ruling, the Munich state court ruled that Scheungraber’s men exacted vengeance against the population of Falzano di Cortona, near the Tuscan town of Arezzo, after local partisans killed two German soldiers in June 1944.
“It was about revenge,’’ said Presiding Judge Manfred Goetzl.
