Sant'Anna di Stazzema massacre. Nazis killed 560 Italian villagers

The Sant'Anna di Stazzema massacre was a Nazi German crime against humanity[ committed in the hill village of Sant'Anna di Stazzema in Tuscany, Italy, in the course of an operation against the Italian resistance movement during the Italian Campaign of World War II.

On 12 August 1944, about 560 (130 children) local villagers and refugees were murdered and their bodies burnt in a scorched earth policy action by the German occupation forces of the Waffen-SS.

On the morning of 12 August 1944, German troops of the 2nd Battalion of SS Panzergrenadier Regiment 35 of 16th SS Panzergrenadier Division Reichsführer-SS, commanded by SS-Hauptsturmführer Anton Galler, entered the mountain village of Sant'Anna di Stazzema.

The soldiers immediately proceeded to round up villagers and refugees, locking up hundreds of them in several barns and stables before beginning systematically executing them. The killings were done mostly by shooting groups of people with machine guns or by herding them into basements and other enclosed spaces and tossing in hand grenades.

These crimes have been defined as voluntary and organized acts of terrorism by the Military Tribunal of La Spezia and the highest Italian court of appeal.

On 22 June 2005, the court found the accused guilty of participation in the killings and sentenced them in absentia to life imprisonment:

• divisional commander Max Simon
• Werner Bruss (b. 1920, former SS-Unterscharführer),
• Alfred Concina (b. 1919, former SS-Unterscharführer),
• Ludwig Goering (b. 1923, former SS-Rottenführer who confessed to killing twenty women),
• Karl Gropler (b. 1923, former SS-Unterscharführer),
• Georg Rauch (b. 1921, former SS-Untersturmführer),
• Horst Richter (b. 1921, former SS-Unterscharführer),
• Alfred Schoneberg (b. 1921, former SS-Unterscharführer),
• Heinrich Schendel (b. 1922, former SS-Unterscharführer),
• Gerhard Sommer, (b. 1921, former SS-Untersturmführer),
• Ludwig Heinrich Sonntag (b. 1924, former SS-Unterscharführer).