Italian war crime trial points to ’new Odessa’

Military prosecutors in Italy believe Waffen SS troops who committed atrocities against Italian civilians in the last phase of the Second World War have been shielded from justice for decades by a secretive, Odessa-style organisation. The prosecutors in the trial of seven former officers in Hitler’s Waffen SS in the north Italian city of La Spezia, accused of the 1944 murder of 560 villagers in the Tuscan village of Sant’Anna di Stazzema, refused to put their suspicions on the record, declining to confirm or deny the stories that have surfaced in the Italian press this week. But privately they are said to be convinced that only a meticulously organised secret conspiracy explains the success of the soldiers responsible for this and other mass murders in evading justice for six decades - a conspiracy similar to the alleged Odessa network of former SS officers which reputedly helped Nazi war criminals to find refuge in Latin America. siehe auch: Italian war crime trial points to 'new Odessa'