Ultimate Justice

The Italian media have dubbed him the butcher of Genoa. Friedrich Engel, now a frail 93, is accused of ordering the execution of 59 Italian inmates from a Genoa prison in May 1944 in retaliation for a bomb blast at a cinema that killed five German marines. Engel, who was a member of the Nazis' élite Waffen SS security service, admits he took part in the executions. "Yes I was involved, but I don't feel entirely guilty," he told German television last year. "They were all partisans, terrorists who participated in earlier actions against Germans." Now Engel is being brought to trial in Germany in what is likely to be one of the last cases of Nazi war crimes to go to court anywhere.

Engel, who has pleaded not guilty to the charges against him, is using a depressingly familiar defense: he was just following orders direct from Adolf Hitler. Such claims have been used — almost always without success — by countless accused Nazis since the end of World War II. Engel claimed that after the cinema blast, an angry Hitler issued an order to "repay attacks resulting in death" by executing 10 people for every German who died. "For me to have resisted would have been impossible," he told the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera. "Imagine, if you can, how you would have resisted the personal wishes of the Führer."

Engel's trial, expected to begin in May or June, comes at a time when new attention has been focused on the war years by a book, Crab Walk, by Nobel-prizewinning author Günter Grass. The work deals with the 1945 sinking of the ship Wilhelm Gustloff by a Russian submarine as it steamed from Danzig (present day Gdansk, Poland) back to Germany. More than 7,000 passengers, mostly German women and children, drowned in the incident. The book, which tops best-seller lists in Germany, has sold more than 300,000 copies and has inspired front-page coverage about the final days of the war.

Trials of Nazi suspects have slowed to a trickle in Germany: eyewitness testimony is harder to come by nearly 57 years after the war ended, and the accused are dying out. Last year there were two trials, both involving very elderly men. A court in Ravensburg in southern Germany sentenced former SS officer Julius Viel, then 83, to 12 years in prison for shooting dead seven Jews as they dug trenches at the Theresienstadt concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia. Judge Hermann Winkler said that neither the passing of years nor Viel's exemplary life since the war lessened the gravity of the offense. Viel died in February. And Anton Malloth, a former SS guard, was jailed for life for killing two Jews at the Theresienstadt camp during the last years of the war. He beat to death one Jew who failed to report on time and shot another for stealing a cauliflower. The prosecution said that despite his advanced age — he was 89 at the time of the trial — a life sentence was necessary as a deterrent to neo-Nazis in modern Germany. Malloth had lived most of his life quietly in northern Italy, where he was a salesman for an electrical-goods company.

Engel, the Genoa suspect, has lived since the war in Hamburg, where he was in the lumber-importing business. After the war he lived under an alias for nine years but then assumed his real name under an amnesty. Since then he has periodically been the subject of war-crimes investigations but escaped indictment. For years, evidence of Nazi war crimes was suppressed by the Italian government for fear of damaging postwar European unity.

Engel was convicted in absentia in November 1999 by an Italian military court on 246 counts of murder. He was accused of three massacres of civilians, including 18 people he shot personally, according to eyewitness testimony. He was sentenced to life imprisonment by the Italian court, but Germany doesn't allow for its citizens to be extradited abroad. Meanwhile, Engel has insisted he is innocent of any crime. Speaking of the 59 people who were taken from Genoa's Marassi prison and shot in groups of six outside town, he said, "I want to stress that these 59 were martyrs. They did not cry, they did not shout, they did not ask for mercy." All that remains is to determine what degree of mercy the court will now show Engel.