MUNICH -- A 90-year-old former German army officer was sentenced to life in prison Tuesday for ordering the massacre of 10 Italian civilians in a World War II reprisal killing.

The Munich state court convicted Josef Scheungraber on 10 counts of murder and one of attempted murder, 65 years after soldiers under his command herded 11 Italians into a barn and blew it up. One teenage boy survived the blast.

The 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 the judge, Manfred Goetzl.

Scheungraber "was the only officer present," Goetzl said. "He was not someone who allowed an important matter to be taken out of his hands."

Scheungraber drew several deep breaths after his conviction was announced and listened to the judge's explanation with his eyes closed.

However, Scheungraber was acquitted of charges that he also ordered soldiers to shoot to death three Italian men and one woman before the barn massacre. Goetzl said it could not be proven that Scheungraber gave that order.

Scheungraber's lawyer, Klaus Goebel, said he would appeal what he called "a scandalous verdict." Scheungraber declined to comment.

Court spokeswoman Margarete Noetzel said Scheungraber would not go to prison until the appeals process is finished. This could take months.

A few relatives of Scheungraber's victims attended the judgment and expressed satisfaction with the outcome.

"This was a very important verdict for our family," said Angiola Lescai, 60, whose grandfather was among those killed in the barn. "We view this as a very beautiful gesture of reconciliation."

The mayor of Cortona, Andrea Vignini, who also attended, said the area's citizens "have waited 65 years to hear this verdict. I think this ruling finally brings peace for the dead and the living."

Scheungraber, who commanded a company of engineers, maintained he was not in Falzano di Cortona when the killings happened, but was overseeing reconstruction of a nearby bridge.

His defense team had sought a total acquittal, arguing that prosecutors had presented no evidence of Scheungraber's personal guilt.

Prosecutors acknowledged they could provide no living witnesses who heard Scheungraber give orders to kill civilians. But they said he had been photographed at the burial of the two German soldiers whose killings triggered the reprisals.

The court did hear from the sole survivor of the barn massacre, Gino Massetti, who was 15 when German troops herded him and 10 others into the barn before it was destroyed.

"I heard a scream, and that was it then. They were all dead," Massetti testified in October.

Just before the barn was blown up, Massetti recalled, he saw a man he assumed was an officer arrive on a motorcycle and give what appeared to be an order to the others. Massetti could not describe the officer and didn't understand what he had said.

Massetti said it was down to luck that he survived. He was partly shielded from the blast after a heavy beam and a man fell on top of him.

A former work colleague also testified that he remembered Scheungraber saying to him once in the 1970s that he couldn't visit Italy because of what had happened during the war, which involved "shooting a dozen men and blowing them into the air."

The witness, Eugen Schuh, testified he did not remember Scheungraber saying he had given the order, but said the defendant told the story "as if it were his decision."

In September 2006 a military court in La Spezia, Italy, tried Scheungraber in absentia over the same crimes and convicted him of complicity in murdering civilians. It sentenced him to life in prison.

The defendant lives in Bavaria, and prosecutors said German judicial authorities needed to evaluate the case themselves before Scheungraber would face any punishment. His Munich trial opened last year.

Scheungraber's conviction gives German prosecutors a boost as they pursue two other Nazi-era cases.

The Munich court has yet to decide when 89-year-old John Demjanjuk - charged with being an accessory to the murder of 27,900 people at the Sobibor camp in Poland - might go on trial.

The admitted Nazi hit man Heinrich Boere is expected to go on trial in Aachen, northwest Germany, in October for the 1944 killings of three Dutch civilians.

The top Nazi-hunter at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, Efraim Zuroff, said Scheungraber's conviction would "inspire additional trials."

"We hope that German prosecutors will be just as successful in the case of Demjanjuk, Heinrich Boere and any other cases they may take up," Zuroff said in a telephone interview from Jerusalem.

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Associated Press Writer Melissa Eddy in Berlin contributed to this report.

© 2009 The Associated Press

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