Anatomy of a massacre : how the SS got away with war crimes in Italy

There isn’t any triumph, there isn’t any happy ending in the story of Sant’Anna di Stazzema, but there is a resolute affirmation of the continuing strength of the human spirit. At dawn on 12 August 1944, German SS troops arrived in the Tuscan mountain village of Sant’Anna di Stazzema. On arrival, they proceeded to murder up to 560 Italian civilians in the olive groves and chestnut woods of the small hamlet. The victims were women, the elderly and over eighty children. One was a baby barely three weeks old. It was the most high-profile massacre committed by the Nazis in Italy – and yet, despite three separate war crimes investigations, the Sant’Anna killers escaped justice. Sixty years later, ten of the SS men who were at Sant’Anna were sentenced to life imprisonment in absentia by Italian courts, but they died free. __Anatomy of a Massacre__ tells the full story of what happened at Sant’Anna di Stazzema – from Tuscany to Rome and Germany – and tries to answer the question: why were the survivors denied justice? "On 12 August 1944, a unit of the 16th SS Panzergrenadier Division arrived in the village of Sant'Anna, hidden high in the olive groves and chestnut woods of the Tuscan mountains. Seeking reprisal, the SS killed 560 of the villagers, eighty of whom were under 16, one a 3-week-old baby. Survivors of the massacre, all young children at the time, have since spearheaded a 75-year campaign to bring the killers to justice. In the process these Italians now pensioners have exposed an international judicial cover-up stretching across Europe, and lasting three generations. None of the SS killers responsible for the most notorious war crime in Italy's history have ever been caught, or served a day in prison. Ten were sentenced to life imprisonment in absentia by Italian courts as Germany refused to extradite them. From Tuscany to Rome and to the modern day streets of Hamburg and the government ministries of Bonn. The Olive Trees Screamed Murder tells the comprehensive story of the massacre at Sant'Anna di Stazzema, and the 75-year international failure to bring the killers to justice"--Publisher's description The first account in English of the Sant'Anna di Stazzema massacre and the last hunt for Nazi war criminals