Life term asked for last Cephalonia massacre German

(ANSA) - Rome, October 19 - A Rome military prosecutor on Wednesday asked for life imprisonment for the last surviving German officer who allegedly took part in the massacre of thousands of Italian soldiers on the Greek island of Cephalonia in World War II. The defendant, 90-year-old ex-corporal Alfred Stork, is accused of ordering the execution of "at least 117 Italian officers" after they surrendered, said Rome Prosecutor Marco De Paolis. Among the evidence is a 2005 confession, later retracted, in which Stork told German prosecutors he was a member of one of the two execution platoons. The incident was just one episode amid a much larger massacre which came after the 1943 armistice between Italy and the Allies that instructed Italian troops to switch sides. After news of the September 8 armistice filtered across to the island on September 14, 1943, General Antonio Gandin told each of his men in the Acqui division to follow his own conscience and choose between three alternatives: fight on alongside the Germans, surrender his weapons, or keep them and resist German attacks. Over the next eight days, 1,300 men died in battle, 5,155 were shot after being taken prisoner, and 3,000 drowned when a ship carrying them to Nazi concentration camps sank. The bodies of 200 men were tossed down a well, from which they were only recovered and sent back home a few months before former Italian president Carlo Azeglio Ciampi's visit in 2001. To the outrage of Italy, a German court cleared then 86-year-old former lieutenant Otmar Muhlhauser of war-crime charges in 2006. Muhlhauser, who died in 2009, reportedly admitted he had personally ordered the execution of hundreds of soldiers including General Gandin. The incident forms the backdrop to the best-selling 1994 novel, Captain Corelli's Mandolin, which became a film in 2001 starring Nicholas Cage and Penelope Cruz.