A judge in the Northern Italian city of Turin has ruled that a former Nazi SS captain will have to stand trial there on war crimes charges next March. He’s accused of having ordered the murder of 15 Italians, whose bodies were then strung up in public in a Square in Milan in August, 1944. David Willey reports from Rome.

Former SS captain, Theodor Saevecke, is now 86 years old and he’s been located in Germany. Because of his great age, the prosecution says his extradition will not be requested and he will be tried in absentia.

But the murders which led to Saevecke’s indictment caused such grief during the Second World War that they cannot be justified as a military reprisal, the prosecution argues. The Nazi officer ordered the killings after a bomb attack on a German army bus by Italian parisans.

The main casualties, however, were six Italian pedestrians who happened to be passing by. Military prosecutor, Pier Paolo Rivello, said he’ll ask for a life sentence.

Although the murders had been committed in time of war, they were a fact of common crime. 15 Italians were ordered by Captain Saevecke to be taken from the San Vitore prison in Milan, where they were being held in custody, and shot by a firing squad in the Piazzale Loreto, in Milan.

Their bodies were then strung up by the German military as a warning against further acts of sabotage against Nazi troops. In the closing days of the war, in 1945, when the Fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini, his mistress, Clara Petacci, and other Fascist leaders were captured by partisans, their bodies were displayed to the public in the same Square, in memory of this atrocity.