Walter Reder

Content sourced from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Walter Reder (4 February 1915 – 26 April 1991) was an Austrian SS commander in World War II. He served in the SS divisions Totenkopf and Reichsführer-SS, and commanded a unit in Italy in 1944 that carried out the Vinca massacre and the Marzabotto massacre. After the war, he was captured by American soldiers, handed to British forces, and extradited to Italy in May 1948 to stand trial for war crimes. An Italian military court in Bologna convicted him of ordering the destruction of Marzabotto and other villages and the execution of about 2,700 Italian civilians in Tuscany and Emilia during 1944. In October 1951 he was sentenced to life imprisonment at Gaeta. The Marzabotto massacre is believed to have killed around 1,830 people. Survivors voted 237 to 1 against his release. Further SS members connected to the massacres were later tried in absentia for Sant’Anna di Stazzema. Reder was paroled in January 1985 and returned to Austria, where he died in Vienna in 1991.