Michael Seifert, a former Nazi corporal known to his friends as “Misha” but to many others as the “executioner of Bolzano”, died in hospital in Caserta [Campania] on Friday night.
Seifert, who was born to German-speaking parents in the Ukraine in 1924, joined the Nazi SS in 1943. He was a guard at Bolzano Camp from June 1944 until April 1945. Among the transit camp’s prisoners were Jews, Italian Resistance fighters and German army deserters. Seifert was cruel and sadistic towards the inmates and is said to have left one man to starve to death and to have raped and killed a pregnant woman. He is also reported to have killed at least eighteen people there, among them several teenagers.
After the war Seifert escaped to Canada but was tried in absentia by an Italian military tribunal in 2000. He was convicted of the murder of eleven people at the camp. One of the witnesses at the trial was the broadcaster Mike Bongiorno, who had been imprisoned at Bolzano.
In 2002 Seifert was arrested in Canada at Italy’s request. He fought extradition, admitting to having been a guard at Bolzano but denying any part in atrocities which took place there. He was finally extradited to Italy in 2008 and was imprisoned in Santa Maria Capua Vetere military prison until being taken ill following a fall.
