Michael Seifert (SS guard)

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Michael Seifert (born March 16, 1924) was an SS guard in Italy during World War II. Dubbed the "Beast of Bolzano", he was convicted in absentia in 2000 by a military tribunal in Verona, Italy, on nine counts of murder, committed while he was an SS guard at a prison transit camp in Bolzano, northern Italy. He was sentenced to life in prison and extradited on February 15, 2008 from Canada to Italy. His crimes involved actions taken in a prison camp in Bolzano, Italy, from 1944 to 1945.

At his trial, people testified that Seifert starved a 15-year-old prisoner to death, gouged out a person's eyes and tortured a woman before killing her and her daughter.

Avi Benlolo, president of the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies in Canada, noted that Seifert's imprisonment "sets an example for other war criminals, not only Nazi war criminals, but war criminals related to Rwanda, Bosnia, Darfur or any other genocide, that there's no time limit to justice."

After his extradition to Italy, Seifert was held in a maximum-security Italian military prison in Santa Maria Capua Vetere. Prosecutors from Italy and Germany intended to interview him regarding other war crimes that may have taken place at Bolzano.^[1]