Germany knights WWII atrocity survivor (4)

(ANSA) - Lucca, May 26 - Germany on Tuesday knighted two elderly survivors of Italy's worst WWII Nazi atrocity, in the Tuscan village of Sant'Anna di Stazzema.
    President Frank-Walter Steinmeier conferred the honour of a knight in the order of merit of the federal republic of Germany on Enrico Pieri and Enio Mancini, the German embassy said in a letter to the two men.
    The Sant'Anna di Stazzema massacre was a Nazi German war crime committed in the hill village of Sant'Anna di Stazzema in Tuscany, Italy, in the course of an operation against the Italian resistance movement during the Italian Campaign of World War II. On 12 August 1944 the Waffen-SS, with the help of the Italian Brigate Nere, murdered about 560 local villagers and refugees, including more than a hundred children, and burned their bodies, in a reprisal for a Resistance raid.