An Italian military court has convicted ten former Nazi SS officers and soldiers in absentia for taking part in the worst massacre committed on Italian soil during the Second World War.

All those convicted for the slaughter of more than 800 civilians at Marzabotto in the Apennine mountains near Bologna in 1944 are now in their eighties. None attended the hearings at La Spezia, and none is likely to be extradited from Germany to Italy because of their age. Lawyers and descendants of the victims wept and embraced each other as the sentence was read out.

Romano Prodi, the Italian Prime Minister, voiced regret that the convictions would hold only “symbolic value”. “If [the convictions] could have been possible 40 years earlier, it would have had real value. It is right that there is no statute of limitations on these crimes, even if it is clear that after so many years the guilty have become almost unreachable,” he said at his home in Bologna.

Seventeen former Nazis, now aged from 81 to 88, were accused of taking part in the killings, but the court acquitted seven of them. Major Walter Reder, the commanding officer at Marzabotto, was given a life sentence by a military court in Bologna in 1951 but was freed in 1985 and died six years later.

The residents of Marzabotto were rounded up and shot by retreating German forces at the end of September and early October 1944, as Allied forces advanced north, and Nazism and Fascism crumbled. The operation by the 16th SS Panzergrenadier Division was ostensibly aimed at Italian partisans and local people giving them shelter and support.

In reality, the killings were indiscriminate, with 300 women and 216 children — 40 under the age of 2 — among the dead, as well as 5 priests. Some historians put the total shot dead in the Marzabotto area as nearer 1,800 than 800.

Vincenzo Santoro, the presiding judge at La Spezia, said: “This judgment has been reached in the name of the Italian people and in accordance with the law after a very difficult trial”.

During the trial Nicola Canestrini, one of the defence lawyers, argued that even Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, had worn German uniform as a member of the Hitler Youth as a teenager. However, Marco De Paolis, the prosecutor, said: “Members of the SS were not ordinary soldiers. They were like al-Qaeda today — terrorists.”

He said that the SS troops had hunted down men, women and the elderly in a “premeditated act of terror”.

Gianfranco Lorenzini, one of the witnesses, who was 13 at the time, described how the SS troops “threw newborn babies into the air and killed them with sub-machineguns, and then raped the women”.

The court ordered compensation amounting to €100 million (£66 million) to be paid to descendants of the victims, and the local authorities. It is not clear how the order can be enforced.

The Marzabotto trial is one of several cases reopened after the discovery ten years ago of records relating to wartime massacres at a military archive in Rome dubbed “the cupboard of shame”.

It emerged that investigations had been quietly dropped in order not to disrupt good relations with West Germany.

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