ROME - An 83-year-old former SS prison guard, known as the "Beast of Bolzano" for his cruelty to inmates in a northern Italian camp, was being
extradited Friday from Canada to Italy to begin serving a life sentence for war crimes, officials said.
The return of Michael Seifert — who, witnesses testified, gouged out eyes and starved and beat prisoners — adds to Italy's successes in its campaign to
see that justice is done for Nazi war crimes suffered by its people in the final years of World War II.
The former Nazi lieutenant was being flown from Vancouver to Toronto and was then set to board a special military flight due to arrive Saturday morning
in Rome. He will be transferred to a military prison near Naples to begin serving his sentence, said Bartolomeo Costantini, the military prosecutor who
pursued the case. Seifert was convicted in absentia in 2000 by a military tribunal in Verona on nine counts of murder, committed while he was an SS guard
at a prison transit camp in Bolzano, a city in the South Tyrol area.
