MUNICH, September 15, 2008 (AFP) - A 90-year-old German, sentenced in absentia by an Italian military court to life in prison for a Nazi war crime, went on trial in Germany Monday in one of the last cases of its kind.

Josef Scheungraber, then the commander of a German mountain infantry battalion, is accused of ordering the killing of 14 civilians in the Tuscan village of Falzano near Cortona on June 26, 1944.

The massacre was allegedly in retaliation for an attack by Italian partisans that left two German soldiers dead.

The trial in the southern city of Munich comes at the end of a long legal odyssey that has provoked outrage among victims' groups.

The defendant appeared to be in good health as he took his place in the courtroom and followed the proceedings with headphones due to his poor hearing.

'I completely and thoroughly deny the accusations in the charge sheet,' he said in a statement read in court by one of his two lawyers.

His defence team said it was weighing whether to appeal to the court to have Scheungraber declared unfit for trial due to his advanced age.

Scheungraber has lived for decades as a free man in Ottobrunn outside Munich, where he has served on the town council and run a furniture shop.

He regularly attended marches with fellow wartime veterans and recently received an award for municipal service.

Documents found in the 1990s pointed to Scheungraber's alleged involvement in the killings and he was was sentenced in absentia in September 2006 to life imprisonment by an Italian military tribunal in La Spezia.

However Germany as a rule does not extradite its citizens without their consent and has not received a formal request from Italy to jail him here.

The charge sheet describing the alleged actions of Scheungraber's notorious unit in the tiny Italian farming community paints a chilling picture.

The troops are alleged to have first shot dead a 74-year-old woman and three men in the street before cramming 11 others into the ground floor of a farmhouse which they then blew up.

A 15-year-old boy, Gino Massetti, survived seriously injured and -- more than six decades later -- testified during the Italian trial.

Massetti, now 79, has told the German press that he has no desire to exact vengeance.

'I just want to forget those horrible moments,' he said.

The defendant said in his statement that he had not given an order for the killings and was not at the scene of the crime. His defence team said prosecutors had no witness who could testify to Scheungraber's involvement.

Scheungraber was not jailed pending his trial as prosecutors said there was little risk he would flee the country. Due to his age, he will only be asked to testify for a few hours at a time.

The military tribunal at La Spezia has tried several other former Nazis for crimes committed in Italy during World War II but none of the defendants have been brought to justice.

In 2005 it handed life sentences to 10 elderly former SS soldiers for the massacre of 560 Italian civilians including 120 children in 1944 in the Tuscan town of Sant'Anna di Stazzema.

At least two of the Germans have died since then.

Another two received the same sentence in September 2006 for the Falzano massacre and 10 others in January 2007 for a bloodbath in Marzabotto that left 955 dead.

A German network called 'Keine Ruhe!' ('No Peace!') has rallied against allowing the men to live out their twilight years unperturbed and demanded long-delayed justice for the victims.

'There is a very strong tendency toward maintaining the silence,' the group charges.

Ulrich Sander of the Association of Victims of Nazism/Federation of Antifascists welcomed the decision to put Scheungraber on trial as a 'success.'

But he said that while Germany actively tended to the memory of victims of Nazi war crimes, it seemed to have much less interest in bringing the last of the criminals to justice.

'We are disappointed that the ruling handed down in Italy was not carried out by the German state,' he told AFP, referring to Scheungraber's case.