THE SECOND WORLD WAR: April 2010

Episode - 13 - The last days of world war II - 13 - 19 May 1945

Episode - 12 - The last days of world war II - 6 - 12 May 1945

Episode - 11 - The last days of world war II - 29 April - 5 May 1945

Episode - 10 - The last days of world war II - 22 - 28 April 1945

Behind closed doors - Stalin,the nazis and west

Episode - 09 - The last days of world war II - 15 - 21 April 1945

Truman was born on May 8, 1884 in Lamar, Missouri, the oldest child of John Anderson Truman and Martha Ellen Young Truman.As a young boy, Truman had three main interests: music, reading, and history, all encouraged by his mother. He was very close to his mother for as long as she lived, and as president solicited political as well as personal advice from her.He got up at five every morning to practice the piano, and went to a local music teacher twice a week until he was fifteen.Truman also read a great deal of popular history. He was a page at the 1900 Democratic National Convention at Convention Hall in Kansas City.

After graduating from Independence High School (now William Chrisman High School) in 1901, Truman worked as a timekeeper on the Santa Fe Railroad, sleeping in "hobo camps" near the rail lines;he then worked at a series of clerical jobs. He worked briefly in the mail room of the Kansas City Star. Truman decided not to join the International Typographical Union. He returned to the Grandview farm in 1906 and stayed there until 1917 when he went into military service.

The physically demanding work he put in on the Grandview farm was a formative experience. During this period he courted Bess Wallace and even proposed to her in 1911. She turned him down, and Truman said he wanted to make more money than a farmer before he proposed again.

Truman enlisted in the Missouri Army National Guard in 1905, and served until 1911. At his physical in 1905, his eyesight had been an unacceptable 20/50 in the right eye and 20/40 in the left.Reportedly, he passed by secretly memorizing the eye chart.

With the onset of American participation in World War I, Truman rejoined the Guard. Before going to France, he was sent to Camp Doniphan, near Lawton, Oklahoma for training. He ran the camp canteen with Edward Jacobson, who had experience in a Kansas City clothing store as a clerk. At Ft. Sill he also met Lieutenant James M. Pendergast, the nephew of Thomas Joseph (T.J.) Pendergast, a Kansas City politician. Both men were to have a profound influence on Truman's later life.

Truman was chosen to be an officer, and then battery commander in an artillery regiment in France. His unit was Battery D, 129th Field Artillery, 60th Brigade, 35th Infantry Division, known for its discipline problems.During a sudden attack by the Germans in the Vosges Mountains, the battery started to disperse; Truman ordered them back into position using profanities that he had "learned while working on the Santa Fe railroad."Shocked by the outburst, his men reassembled and followed him to safety. Under Captain Truman's command in France, the battery did not lose a single man.His battery also provided support for George S. Patton's tank brigade during the Meuse-Argonne Offensive.On November 11, 1918 his artillery unit fired some of the last shots of World War I into German positions. The war was a transformative experience that brought out Truman's leadership qualities; he later rose to the rank of Colonel in the Army Reserves,and his war record made possible his later political career in Missouri.

On June 23, 1941, the day after Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union, Senator Truman declared: "If we see that Germany is winning we ought to help Russia and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany, and that way let them kill as many as possible, although I don't want to see Hitler victorious under any circumstances. Neither of them thinks anything of their pledged word."Although the sentiment was in line with what many Americans felt at the time, it was regarded by later biographers as both inappropriate and cynical.The remark was the first in a long series of prominently inopportune off-the-cuff statements by Truman to members of the national press corps.

On April 12, 1945, Truman was urgently called to the White House, where Eleanor Roosevelt informed him that the president had died after suffering a massive cerebral hemorrhage. Truman's first concern was for Mrs. Roosevelt. He asked if there was anything he could do for her, to which she replied, "Is there anything we can do for you? You are the one in trouble now!"

Truman had been vice president for only 82 days when President Roosevelt died, April 12, 1945. He had had very little meaningful communication with Roosevelt about world affairs or domestic politics after being sworn in as vice president, and was completely uninformed about major initiatives relating to the successful prosecution of the war—including, notably, the top secret Manhattan Project, which was about to test the world's first atomic bomb.

Shortly after taking the oath of office, Truman said to reporters:

"Boys, if you ever pray, pray for me now. I don't know if you fellas ever had a load of hay fall on you, but when they told me what happened yesterday, I felt like the moon, the stars, and all the planets had fallen on me."
A few days after his swearing in, he wrote to his wife, Bess: "It won't be long until I can sit back and study the whole picture and. . . there'll be no more to this job than there was to running Jackson County and not anymore worry."However, the simplicity he had predicted would prove elusive.

Upon assuming the presidency, Truman asked all the members of FDR's cabinet to remain in place, told them that he was open to their advice, and laid down a central principle of his administration: he would be the one making decisions, and they were to support him.Just a few weeks after he assumed office, on his 61st birthday, the Allies achieved victory in Europe.

Truman was much more difficult for the Secret Service to protect than the wheel chair–bound Roosevelt had been. The Secret Service had been protecting Roosevelt for over 12 years. Because he was wheel chair–bound most of the time, if he needed to go anywhere, his Secret Service agents would push him at their own speed. Truman had no such restrictions and was an avid walker, regularly taking walks around Washington.

Truman was quickly briefed on the Manhattan Project and at the Potsdam Conference, he indicated cryptically to Joseph Stalin the U.S. was about to use a new kind of weapon against the Japanese. Though this was the first time the Soviets had been officially given information about the atomic bomb, Stalin (through his spies in the U.S.) was already well aware of the bomb project, in fact learning about it long before Truman himself did.

In August 1945, after Japan did not accept the Potsdam Declaration Truman authorized use of atomic weapons against the Japanese.The atomic bombings that followed were the first, and so far the only, instance of nuclear warfare.

On the morning of August 6, 1945, at 8:15, the B-29 bomber Enola Gay dropped an atomic bomb, Little Boy, on Hiroshima.Two days later, having heard nothing from the Japanese government, the U.S. military proceeded with its plans to drop a second atomic bomb. On August 9, Nagasaki was also devastated with a bomb, Fat Man, dropped by the B-29 bomber Bockscar.The bombs killed as many as 140,000 people in Hiroshima and 80,000 in Nagasaki by the end of 1945,with roughly half of those deaths occurring on the days of the bombings. Truman received news of the bombing while aboard the heavy cruiser USS Augusta (CA-31) on his way back to the U.S. after the Potsdam Conference. The Japanese agreed to surrender on August 14.

Supporters of Truman's decision to use the bomb argue that it saved hundreds of thousands of lives that would have been lost in an invasion of mainland Japan. Eleanor Roosevelt spoke in support of this view in 1954, saying that Truman had "made the only decision he could," and that the bomb's use was necessary "to avoid tremendous sacrifice of American lives."Others, including historian Gar Alperovitz, have argued that the use of nuclear weapons was unnecessary and inherently immoral.Truman himself wrote later in life that, "I knew what I was doing when I stopped the war... I have no regrets and, under the same circumstances, I would do it again."

In 1956, Truman took a trip to Europe with his wife, and was a sensation. In Britain he received an honorary degree in Civic Law from Oxford University, an event that moved him to tears. He met with his friend Winston Churchill for the last time, and on returning to the U.S., he gave his full support to Adlai Stevenson's second bid for the White House, although he had initially favored Democratic Governor W. Averell Harriman of New York for the nomination.

Upon turning 80, Truman was feted in Washington and asked to address the United States Senate, as part of a new rule that allowed former presidents to be granted privilege of the floor. Truman was so emotionally overcome by the honor and by his reception that he was barely able to deliver his speech.He also campaigned for senatorial candidates. A bad fall in the bathroom of his home in late 1964 severely limited his physical capabilities, and he was unable to maintain his daily presence at his presidential library. In 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Medicare bill at the Truman Library and gave the first two Medicare cards to Truman and his wife Bess to honor his fight for government health care as president.

On December 5, 1972, he was admitted to Kansas City's Research Hospital and Medical Center with lung congestion from pneumonia. He subsequently developed multiple organ failure and died at 7:50 a.m. on December 26 at the age of 88. Bess Truman died nearly ten years later, on October 18, 1982.He and Bess are buried at the Truman Library in Independence, Missouri. Bess Truman opted for a simple private service at the library for her husband because of her advanced age and frail health, though a state funeral in Washington had been planned. Foreign dignitaries, instead, attended a memorial service at Washington National Cathedral a week later.

Albert Kesselring

Albert Kesselring was born in Marktsteft, Bavaria, on 30 November 1885,the son of Carl Adolf Kesselring, a schoolmaster and town councillor, and his wife Rosina,who was born a Kesselring, being Carl's second cousin.Albert's early years were spent in Marktsteft, where relatives had operated a brewery since 1688.

Matriculating from the Christian Ernestinum Secondary School in Bayreuth in 1904, Kesselring joined the German Army as an Fahnenjunker (officer cadet) in the 2nd Bavarian Foot Artillery Regiment. The regiment was based at Metz and was responsible for maintaining its forts. He remained with the regiment until 1915, except for periods at the Military Academy from 1905 to 1906, at the conclusion of which he received his commission as a Leutnant (lieutenant), and at the School of Artillery and Engineering in Munich from 1909 to 1910.

Kesselring married Luise Anna Pauline (Liny) Keyssler, the daughter of an apothecary from Bayreuth, in 1910. The couple honeymooned in Italy.Their marriage was childless, but in 1913 they adopted Rainer, the son of Albert's second cousin Kurt Kesselring.In 1912, Kesselring completed training as a balloon observer in a dirigible section – an early sign of an interest in aviation.Kesselring's superiors considered posting him to the School of Artillery and Engineering as an instructor because of his expertise in "the interplay between tactics and technology".

In the Polish campaign that began World War II, Kesselring's Luftflotte 1 operated in support of Army Group North, commanded by Generaloberst Fedor von Bock. Although not under von Bock's command, Kesselring worked closely with Bock and considered himself under Bock's orders in all matters pertaining to the ground war. Kesselring strove to provide the best possible close air support to the ground forces and used the flexibility of air power to concentrate all available air strength at critical points, such as during the Battle of the Bzura. He attempted to cut the Polish communications by making a series of air attacks against Warsaw, but found that even 1,000 kg bombs could not guarantee that bridges would be destroyed.

Kesselring was himself shot down over Poland by the Polish Air Force. In all, he would be shot down five times during World War II.For his part in the Polish campaign, Kesselring was personally awarded the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross by Adolf Hitler.

Kesselring's Luftflotte 1 was not involved in the preparations for the campaigns in the west. Instead it remained in the east on garrison duty, establishing new airbases and an Air Raid Precautions network in occupied Poland. However, after the Mechelen Incident, in which an aircraft made a forced landing in Belgium with copies of the German invasion plan, Göring relieved the commander of Luftflotte 2, General der Flieger Hellmuth Felmy, of his command, and appointed Kesselring in his place. Kesselring flew to his new headquarters at Münster the very next day, 13 January 1940. As Felmy's chief of staff, Generalmajor Josef Kammhuber, had also been relieved, Kesselring brought his own chief of staff, Generalmajor Wilhelm Speidel, with him.

Arriving in the west, Kesselring found Luftflotte 2 operating in support of von Bock's Army Group B. He inherited from Felmy a complex air plan requiring on-the-minute timing for several hours, incorporating an airborne operation around Rotterdam and The Hague to seize airfields and bridges in the "fortress Holland" area. The paratroopers were General der Flieger Kurt Student's airborne forces that depended on a quick link up with the mechanised forces. To facilitate this, Kesselring promised von Bock the fullest possible close air support. Air and ground operations, however, were to commence simultaneously, so there would be no time to suppress the defending Royal Netherlands Air Force.

The Battle of the Netherlands commenced on 10 May 1940. While initial air operations went well, and Kesselring's fighters and bombers soon gained the upper hand against the small Dutch air force, the paratroopers ran into fierce opposition in the Battle for The Hague and the Battle of Rotterdam. On 14 May 1940, responding to a call for assistance from Student, Kesselring ordered the bombing of Rotterdam city centre. Fires raged out of control, destroying much of the city.

After the surrender of the Netherlands on 14 May 1940, Luftflotte 2 attempted to move forward to new airfields in Belgium while still providing support for the fast moving ground troops. The Battle of France was going well, with General der Panzertruppe Heinz Guderian forcing a crossing of the Meuse River at Sedan on 13 May 1940. To support the breakthrough, Kesselring transferred Generalleutnant Wolfram von Richthofen's VIII. Fliegerkorps to Luftflotte 3.By 24 May, the Allied forces had been cut in two, and the German Army was only 15 kilometres (9.3 mi) from Dunkirk, the last channel port remaining in Allied hands. However, that day Generaloberst Gerd von Rundstedt ordered a halt. Kesselring considered this decision a "fatal error".It left the burden of preventing the Allied evacuation of Dunkirk to Kesselring's fliers, who were hampered by poor flying weather and staunch opposition from the British Royal Air Force.For his role in the campaign in the west, Kesselring was promoted to Generalfeldmarschall (field marshal) on 19 July 1940.

Following the campaign in France, Kesselring's Luftflotte 2 was committed to the Battle of Britain. Luftflotte 2 was initially responsible for the bombing of southeastern England and the London area but as the battle progressed, command responsibility shifted, with Generalfeldmarschall Hugo Sperrle's Luftflotte 3 taking more responsibility for the night-time Blitz attacks while the main daylight operations fell to Luftflotte 2. Kesselring was involved in the planning of numerous raids, including the Coventry Blitz of November 1940.Kesselring's fliers reported numerous victories, but failed to press home attacks and achieve a decisive victory. Instead, the Luftwaffe employed the inherent flexibility of air power to switch targets.

Although earmarked for operations against the Soviet Union, Luftflotte 2 remained in the west until May 1941. This was partly as a deception measure, and partly because new airbases in Poland could not be completed by the 1 June 1941 target date, although they were made ready in time for the actual commencement of Operation Barbarossa on 22 June 1941. Kesselring established his new headquarters at Bielany, a suburb of Warsaw.

Luftflotte 2 operated in support of Army Group Centre, commanded by Fedor von Bock, continuing the close working relationship between the two. Kesselring's mission was to gain air superiority, and if possible air supremacy, as soon as possible while still supporting ground operations.For this he had a fleet of over 1,000 aircraft, about a third of the Luftwaffe's total strength.

The German attack caught large numbers of Soviet Air Force aircraft on the ground. Faulty tactics – sending unescorted bombers against the Germans at regular intervals in tactically unsound formations – accounted for many more. Kesselring reported that in the first week of operations Luftflotte 2 had accounted for 2,500 Soviet aircraft in the air and on the ground. Even Göring found these figures hard to believe and ordered them to be re-checked. As the ground troops advanced, the figures could be directly confirmed and were found to be too low.Within days, Kesselring was able to fly solo over the front in his Focke-Wulf Fw 189.
With air supremacy attained, Luftflotte 2 turned to support of ground operations, particularly guarding the flanks of the armoured spearheads, without which the rapid advance was not possible. When enemy counterattacks threatened, Kesselring threw the full weight of his force against them.Now that the Army was convinced of the value of air support, units were all too inclined to call for it. Kesselring now had to convince the Army that air support should be concentrated at critical points.He strove to improve army–air cooperation with new tactics and the appointment of Colonel Martin Fiebig as a special close air support commander.By 26 July, Kesselring reported the destruction of 165 tanks, 2,136 vehicles and 194 artillery pieces.

In late 1941, Luftflotte 2 supported the final German offensive against Moscow, codenamed Operation Typhoon. Raids on Moscow proved hazardous, as Moscow had good all-weather airfields and opposition from both fighters and anti-aircraft guns was similar to that encountered over Britain.The bad weather that hampered ground operations from October on impeded air operations even more. Nonetheless, Luftflotte 2 continued to fly critical reconnaissance, interdiction, close air support and air supply missions.

In November 1941, Kesselring was appointed Commander-in-Chief South and was transferred to Italy along with his Luftflotte 2 staff, which for the time being also functioned as his Commander-in-Chief South staff. Only in January 1943 did he form his headquarters into a true theatre staff and create a separate staff to control Luftflotte 2. As a theatre commander, he was answerable directly to the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW) and commanded ground, naval and air forces, but this was of little importance at first as most German units were under Italian operational control.

Kesselring strove to organise and protect supply convoys in order to get the German-Italian panzer army the resources it needed. He succeeded in establishing local air superiority and neutralising Malta, which provided a base from which British aircraft and submarines could menace Axis convoys headed for North Africa. Without the vital supplies they carried, particularly fuel, the Axis forces in North Africa could not conduct operations. Through various expedients, Kesselring managed to deliver a greatly increased flow of supplies to Generalfeldmarschall Erwin Rommel's Afrika Korps in Libya.With his forces thus strengthened, Rommel prepared an attack on the British positions around Gazala, while Kesselring planned Operation Herkules, an airborne and seaborne attack on Malta with the 185 Airborne Division Folgore and Ramcke Parachute Brigade. Kesselring hoped to thereby secure the Axis line of communication with North Africa.

For the Battle of Gazala, Rommel divided his command in two, taking personal command of the mobile units of the Deutsches Afrika Korps and Italian XX Motorized Corps, which he led around the southern flank of Lieutenant General Neil Ritchie's British Eighth Army. Rommel left the infantry of the Italian X and XXI Corps under General der Panzertruppe Ludwig Crüwell to hold the rest of the Eighth Army in place. This command arrangement went awry on 29 May 1942 when Crüwell was taken prisoner. Lacking an available commander of sufficient seniority, Kesselring assumed personal command of Gruppe Crüwell. Flying his Fieseler Fi 156 Storch to a meeting, Kesselring was fired upon by a British force astride Rommel's line of communications. Kesselring called in an air strike by every available Stuka and Jabo. His attack was successful; the British force suffered heavy losses and was forced to pull back.

Kesselring and Rommel had a disagreement over the latter's conduct in the Battle of Bir Hakeim. Rommel's initial infantry assaults had failed to capture this vital position, the southern pivot of the British Gazala Line, which was held by the 1st Free French brigade, commanded by General Marie Pierre Koenig. Rommel had called for air support but had failed to break the position, which Kesselring attributed to faulty coordination between the ground and air attacks. Bir Hakeim was evacuated on 10 June 1942. Kesselring was more impressed with the results of Rommel's successful assault on Tobruk on 21 June, for which Kesselring brought in additional aircraft from Greece and Crete.For his part in the campaign, Kesselring was awarded the Knight's Cross with oak leaves and swords.

In the wake of the victory at Tobruk, Rommel persuaded Hitler to authorise an attack on Egypt instead of Malta, over Kesselring's objections.The parachute troops assembled for Operation Herkules were sent to Rommel. Things went well at first, with Rommel winning the Battle of Mersa Matruh, but just as Kesselring had warned, the logistical difficulties mounted and the result was the disastrous First Battle of El Alamein, Battle of Alam el Halfa and Second Battle of El Alamein.Kesselring considered Rommel to be a great general leading fast-moving troops at the corps level of command, but felt that he was too moody and changeable for higher command. For Kesselring, Rommel's nervous breakdown and hospitalisation for depression at the end of the African Campaign only confirmed this.

Kesselring was briefly considered as a possible successor to Generalfeldmarschall Wilhelm Keitel as Chief of Staff of the OKW in September 1942, with General der Panzertruppe Friedrich Paulus replacing Generaloberst Alfred Jodl as Chief of the Operations Staff at OKW. The consideration demonstrated the high regard in which Kesselring was held by Hitler. Nevertheless, Hitler decided that neither Kesselring nor Paulus could be spared from their current posts.In October 1942, Kesselring was given direct command of all German armed forces in the theatre except Rommel's German-Italian Panzer Army in North Africa, including General der Infantrie Enno von Rintelen, the German liaison officer at Commando Supremo, who spoke fluent Italian. Kesselring's command also included the troops in Greece and the Balkans until the end of the year, when Hitler created an army group headquarters under Generalfeldmarschall Wilhelm List, naming him Oberbefehlshaber Südost (Commander in Chief South East).
The Allied invasion of French North Africa precipitated a crisis in Kesselring's command. He ordered Walther Nehring, the former commander of the Afrika Korps who was returning to action after recovering from wounds received at the Battle of Alam el Halfa, to proceed to Tunisia to take command of a new corps (XC Corps). Kesselring ordered Nehring to establish a bridgehead in Tunisia and then to press west as far as possible so as to gain freedom to manoeuvre.By December, the Allied commander, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, was forced to concede that Kesselring had won the race; the final phase of Operation Torch had failed and the Axis could only be ejected from Tunisia after a prolonged struggle.

With the initiative back with the Germans and Italians, Kesselring hoped to launch an offensive that would drive the Allies out of North Africa. At the Battle of the Kasserine Pass his forces gave the Allies a beating but in the end strong Allied resistance and a string of Axis errors stopped the advance.Kesselring now concentrated on shoring up his forces by moving the required tonnages of supplies from Sicily but his efforts were frustrated by Allied aircraft and submarines. An Allied offensive in April finally broke through, leading to a collapse of the Axis position in Tunisia. Some 275,000 German and Italian prisoners were taken. Only the Battle of Stalingrad overshadowed this disaster. In return, Kesselring had held up the Allies in Tunisia for six months, forcing a postponement of the Allied invasion of northern France from the middle of 1943 to the middle of 1944.

Kesselring expected that the Allies would next invade Sicily, as a landing could be made there under fighter cover from Tunisia and Malta.He reinforced the six coastal and four mobile Italian divisions there with two mobile German divisions, the 15th Panzergrenadier Division and the Hermann Göring Panzer Division, both rebuilt after being destroyed in Tunisia.Kesselring was well aware that while this force was large enough to stop the Allies from simply marching in, it could not withstand a large scale invasion. He therefore pinned his hopes on repelling the Allied invasion of Sicily on an immediate counterattack, which he ordered Colonel Paul Conrath of the Hermann Göring Panzer Division to carry out the moment the objective of the Allied invasion fleet was known, with or without orders from the island commander, Generale d'Armata Alfredo Guzzoni.

Kesselring hoped that the Allied invasion fleet would provide good targets for U-boats, but they had few successes.U-953 sank two American LSTs and with U-375 sank three vessels from a British convoy on 4–5 July, while U-371 sank a Liberty ship and a tanker on 10 July.Pressure from the Allied air forces forced Luftflotte 2, commanded since June by von Richthofen,to withdraw most of its aircraft to the mainland.

The Allied invasion of Sicily on 10 July 1943 was stubbornly opposed. A Stuka attacked and sank the USS Maddox;an Me109 destroyed an LST; and a Liberty ship filled with ammunition was bombed by Ju88s and caught fire, later exploding without loss of life.Unaware that Guzzoni had already ordered a major counterattack on 11 July, Kesselring bypassed the chain of command to order the Hermann Göring Panzer Division to attack that day in the hope that a vigorous attack could succeed before the Americans could bring the bulk of their artillery and armoured support ashore.Although his troops gave the Americans "quite a battering", they failed to capture the Allied position.

Kesselring flew to Sicily himself on 12 July to survey the situation and decided that no more than a delaying action was possible and that the island would eventually have to be evacuated. Nonetheless, he intended to fight on and he reinforced Sicily with the 29th Panzergrenadier Division on 15 July. Kesselring returned to Sicily by flying boat on 16 July to give the senior German commander, General der Panzertruppe Hans-Valentin Hube, his instructions. Unable to provide much more in the way of air support, Kesselring gave Hube command of the heavy flak units on the island, although this was contrary to Luftwaffe doctrine. In all, Kesselring managed to delay the Allies in Sicily for another month and the Allied conquest of the Sicily was not complete until 17 August.

Kesselring issued orders for the evacuation of Sicily, codenamed Operation Lehrgang, on 9 August. Colonel Ernst Baade was placed in overall command of all three services in the Messina area. A large number of antiaircraft guns were concentrated to protect the evacuation from Allied aircraft. Fregattenkapitän Gustav von Liebenstein assembled a collection of small craft that included 33 naval ferry barges, 12 Siebel ferries, two naval gun lighters, 11 large landing craft and 76 motorboats.In spite of the Allies' superiority on land, at sea, and in the air, Kesselring was able to evacuate not only 40,000 men, but also 9,605 vehicles, 94 guns, 47 tanks, 1,100 tons of ammunition, 970 tons of fuel, and 15,000 tons of stores.He was able to achieve a degree of coordination between the three services under his command that his opponent, Eisenhower, could not.

With the fall of Sicily, OKW feared that Italy would withdraw from the war, but Kesselring remained confident that the Italians would continue to fight.OKW regarded Kesselring and von Rintelen as too pro-Italian and began to bypass him, sending Rommel to northern Italy, and Student to Rome, where his I Parachute Corps was under OKW orders to occupy the capital in case of Italian defection.Benito Mussolini was removed from power on 25 July 1943 and Rommel and OKW began to plan for the occupation of Italy and the disarmament of the Italian Army. Kesselring remained uninformed of these plans for the time being.

On the advice of Rommel and Generaloberst Alfred Jodl, Hitler decided that the Italian Peninsula could not be held without the assistance of the Italian Army.Kesselring was ordered to withdraw from southern Italy and consolidate his Army Group C with Rommel's Army Group B in Northern Italy, where Rommel would assume overall command. Kesselring was slated to be posted to Norway.Kesselring was appalled at the prospect of abandoning Italy. It would expose southern Germany to bombers operating from Italy; risk the Allies breaking into the Po Valley; and was completely unnecessary, as he was certain that Rome could be held until the summer of 1944. This assessment was based on his belief that the Allies would not conduct operations outside the range of their air cover, which could only reach as far as Salerno. Kesselring submitted his resignation on 14 August 1943.

SS Obergruppenführer Karl Wolff, the highest SS and police Führer in Italy, intervened on Kesselring's behalf with Hitler. Wolff painted Rommel as "politically unreliable" and argued that Kesselring's presence in southern Italy was vital to prevent an early Italian defection. On Wolff's advice, Hitler refused to accept Kesselring's resignation.

Italy withdrew from the war on 8 September. Kesselring immediately moved to secure Rome, where he expected an Allied airborne and seaborne invasion. He ordered the 3rd Panzergrenadier Division and 2nd Parachute Division to close on the city, while a detachment made an unsuccessful attempt to seize the Italian Army staff at Monterotondo in a coup de main. Kesselring's two divisions were faced by five Italian divisions, two of them armoured, but he managed to overcome the opposition, disperse the Italian forces and secure the city in two days.

All over Italy, the Germans swiftly disarmed Italian units. Rommel deported Italian soldiers, except for those willing to serve in German units, to Germany for forced labor, whereas Italian units in Kesselring's area were initially disbanded and their men permitted to go home. One Italian commander, General Gonzaga, refused German demands that his 222nd Coastal Division disarm, and was promptly shot. A significant part of the 184 Airborne Division Nembo went over to the German side, eventually becoming the basis of the 4th Parachute Division.On the Greek Island of Kefalonia – outside Kesselring's command – some 5,000 Italian troops of the 33 Mountain Infantry Division Acqui were massacred.Mussolini was rescued by the Germans in Operation Oak (Unternehmen Eiche), a raid planned by Kurt Student and carried out by Obersturmbannführer Otto Skorzeny on 12 September. The details of the operation were deliberately, though unsuccessfully, kept from Kesselring. "Kesselring is too honest for those born traitors down there" was Hitler's assessment.

Italy now effectively became an occupied country, as the Germans poured in troops.Italy's decision to switch sides created contempt for the Italians among both the Allies and Germans, which was to have far-reaching consequences.

Although his command was already "written off",Kesselring intended to fight. At the Battle of Salerno in September 1943, he launched a full-scale counterattack against the Allied landings there with Generaloberst Heinrich von Vietinghoff's Tenth Army.The counterattack inflicted heavy casualties on the Allied forces, forced them back in several areas, and, for a time, made Allied commanders contemplate evacuation.[93] The short distance from German airfields allowed Luftflotte 2 to put 120 aircraft over the Salerno area on 11 September 1943.Using Fritz X anti-ship missiles, hits were scored on the battleship HMS Warspite and cruisers HMS Uganda and USS Savannah, while a Liberty ship was sunk on 14 September and another damaged the next day.The offensive ultimately failed to throw the Allies back into the sea because of the intervention of Allied naval gunfire which devastated the advancing German units, stubborn Allied resistance and the advance of the British Eighth Army. On 17 September 1943, Kesselring gave Vietinghoff permission to break off the attack and withdraw.

Kesselring had been defeated but gained precious time. Already, in defiance of his orders, he was preparing a series of successive fallback positions on the Volturno Line, the Barbara Line and the Bernhardt Line.Only in November 1943, after a month of hard fighting, did the Allies reach Kesselring's main position, the Gustav Line.According to his memoirs, Kesselring felt that much more could have been accomplished if he had access to the troops held "uselessly" under Rommel's command.

In November 1943, Kesselring met with Hitler. Kesselring gave an optimistic assessment of the situation in Italy and gave reassurances that he could hold the Allies south of Rome on the Winter Line. Kesselring further promised that he could prevent the Allies reaching the Northern Apennines for at least six months. As a result, on 6 November 1943, Hitler ordered Rommel and his Army Group B headquarters to move to France to take charge of the Atlantic Wall and prepare for the Allied attack that was expected there in the Spring of 1944. On 21 November 1943, Kesselring resumed command of all German forces in Italy, combining Commander-in-Chief South, a joint command, with that of Army Group C, a ground command."I had always blamed Kesselring", Hitler later explained, "for looking at things too optimistically ... events have proved Rommel wrong, and I have been justified in my decision to leave Field Marshal Kesselring there, whom I have seen as an incredible political idealist, but also as a military optimist, and it is my opinion that military leadership without optimism is not possible."

The Luftwaffe scored a notable success on the night of 2 December 1943 when 105 Ju88 bombers struck the port of Bari. Skilfully using chaff to confuse the Allied radar operators, they found the port packed with brightly lit Allied shipping. The result was the most destructive air raid on Allied shipping since the attack on Pearl Harbor. Hits were scored on two ammunition ships and a tanker. Burning oil and exploding ammunition spread over the harbour. Some 16 ships were sunk and eight damaged, and the port was put out of action for three weeks. Moreover, one of the ships sunk, SS John Harvey, had been carrying mustard gas, which enveloped the port in a cloud of poisonous vapours.

The first Allied attempt to break through the Gustav Line in the Battle of Monte Cassino in January 1944 met with early success, with the British X Corps breaking through the line held by the 94th Infantry Division and imperilling the entire Tenth Army front. At the same time, Kesselring was receiving warnings of an imminent Allied amphibious attack. Kesselring rushed his reserves, the 29th and 90th Panzergrenadier Divisions, to the Cassino front. They were able to stabilise the German position there but left Rome poorly guarded. Kesselring felt that he had been out-generalled when the Allies landed at Anzio.

Although taken by surprise, Kesselring moved rapidly to regain control of the situation, summoning Generaloberst Eberhard von Mackensen's Fourteenth Army headquarters from northern Italy, the 29th and 90th Panzergrenadier Divisions from the Cassino front, and the 26th Panzer Division from Tenth Army. OKW chipped in some divisions from other theatres. By February, Kesselring was able to take the offensive at Anzio but his forces were unable to crush the Allied beachhead, for which Kesselring blamed himself, OKW and von Mackensen for avoidable errors.

Meanwhile, costly fighting at Monte Cassino in February 1944 brought the Allies close to a breakthrough into the Liri Valley.To hold the bastion of Monte Cassino, Kesselring brought in the 1st Parachute Division, an "exceptionally well trained and conditioned" formation, on 26 February.[106] Despite heavy casualties and the expenditure of enormous quantities of ammunition, an Allied offensive in March 1944 failed to break the Gustav Line position.

On 11 May 1944 General Sir Harold Alexander launched Operation Diadem, which finally broke through the Gustav Line and forced the Tenth Army to withdraw. In the process, a gap opened up between the Tenth and Fourteenth Armies, threatening both with encirclement. For this failure, Kesselring relieved von Mackensen of his command, replacing him with General der Panzertruppe Joachim Lemelsen. Fortunately for the Germans, Lieutenant General Mark Clark, obsessed with the capture of Rome, failed to take advantage of the situation and the Tenth Army was able to withdraw to the next line of defence, the Trasimene Line, where it was able to link up with the Fourteenth Army and then conduct a fighting withdrawal.

For his part in the campaign, Kesselring was awarded the Knight's Cross with oak leaves, swords and diamonds by Hitler at the Wolfsschanze near Rastenburg, East Prussia on 19 July 1944. The next day, Hitler was the target of the 20 July plot.Informed of this event that evening by Göring,Kesselring, like many other senior commanders, sent a telegram to Hitler reaffirming his loyalty.

Throughout July and August 1944, Kesselring fought a stubborn delaying action, gradually retreating to the formidable Gothic Line north of Florence. There, he was finally able to halt the Allied advance. Casualties of the Gothic Line battles in September and October 1944 included Kesselring himself. On 25 October 1944, his car collided with an artillery piece coming out of a side road. Kesselring suffered serious head and facial injuries and did not return to his command until January 1945.

On 22–23 March 1944, a 15-man American Office of Strategic Services (OSS) Operational Group landed in inflatable boats from US Navy PT boats on the Ligurian coast as part of Operation Ginny II, a mission to blow up the entrances of two vital railway tunnels.Their boats were discovered and they were captured by a smaller group of Italian and German soldiers.On 26 March, they were executed under Hitler's "Commando Order",issued after German soldiers had been shackled during the Dieppe Raid.General Anton Dostler, who had signed the execution order, was tried after the war, found guilty, and executed by firing squad 1 December 1945.

In Rome on 23 March 1944, 33 German-Italian policemen of the Polizeiregiment Bozen from the German-speaking population of the Bolzano-Bozen and three Italian civilians were killed by a bomb blast or in the subsequent shooting.In response, Hitler approved the recommendation of Generaloberst Eberhard von Mackensen, the commander of the Fourteenth Army who was responsible for the sector including Rome, that ten Italians should be shot for each policeman killed. The task fell to SS Obersturmbannführer Herbert Kappler who, finding there were not enough condemned prisoners available, made up the numbers as he thought best, using Jewish prisoners and even civilians taken from the streets. The result was the Ardeatine massacre.

The fall of Rome on 4 June 1944 placed Kesselring in a dangerous situation as his forces attempted to withdraw from Rome to the Gothic Line. That the Germans were especially vulnerable to Italian partisans was not lost on General Alexander, who appealed in a radio broadcast for Italians to kill Germans "wherever you encounter them". Kesselring responded by authorising the "massive employment of artillery, grenade and mine throwers,armoured cars, flamethrowers and other technical combat equipment" against the partisans. He also issued an order promising indemnity to soldiers who "exceed our normal restraint".Whether or not as a result of Kesselring's hard line, massacres were carried out by the Hermann Göring Panzer Division at Stia in April, Civitella in Val di Chiana in June and Bucine (mistakenly named Buchini at Nuremburg) in July 1944,by the 26th Panzer Division at Padule di Fucecchio on 23 August 1944,and by the 16th SS Panzergrenadier Division Reichsführer-SS at Sant'Anna di Stazzema in August 1944 and Marzabotto in September and October 1944.

In August 1944 Kesselring was informed by Rudolf Rahn, the German ambassador to the RSI, that Mussolini had filed protests about the killing of Italian citizens. In response, Kesselring issued another edict to his troops on 21 August, deploring incidents that had "damaged the German Wehrmacht's reputation and discipline and which no longer have anything to do with reprisal operations" and launched investigations into specific cases that Mussolini cited. Between 21 July and 25 September 1944, 624 Germans were killed, 993 wounded and 872 missing in partisan operations, while some 9,520 partisans were killed.

Kesselring used the Jews of Rome as slave labour on the construction of fortifications – as he had earlier done with those of Tunis. He needed a large labour force, given the magnitude of the logistical challenges he was facing. When ordered to deport the Roman Jews, Kesselring resisted. He announced that no resources were available to carry out such an order. Hitler then transferred responsibility to the SS and around 8,000 Roman Jews were ultimately deported.uring the German occupation of Italy, the Germans were believed to have killed some 46,000 Italian civilians, including 7,000 Jews.

Once recovered from the car accident, Kesselring relieved Generalfeldmarschall Gerd von Rundstedt as OB West on 10 March 1945.On arrival, he told his new staff, "Well, gentlemen, I am the new V-3", referring to the Vergeltungswaffe ("vengeance" weapons) and, in particular, to the V-3 cannon, prototypes of which were fired on the Western Front in late 1944 and early 1945. Given the desperate situation of the Western Front, this was another sign of Kesselring's proverbial optimism. Kesselring still described as "lucid" Hitler's analysis of the situation, according to which the Germans were about to inflict a historical defeat upon the Soviets, after which the victorious German armies would be brought west to crush the Allies and sweep them from the continent. Therefore, Kesselring was determined to "hang on" in the west until the "decision in the East" came.Kesselring endorsed Hitler's order that deserters should be hanged from the nearest tree. When a staff officer sought to make Kesselring aware of the hopelessness of the situation, Kesselring told him that he had driven through the entire army rear area and not seen a single hanged man.

The Western Front at this time generally followed the Rhine river with two important exceptions: the American bridgehead over the Rhine at Remagen, and a large German salient west of the Rhine, the Saar–Palatinate triangle. Consideration was given to evacuating the triangle, but OKW ordered it held.When Kesselring paid his first visit to the German First and Seventh Army headquarters there on 13 March 1945, the army group commander, Oberstgruppenführer Paul Hausser, and the two army commanders all affirmed the defence of the triangle could only result in heavy losses or complete annihilation of their commands. General der Infanterie Hans Felber of the Seventh Army considered the latter the most likely outcome. Nonetheless, Kesselring insisted that the positions had to be held.

The triangle was already under attack from two sides by Lieutenant General George Patton's Third Army and Lieutenant General Alexander Patch's Seventh Army. The German position soon crumbled and Hitler reluctantly sanctioned a withdrawal.The First and Seventh Armies suffered heavy losses: around 113,000 Germans casualties at the cost of 17,000 on the Allied side. Nonetheless, they had avoided encirclement and managed to conduct a skilful delaying action, evacuating the last troops to the east bank of the Rhine on 25 March 1945.

As Germany was cut in two, Kesselring's command was enlarged to include Army Groups Centre, South and South-East on the Eastern Front, and Army Group C in Italy, as well as his own Army Group G and Army Group Upper Rhine.On 30 April, Hitler committed suicide in Berlin. On 1 May, Karl Dönitz was designated German President (Reichspräsident) and the Flensburg government was created.One of the new president's first acts was the appointment of Kesselring as Commander-in-Chief of Southern Germany, with plenipotentiary powers.

Meanwhile, Wolff and von Vietinghoff, now commander of Army Group C, had almost concluded a preliminary surrender agreement with the OSS chief in Switzerland, Allen Dulles. Known as Operation Sunrise, these secret negotiations had been in progress since early March 1945. Kesselring was aware of them, having previously consented to them, although he had not informed his own staff. He did, however, later inform Hitler.

At first he did not accept the agreement and, on 30 April, relieved both Vietinghoff and his Chief of Staff, Generalleutnant Hans Röttiger, putting them at the disposition of the OKW for a possible court martial. They were replaced by General Friedrich Schulz and Generalmajor Friedrich Wenzel respectively. The next morning, 1 May, Röttinger reacted by placing both Schulz and Wenzel under arrest, and summoning General Joachim Lemelsen to take Schulz's place. Lemelsen initially refused, as he was in possession of a written order from Kesselring which prohibited any talks with the enemy without his explicit authorization. By this time, Vietinghoff and Wolff had concluded an armistice with the Allied Commander in Chief of the Mediterranean Theatre, Field Marshal Alexander, which became effective on 2 May at 14:00. Lemelsen reached Bolzano, and Schulz and Wenzel regained control, this time agreeing with the officers pushing for a quick surrender. The German Armies in Italy were now utterly defeated by the Allies, who were rapidly advancing from Garmisch towards Innsbruck. Kesselring remained stubbornly opposed to the surrender, but was finally won over by Wolff on the late morning of 2 May after a two-hour phone call to Kesselring at his headquarters at Pullach.

North of the Alps, Army Group G followed suit on 6 May. Kesselring now decided to surrender his own headquarters. He ordered SS Oberstgruppenführer Paul Hausser to supervise the SS troops to ensure that the surrender was carried out in accordance with his instructions. Kesselring then surrendered to an American major at Saalfelden, near Salzburg, in Austria on 9 May 1945.

He was taken to see Major General Maxwell D. Taylor, the commander of the 101st Airborne Division, who treated him courteously, allowing him to keep his weapons and field marshal's baton, and to visit the Eastern-front headquarters of Army Groups Centre and South at Zeltweg and Graz unescorted. Taylor arranged for Kesselring and his staff to move into a hotel at Berchtesgaden.Photographs of Taylor and Kesselring drinking tea together created a stir in the United States.Kesselring met with Lieutenant General Jacob L. Devers, commander of the Sixth United States Army Group, and gave interviews to Allied newspaper reporters.

With the end of the war, Kesselring was hoping to be able to make a start on the rehabilitation of Germany.Instead he found himself placed under arrest. On 15 May 1945, Kesselring was taken to Mondorf-les-Bains where his baton and decorations were taken from him and he was incarcerated.He was held in a number of American POW camps before being transferred to British custody in 1946.

By the end of the war, for most Italians the name of Kesselring, whose signature appeared on posters and printed orders announcing draconian measures adopted by the German occupation, had become synonymous with the oppression and terror that had characterised the German occupation. Kesselring's name headed the list of German officers blamed for a long series of atrocities perpetrated by the German forces.

The Moscow Declaration of October 1943 promised that "those German officers and men and members of the Nazi party who have been responsible for or have taken a consenting part in the above atrocities, massacres and executions will be sent back to the countries in which their abominable deeds were done in order that they may be judged and punished according to the laws of these liberated countries and of free governments which will be erected therein."[148] However, the British, who had been a driving force in moulding the war crimes trial policy that culminated in the Nuremberg Trials, explicitly excluded high-ranking German officers in their custody. Thus, Kesselring's conviction became "a legal prerequisite if perpetrators of war crimes were to be found guilty by Italian courts".

The British held two major trials against the top German war criminals who had perpetrated crimes during the Italian campaign. For political reasons it was decided to hold the trials in Italy,but a request by Italy to allow an Italian judge to participate was denied on the grounds that Italy was not an Allied country.The trials were held under the Royal Warrant of 18 June 1945,thus essentially under British Common Military Law. The decision put the trials on a shaky legal basis, as foreign nationals were being tried for crimes against foreigners in a foreign country.The first trial, held in Rome, was of von Mackensen and Generalleutnant Kurt Mältzer, the Commandant of Rome, for their part in the Ardeatine massacre. Both were sentenced to death on 30 November 1946.

Kesselring's own trial began in Venice on 17 February 1947.The British Military Court was presided over by Major General Sir Edmund Hakewill-Smith, assisted by four lieutenant colonels. Colonel Richard C. Halse – who had already obtained the death penalty for von Mackensen and Mältzer – was the prosecutor.Kesselring's legal team was headed by Hans Laternser, a skilful German lawyer who specialised in Anglo-Saxon law, had represented several defendants at the Nuremberg Trials, and would later go on to represent Generalfeldmarschall Erich von Manstein. Kesselring's ability to pay his legal team was hampered because his assets had been frozen by the Allies, but his legal costs were eventually met by friends in South America and relatives in Franconia.

Kesselring was arraigned on two charges: the shooting of 335 Italians in the Ardeatine massacre and incitement to kill Italian civilians. Kesselring did not invoke the "Nuremberg defence". Rather, he maintained that his actions were lawful. On 6 May 1947 the Court found him guilty of both charges and sentenced him to death by firing squad, which was considered more honourable than hanging.The court left open the question of the legality of killing innocent persons in reprisals.

The planned major trial for the campaign of reprisals never took place, but a series of smaller trials was held instead in Padua between April and June 1947 for SS Brigadeführer Willy Tensfeld, Kapitänleutnant Waldemar Krummhaar, the 26th Panzer Division's Generalleutnant Edward Crasemann and SS Gruppenführer Max Simon of the 16th SS Panzergrenadier Division Reichsführer-SS.Tensfeld was acquitted; Crasemann was sentenced to 10 years; and Simon was sentenced to death, but his sentence was commuted. Simons's trial was the last held in Italy by the British. By 1949, British military tribunals had sentenced 230 Germans to death and another 447 to custodial sentences. None of the death sentences imposed between the end of 1946 and 1948 were carried out.A number of officers, all below the rank of General, including Herbert Kappler, were transferred to the Italian courts for trial. These applied very different legal standards to the British – ones which were often more favourable to the defendants. Ironically, in view of the repeated attempts by many senior Wehrmacht commanders to shift blame for atrocities onto the SS, the most senior SS commanders in Italy, Karl Wolff and Himmler's personal representative in Italy, SS Standartenführer Eugen Dollmann, escaped prosecution.

The death verdict against Kesselring unleashed a storm of protest in the United Kingdom. Former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill immediately branded it as too harsh and intervened in favour of Kesselring. Field Marshal Alexander, now Governor General of Canada, sent a telegram to Prime Minister Clement Attlee in which he expressed his hope that Kesselring's sentence would be commuted. "As his old opponent on the battlefield", he started, "I have no complaints against him. Kesselring and his soldiers fought against us hard but clean."Alexander had expressed his admiration for Kesselring as a military commander as early as 1943.In his 1961 memoirs Alexander paid tribute to Kesselring as a commander who "showed great skill in extricating himself from the desperate situations into which his faulty intelligence had led him".Alexander's sentiments were echoed by Lieutenant General Sir Oliver Leese, who had commanded the British Eighth Army in the Italian campaign. In a May 1947 interview, Leese said he was "very sad" to hear of what he considered "British victor's justice" being imposed on Kesselring, an "extremely gallant soldier who had fought his battles fairly and squarely".Lord de L'Isle, who had been awarded the Victoria Cross for gallantry at Anzio, raised the issue in the House of Lords.

The Italian government flatly refused to carry out death sentences, as the death penalty had been abolished in Italy in 1944 and was regarded as a relic of Mussolini's Fascist regime. The Italian decision was very disappointing to the British government because the trials had partly been intended to meet the expectations of the Italian public.The War Office notified Lieutenant General Sir John Harding, who had succeeded Alexander as commander of British forces in the Mediterranean in 1946, that there should be no more death sentences and those already imposed should be commuted. Accordingly, Harding commuted the death sentences imposed on von Mackensen, Mältzer and Kesselring to life imprisonment on 4 July 1947.Mältzer died while still in prison in February 1952,while von Mackensen, after having his sentence reduced to 21 years, was eventually freed in October 1952.Kesselring was moved from Mestre prison near Venice to Wolfsberg, Carinthia, in May 1947. In October 1947 he was transferred for the last time, to Werl prison, in Westphalia.

In Wolfsberg, Kesselring was approached by a former SS major who had an escape plan prepared. Kesselring declined the offer on the grounds that he felt it would be seen as a confession of guilt.Other senior Nazi figures did manage to escape from Wolfsberg to South America or Syria.

Kesselring resumed his work on a history of the war that he was writing for the US Army's Historical Division.This effort, working under the direction of Generaloberst Franz Halder in 1946, brought together a number of German generals for the purpose of producing historical studies of the war, including Gotthard Heinrici, Heinz Guderian, Lothar Rendulic, Hasso von Manteuffel and Georg von Küchler.Kesselring contributed studies of the war in Italy and North Africa and the problems faced by the German high command.Kesselring also worked secretly on his memoirs. The manuscript was smuggled out by Irmgard Horn-Kesselring, Ranier's mother, who typed it up at her home.

An influential group assembled in Britain to lobby for Kesselring's release from prison. Headed by Lord Hankey, the group included politicians Lord de L'Isle and Richard Stokes, Field Marshal Alexander and Admiral of the Fleet The Earl of Cork and Orrery, and military historians Basil Liddell Hart and J. F. C. Fuller.Upon re-gaining the prime ministership in 1951, Winston Churchill, who was closely associated with the group, gave priority to the quick release of the war criminals remaining in British custody.

Meanwhile, in Germany, the release of military prisoners had become a political issue. With the establishment of West Germany in 1949, and the advent of the Cold War between the former Allies and the Soviet Union, it became inevitable that the Wehrmacht would be revived in some form, and there were calls for amnesty for military prisoners as a precondition for German military participation in the Western Alliance.A media campaign gradually gathered steam in Germany. Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung published an interview with Liny Kesselring and Stern ran a series about Kesselring and von Manstein entitled "Justice, Not Clemency".The pressure on the British government was increased in 1952, when the German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer made it clear that West German ratification of the European Defence Community Treaty was dependent on the release of German military figures.

In July 1952, Kesselring was diagnosed with a cancerous growth in the throat.During World War I, Kesselring frequently smoked up to twenty cigars per day but he quit smoking in 1925.Although the British were suspicious of the diagnosis, they were concerned that Kesselring might die in prison like Mältzer, which would be a public relations disaster. Kesselring was transferred to a hospital, under guard.In October 1952, Kesselring was released from his prison sentence on the grounds of ill-health.

In 1952, while still in the hospital, Kesselring accepted the honorary presidency of three veterans' organisations. The first was the Luftwaffenring, consisting of Luftwaffe veterans. The Verband deutsches Afrikakorps, the veterans' association of the Afrika Korps, soon followed. More controversial was the presidency of the right-wing veterans' association, the Stahlhelm, Bund der Frontsoldaten. Leadership of this organisation tarnished Kesselring's reputation.Kesselring attempted to reform the organisation, proposing that the new German flag be flown instead of the old Imperial Flag; that the old Stahlhelm greeting Front heil! be abolished; and that members of the Social Democratic Party of Germany be allowed to join. The response was very unenthusiastic.

Kesselring's memoirs were published in 1953, as Soldat bis zum letzten Tag (A Soldier to the Last Day). They were reprinted in English as A Soldier's Record a year later. Although written while he was in prison, without access to his papers, the memoirs formed a valuable resource, informing military historians on topics such as the background to the invasion of the Soviet Union. When the English edition was published, Kesselring's contentions that the Luftwaffe was not defeated in the air in the Battle of Britain and that Operation Sealion – the invasion of Britain – was thought about but never seriously planned were controversial.In 1955, he published a second book, Gedanken zum Zweiten Weltkrieg (Thoughts on the Second World War).

Interviewed by the Italian journalist Enzo Biagi soon after his release in 1952, Kesselring defiantly described the Marzabotto massacre – in which almost 800 innocent Italian civilians had been killed – as a "normal military operation". Since the event was considered to be the worst massacre of civilians committed in Italy during World War II, Kesselring's definition caused outcry and indignation in the Italian Parliament. Kesselring reacted by raising the provocation and affirming that he had "saved Italy" and that the Italians ought to build him "a monument". In response, on 4 December 1952, Piero Calamandrei, an Italian jurist, soldier, university professor, and politician, who had been a leader of the Resistance, penned an antifascist poem, Lapide ad ignominia ("A Monument to Ignominy"). In the poem, Calamandrei stated that if Kesselring returned he would indeed find a monument, but one stronger than stone, composed of Italian Resistance fighters who "willingly took up arms, to preserve dignity, not to promote hate, and who decided to fight back against the shame and terror of the world". Calamandrei's poem appears in monuments in the towns of Cuneo and Montepulciano.

After release from prison, Kesselring protested against what he regarded as the "unjustly smirched reputation of the German soldier". In November 1953, testifying at a war crimes trial, he warned that "there won't be any volunteers for the new German army if the German government continues to try German soldiers for acts committed in World War II".Kesselring enthusiastically supported the European Defence Community and suggested that the "war opponents of yesterday must become the peace comrades and friends of tomorrow".On the other hand, Kesselring also declared that he found "astonishing" those who believe "that we must revise our ideas in accordance with democratic principles ... That is more than I can take."

Kesselring and Liny toured Austria in March 1954, ostensibly as private citizens. He met with former comrades-in-arms and prison-mates, some of them former SS members, causing embarrassment to the Austrian government, which ordered his deportation. Kesselring ignored the order and completed his tour before leaving a week later, as per his original plan. Kesselring's only official service was on the Medals Commission, which was established by President Theodor Heuss. Ultimately, the commission unanimously recommended that medals should be permitted to be worn—but without the swastika.

Kesselring had testified at the Nuremberg trial of Hermann Göring. His offers to testify against Soviet, American, and British commanders were declined.After his release, however, he was called as an expert witness for the "Generals' Trials". The Generals' Trials were trials of German citizens before German courts for crimes committed in Germany, the most prominent of which was that of Generalfeldmarschall Ferdinand Schörner.

Kesselring died at Bad Nauheim, West Germany, on 16 July 1960 at the age of 74. He was given a quasi-military Stahlhelm funeral and buried in Bergfriedhof Cemetery in Bad Wiessee. Members of Stahlhelm acted as his pall bearers and fired a rifle volley over his grave. His former chief of staff, Siegfried Westphal, spoke for the veterans of North Africa and Italy, describing Kesselring as "a man of admirable strength of character whose care was for soldiers of all ranks". General Josef Kammhuber spoke on behalf of the Luftwaffe and Bundeswehr, expressing the hope that Kesselring would be remembered for his earlier accomplishments rather than for his later activities.Also present were the former SS Oberstgruppenführer Sepp Dietrich, the ex-Chancellor Franz von Papen, Generalfeldmarschall Ferdinand Schörner, Grossadmiral and former Reichspräsident Karl Dönitz, Otto Remer, SS Standartenführer Joachim Peiper, and former Ambassador Rudolf Rahn.

Alfred Jodl

Jodl was born Alfred Josef Ferdinand Baumgärtler in Würzburg 10 May 1890, Germany, the son of Officer Alfred Jodl and Therese Baumgärtler, becoming "Alfred Jodl" upon his parents' marriage in 1899. He was educated at Cadet School in Munich, from which he graduated in 1910.

After schooling, Jodl joined the army as an artillery officer. During World War I he served as a battery officer on the Western Front from 1914–1916, twice being wounded. In 1917 Jodl served briefly on the Eastern Front before returning to the west as a staff officer. After the war Jodl remained in the armed forces and joined the Versailles-limited Reichswehr.

Jodl had married Irma Gräfin von Bullion, a woman five years his senior from an aristocratic Swabian family, in September 1913. She died in Königsberg in the spring of 1943 of pneumonia contracted after major spinal surgery. The following November, Jodl married Luise von Benda, a close family friend.

Jodl's appointment as a major in the operations branch of the Truppenamt in the Army High Command in the last days of the Weimar Republic put him under command of General Ludwig Beck, who recognised Jodl as "a man with a future", although it was only on September 1939 that Jodl met with Adolf Hitler for the first time. In the build-up to World War II, Jodl was nominally assigned as a Artilleriekommandeur of the 44th Division from October 1938 to August 1939 during the Anschluss, but from then until the end of the war in May 1945 he was Chef des Wehrmachtsführungsstabes (Chief of Operation Staff OKW). Jodl acted as a Chief of Staff during the swift occupation of Denmark and Norway. During the campaign, Hitler interfered only when the German destroyer flotilla was demolished outside Narvik and wanted the German forces there to retreat into Sweden. Jodl successfully thwarted Hitler's orders. Jodl disagreed with Hitler for the second time during the summer offensive of 1942. Hitler dispatched Jodl to the Caucasus to visit Field-Marshal Wilhelm List to find out why the oil fields had not been captured. Jodl returned only to corroborate List's reports that the troops were at their last gasp.

During the Battle of Britain Jodl was optimistic of Britain's demise and on 30 June 1940 wrote "The final German victory over England is now only a question of time."

He was injured during the 20 July plot. Due to this, Jodl was awarded the special wounded badge alongside several other leading Nazi figures. He was also rather vocal about his suspicions that others had not endured wounds as strong as his own, often downplaying the effects of the plot on others.

Jodl signed the Commando Order of 28 October 1942 (in which Allied Commandos were not to be treated as POWs) and the Commissar Order of 6 June 1941 (in which Soviet Political Commissioners were to be shot).

At the end of World War II in Europe, Jodl signed the instruments of unconditional surrender on 7 May 1945 in Reims as the representative of Karl Dönitz.

Jodl was arrested and transferred to Flensburg POW camp and later put before the International Military Tribunal at the Nuremberg Trials. Jodl was accused of conspiracy to commit crimes against peace; planning, initiating and waging wars of aggression; war crimes; and crimes against humanity. The principal charges against him related to his signature of the Commando Order and the Commissar Order, both of which ordered that certain prisoners were to be summarily executed. Additional charges at his trial included unlawful deportation and abetting execution. Presented as evidence was his signature on an order that transferred Danish citizens, including Jews and other civilians, to concentration camps. Although he denied his role in the crime, the court sustained his complicity based on the given evidence.

His wife Luise attached herself to her husband's defense team. Subsequently interviewed by Gitta Sereny, researching her biography of Albert Speer, Luise alleged that in many instances the Allied prosecution made charges against Jodl based on documents that they refused to share with the defense. Jodl nevertheless proved that some of the charges made against him were untrue, such as the charge that he had helped Hitler gain control of Germany in 1933. He was in one instance aided by a GI clerk who chose to give Luise a document showing that the execution of a group of British commandos in Norway had been legitimate. The GI warned Luise that if she didn’t copy it immediately she would never see it again; "... it was being 'filed'."odl pleaded not guilty "before God, before history and my people". Found guilty on all four charges, he was hanged (with Keitel, on 16 October 1946)although he had asked the court to be executed by firing squad.

Jodl's last words were reportedly "My greetings to you, my Germany." He was declared dead 18 minutes later.

His remains were cremated at Munich, and his ashes raked out and scattered into the Isar River (effectively an attempt to prevent the establishment of a permanent burial site to those nationalist groups who might seek to congregate there—an example of this being Benito Mussolini's grave in Predappio, Italy). A cenotaph in the family plot in the Fraueninsel Cemetery, in Chiemsee, Germany is dedicated to him.

Adolf Eichmann

Adolf Eichmann was born in Solingen March 19, 1906 ,Germany, to a businessman and industrialist, Adolf Karl Eichmann, and Maria née Schefferling.[5] After his mother died in 1914, his family moved to Linz, Austria. During the First World War, Eichmann's father served in the Austro-Hungarian Army. At the war's conclusion, Eichmann's father returned to the family and had a company in Linz. Eichmann left high school—Realschule—without having graduated and began training to become a mechanic, which he also discontinued. In 1923 he started working in the mining company of his father, from 1925 to 1927 he worked as a sales clerk for the Oberösterreichische Elektrobau AG and then until spring 1933 Eichmann worked as district agent for the Vacuum Oil Company AG, a subsidiary of Standard Oil. In July 1933 he moved back to Germany.

On the advice of family friend Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Eichmann joined the Austrian branch of the NSDAP—member number 889 895—and of theSchutzstaffel (SS).He enlisted on April 1, 1932, as an SS-Anwärter (Candidate). He was accepted as a full SS member that November, appointed an SS-Mann (Man), and assigned the SS number 45326.

For the next year, Eichmann was a member of the Allgemeine SS and served in a mustering formation operating from Salzburg. In 1933 when the Nazis came to power, Eichmann returned to Germany and submitted an application to join the active duty SS regiments. He was accepted, and in November 1933, was promoted to Scharführer (Squad Leader) and assigned to the administrative staff of the Dachau concentration camp.

By 1934, Eichmann requested transfer into the Sicherheitspolizei (Security Police), which had, by that time, become a very powerful and feared organization. Eichmann's transfer was granted in November 1934, and he was assigned to the headquarters of the Sicherheitsdienst (SD) in Berlin. In 1935, Eichmann was promoted to Hauptscharführer (Head Squad Leader) and later commissioned as an SS-Untersturmführer in 1937.

In 1937, Eichmann was sent to the British Mandate of Palestine with his superior Herbert Hagen to assess the possibilities of massive Jewish emigration from Germany to Palestine. They landed in Haifa but could obtain only a transit visa so they went on to Cairo. There, they met Feival Polkes, an agent of the Haganah, who discussed with them the plans of the Zionists and tried to enlist their assistance in facilitating Jewish emigration from Europe.According to an answer Eichmann gave at his trial, he had also planned to meet Arab leaders in Palestine, but this never happened because entry to Palestine was refused by the British authorities.The British objected to a Jewish state in Palestine, so the idea of deporting all the European Jews to Palestine was abandoned.

In 1938, Eichmann was assigned to Austria to help organize SS Security Forces in Vienna after the Anschluss of Austria moved into Germany. Through this effort, Eichmann was promoted to SS-Obersturmführer (1st Lieutenant) and, by the end of 1938, Eichmann had been selected by the SS leadership to form the Central Office for Jewish Emigration, charged with forcibly deporting and expelling Jews from Austria.

At the start of World War II, Eichmann had been promoted to SS-Hauptsturmführer (captain) and had made a name for himself with his Office for Jewish Emigration. Through this work Eichmann made several contacts in the Zionist movement, which he worked with to speed up Jewish emigration from the Third Reich.

Eichmann returned to Berlin in 1939 after the formation of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (Reich Main Security Office). In December 1939, he was assigned to head RSHA Referat IV B4, the RSHA department, which dealt with Jewish affairs and evacuation. He was Heinrich "Gestapo" Müller's subordinate. In August 1940, he released his Reichssicherheitshauptamt: Madagaskar Projekt (Reich Main Security Office: Madagascar Project), a plan for forced Jewish deportation that never materialized.He was promoted to the rank of SS-Sturmbannführer (Major) in late 1940, and less than a year later to Obersturmbannführer (Lieutenant Colonel).

Reinhard Heydrich disclosed to Eichmann in autumn 1941 that all the Jews in German-controlled Europe were to be exterminated.In 1942, Heydrich ordered Eichmann to attend the Wannsee Conference as recording secretary, where Germany's anti-Semitic measures were set down into an official policy of genocide. Eichmann was given the position of Transportation Administrator of the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question", which put him in charge of all the trains that would carry Jews to the death camps in the territory of occupied Poland.

In 1944, he was sent to Hungary after Germany had occupied that country prior to a Soviet invasion. Eichmann at first made an offer through Joel Brand (who was to act as an intermediary) to trade captive European Jews to the Western Allies in exchange for trucks and other goods (see Blood for goods). When there was no positive response to this offer, Eichmann started deporting Jews, sending 430,000 Hungarians to their deaths in the gas chambers.

By 1945, Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler had ordered Jewish extermination to be halted and evidence of the Final Solution to be destroyed. Eichmann was appalled by Himmler's turnabout, and continued his work in Hungary against official orders. Eichmann was also working to avoid being called up in the last ditch German military effort, since a year before he had been commissioned as a Reserve Untersturmführer in the Waffen-SS and was now being ordered to active combat duty.

Eichmann fled Hungary in 1945 as the Soviets entered, and he returned to Austria, where he met up with his old friend Ernst Kaltenbrunner. Kaltenbrunner, however, refused to associate with Eichmann since Eichmann's duties as an extermination administrator had left him a marked man by the Allies.

At the end of World War II, Eichmann was captured by the U.S. Army, who did not know that this man who presented himself as Otto Eckmann was in fact a much bigger catch. Early in 1946, he escaped from U.S. custody and hid in various parts of Germany for a few years. In 1948 he obtained a landing permit for Argentina, but did not use it immediately.

At the beginning of 1950, Eichmann went to Italy, where he posed as a refugee named Riccardo Klement. With the help of a Franciscan friar who had connections with Bishop Alois Hudal, who organized one of the first postwar escape routes for Axis personnel, Eichmann obtained an International Committee of the Red Cross humanitarian passport in Geneva and an Argentine visa. Both of these issued to "Riccardo Klement, technician." In early May 2007, this fake passport was discovered in court archives in Argentina by a student doing research on Eichmann's abduction.The passport has been handed to the Argentina Holocaust Museum in Buenos Aires. He boarded a ship heading for Argentina on July 14, 1950. For the next 10 years, he worked in several odd jobs in the Buenos Aires area—from factory foreman, to junior water engineer and professional rabbit farmer. Eichmann also brought his family to Argentina.

Throughout the 1950s, many Jews and other victims of the Holocaust dedicated themselves to finding Eichmann and other notorious Nazis. Among them was the Jewish Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal. In 1954, Wiesenthal received a postcard from an associate living in Buenos Aires, saying Eichmann was in Argentina. The message read in part:

Ich sah jenes schmutzige Schwein Eichmann. ("I saw that dirty pig Eichmann.") Er wohnt in der Nähe von Buenos Aires und arbeitet für ein Wassergeschäft. ("He lives near Buenos Aires and works for a water company.")
With this and other information collected by Wiesenthal, Israel had solid leads about Eichmann's whereabouts. However, Isser Harel, the head of the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad, later claimed in an unpublished manuscript that Wiesenthal "'had no role whatsoever' in Eichmann's apprehension but in fact had endangered the entire Eichmann operation and aborted the planned capture of Auschwitz doctor Josef Mengele."

Also instrumental in exposing Eichmann's identity was Lothar Hermann. He was a worker of Jewish descent who fled from Germany to Argentina following his incarceration in the Dachau concentration camp, where Eichmann had served as an administrator. By the 1950s, Hermann had settled into life in Buenos Aires with his family. His daughter Sylvia became acquainted with Eichmann's family and romantically involved with Klaus, Eichmann's oldest son. Klaus made boastful remarks about his father's life as a Nazi and direct responsibility for the Holocaust. Hermann knew he had struck gold in 1957 after reading a newspaper report about German war criminals—of whom Eichmann was one.

Soon after, he sent Sylvia to the Eichmanns' home on a fact-finding mission. She was met at the door by Eichmann himself. She asked for Klaus, and, after learning that he was not home, asked whether she was speaking to his father. Eichmann confirmed this fact. Hermann soon began a correspondence with Fritz Bauer, chief prosecutor for the West German state of Hesse, and provided details about Eichmann's person and life. He contacted Israeli officials, who worked closely with Hermann over the next several years to learn about Eichmann and to formulate a plan to capture him.

In 1959, Mossad was informed that Eichmann was in Buenos Aires under the name Ricardo Klement (Clement) and began an effort to locate his exact whereabouts.Through relentless surveillance, it was concluded that Ricardo Klement was, in fact, Adolf Eichmann. The Israeli government then approved an operation to capture Eichmann and bring him to Jerusalem for trial as a war criminal. The Mossad agents continued their surveillance of Eichmann through the first months of 1960 until it was judged safe to take him down, even watching as he delivered flowers to his wife on their 25th wedding anniversary on March 21.

Eichmann was captured by a team of Mossad and Shin Bet agents in a suburb of Buenos Aires on May 11, 1960, as part of a covert operation.The Mossad agents had arrived in Buenos Aires in April 1960 after Eichmann's identity was confirmed. After observing Eichmann for an extensive period of time, a team of Mossad agents waited for him as he arrived home from his work as foreman at a Mercedes Benz factory. One kept lookout waiting for his bus to arrive, while two agents pretended to be fixing a broken down car. An unconfirmed fourth would ride on the bus to make sure he would leave. Once Eichmann alighted and began walking the short distance to his home, he was asked by the agent at the car, Zvi Aharoni, for a cigarette. When Eichmann reached in his pocket he was set upon by the two by the car. Eichmann fought but team member Peter Malkin, a Polish Jew knocked Eichmann unconscious with a strike to the back of his neck and bundled him into the car and took him to the safe house.

There a preliminary interrogation was conducted and it was proved that Klement (Clement) was undoubtedly the Nazi Eichmann.The agents kept him in a safe house until they judged that he could be taken to Israel without being detected by Argentine authorities; then smuggled him out of Argentina on board an El Al Bristol Britannia flight from Argentina to Dakar and then to Israel on May 21, 1960, heavily sedated and disguised, like the agents, in the uniform of the El Al crew.

There was a backup plan in case the apprehension did not go as planned. If the police happened to intervene, one of the agents was to handcuff himself to Eichmann and make full explanations and disclosure. For some time the Israeli government denied involvement in Eichmann's capture, claiming that he had been taken by Jewish volunteers who eagerly turned him over to Israeli government authorities. Negotiations followed between Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion and Argentine president Arturo Frondizi, while the abduction was met from radical right sectors with a violent wave of anti-Semitism, carried on the streets by the Tacuara Nationalist Movement—including assaults, torture and bombings.

Ben-Gurion then announced Eichmann's capture to the Knesset—Israel's parliament—on May 23, receiving a standing ovation in return. Isser Harel, head of the Mossad at the time of the operation, wrote the book The House on Garibaldi Street about Eichmann's capture. The book has since been made into a movie of the same name. Some years later, Peter Malkin, a member of the kidnapping team, wrote Eichmann in My Hands, which explores Eichmann's character and motivations, but its veracity has been attacked.

In June 1960, after unsuccessful secret negotiations with Israel, Argentina requested an urgent meeting of the United Nations Security Council, to protest what Argentina regarded as the "violation of the sovereign rights of the Argentine Republic".In the ensuing debate, the Israeli representative Golda Meir claimed that the abductors were not Israeli agents but private individuals and so the incident was only an "isolated violation of Argentine law".Eventually the Council passed Resolution 138, which requested Israel "to make appropriate reparation", while stating that "Eichmann should be brought to appropriate justice for the crimes of which he is accused" and that "this resolution should in no way be interpreted as condoning the odious crimes of which Eichmann is accused."

After further negotiations, on August 3, Israel and Argentina agreed to end their dispute with a joint statement that "the Governments of Israel and the Republic of the Argentine, imbued with the wish to give effect to the resolution of the Security Council of June 23, 1960, in which the hope was expressed that the traditionally friendly relations between the two countries will be advanced, have decided to regard as closed the incident that arose out of the action taken by Israel nationals which infringed fundamental rights of the State of Argentina."

In the subsequent trial and appeal, the Israeli courts avoided the issue of the legality of Eichmann's capture, relying instead on legal precedents that the circumstances of his capture had no bearing on the legality of his trial. The Israeli Court also determined that because "Argentina has condoned the violation of her sovereignty and has waived her claims, including that for the return of the Appellant, any violation of international law that may have been involved in this incident has thus been remedied."

Eichmann's trial before an Israeli court in Jerusalem began on April 11, 1961. He was indicted on 15 criminal charges, including crimes against humanity, crimes against the Jewish people and membership in an outlawed organization. In accordance with Israeli criminal procedure, the trial was presided over by three judges: Moshe Landau, Benjamin Halevi and Yitzhak Raveh. The chief prosecutor was Gideon Hausner, the Israeli attorney general. The three judges sat high atop a plain dais. The trial was held at the Beit Ha'am—nowadays known as the Gerard Behar Center—a new auditorium in downtown Jerusalem. Eichmann sat inside a bulletproof glass booth to protect him from victims' families. This image inspired the novel, stage play, and film The Man in the Glass Booth, although the plot of the drama has nothing to do with the actual events of the Eichmann trial.

The legal basis of the charges against Eichmann was the 1950 "Nazi and Nazi Collaborators (Punishment) Law".

The trial caused huge international controversy, as well as an international sensation. The Israeli government allowed news programs all over the world to broadcast the trial live with few restrictions. The trial began with various witnesses, including many Holocaust survivors, who testified against Eichmann and his role in transporting victims to the extermination camps. One key witness for the prosecution was an American judge named Michael A. Musmanno, who was a U.S. naval officer in 1945 who questioned the Nuremberg defendants and would go on to become a Justice of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. He testified that the late Hermann Göring "made it very clear that Eichmann was the man to determine, in what order, in what countries, the Jews were to die."

When the prosecution rested, Eichmann's defense lawyers, Robert Servatius and Dieter Wechtenbruch, opened up the defense by explaining why they did not cross-examine any of the prosecution witnesses. Eichmann, speaking in his own defense, said that he did not dispute the facts of what happened during the Holocaust. During the whole trial, Eichmann insisted that he was only "following orders"—the same Nuremberg Defense used by some of the Nazi war criminals during the 1945–1946 Nuremberg Trials. He explicitly declared that he had abdicated his conscience in order to follow the Führerprinzip. Eichmann claimed that he was merely a "transmitter" with very little power. He testified that: "I never did anything, great or small, without obtaining in advance express instructions from Adolf Hitler or any of my superiors."

During cross-examination, prosecutor Hausner asked Eichmann if he considered himself guilty of the murder of millions of Jews. Eichmann replied: "Legally not, but in the human sense ... yes, for I am guilty of having deported them". When Hausner produced as evidence a quote by Eichmann in 1945 stating: "I will leap into my grave laughing because the feeling that I have five million human beings on my conscience is for me a source of extraordinary satisfaction." Eichmann countered the claim saying that he was referring only to "enemies of the Reich".

Witnesses for the defense, all of them former high-ranking Nazis, were promised immunity and safe conduct from their German and Austrian homes to testify in Jerusalem on Eichmann's behalf. All of them refused to travel to Israel, but they sent the court depositions. None of the depositions supported Eichmann's "following orders" defense. One deposition was from Otto Winkelmann, a former senior SS police leader in Budapest in 1944. His memo stated that "(Eichmann) had the nature of a subaltern, which means a fellow who uses his power recklessly, without moral restraints. He would certainly overstep his authority if he thought he was acting in the spirit of his commander [Adolf Hitler]". Franz Six, a former SS brigadier general in the German secret service, who was assigned the supervision of the occupation of the United Kingdom had Operation Sea Lion been successful, said in his deposition that Eichmann was an absolute believer in National Socialism and would act to the most extreme of the party doctrine, and that Eichmann had greater power than other department chiefs.

After 14 weeks of testimony with more than 1,500 documents, 100 prosecution witnesses (90 of whom were Nazi concentration camp survivors) and dozens of defense depositions delivered by diplomatic couriers from 16 different countries, the Eichmann trial ended on August 14. At that point, the judges began deliberations in seclusion. On December 11, the three judges announced their verdict: Eichmann was convicted on all counts. Eichmann had said to the court that he expected the death penalty.On December 15, the court imposed a death sentence. Eichmann appealed the verdict, mostly relying on legal arguments about Israel's jurisdiction and the legality of the laws under which he was charged. He also claimed that he was protected by the principle of "Acts of State" and repeated his "following orders" defense.

On May 29, 1962 Israel's Supreme Court, sitting as a Court of Criminal Appeal, rejected the appeal and upheld the District Court's judgment on all counts. In rejecting his appeal again claiming that he was only "following orders", the court stated that, "Eichmann received no superior orders at all. He was his own superior and he gave all orders in matters that concerned Jewish affairs ... the so-called Final Solution would never have assumed the infernal forms of the flayed skin and tortured flesh of millions of Jews without the fanatical zeal and the unquenchable blood thirst of the appellant and his associates." A large number of prominent persons sent requests for clemency.On May 31, Israeli President Yitzhak Ben-Zvi turned down Eichmann's petition for mercy.On the Telegram that Eichmann's wife, Vera, sent in support of the clemency, Ben-Zvi added in his handwriting a passage from the First Book of Samuel: "As your sword bereaved women, so will your mother be bereaved among women." (1 Samuel 15:33, Samuel's words to Agag, king of the Amalekites).

Eichmann was hanged a few minutes before midnight on May 31, 1962, at a prison in Ramla, Israel. This remains the only civil execution ever carried out in Israel, which has a general policy of not using the death penalty. Eichmann allegedly refused a last meal, preferring instead a bottle of Carmel, a dry red Israeli wine. He consumed about half of the bottle. He also refused to don the traditional black hood for his execution.

According to an official account, there were two people who would pull the lever simultaneously, so neither would know for sure by whose hand Eichmann died.

There is some dispute over Eichmann's last words. One account states that these were, "Long live Germany. Long live Austria. Long live Argentina. These are the countries with which I have been most closely associated and I shall not forget them. I had to obey the rules of war and my flag. I am ready."According to David Cesarani, a leading Holocaust historian and Research Professor in History of the Royal Holloway, University of London, the order of countries (Austria and Argentina) was inverted and he also spoke of his wife, friends and family, as well as his belief in God. Any mention of obedience to the rules of war or flag is omitted in Cesarani's account in which Eichmann is quoted thus:

Long live Germany. Long live Argentina. Long live Austria. These are the three countries with which I have been most connected and which I will not forget. I greet my wife, my family, and my friends. I am ready. We'll meet again soon, as is the fate of all men. I die believing in God.

Shortly after the execution, Eichmann's body was cremated in a specially designed furnace. The furnace was so hot that no one dared to go near it, but a stretcher on tracks was used to put the body in. The next morning, on June 1, his ashes were scattered at sea over the Mediterranean, beyond the territorial waters of Israel. This was to ensure that there could be no future memorial and that no country would serve as his final resting place.

GERMAN LEADERSHIP

HOLOCAUST TIMELINE

WORLD WAR II TIMELINE 1939

WORLD WAR II TIMELINE 1940

WORLD WAR II TIMELINE 1941

WORLD WAR II BATTLE

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ADOLF HITLER MEIN KAMPF VOLUME I

ADOLF HITLER MEIN KAMPF VOLUME II

ADOLF HITLER PHOTO

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