December 1st, 1945, 8:00 in the morning.
A prisoner stockade in Aversa, Italy.
A 54-year-old German general named Anton Dostler is marched out into the cold morning air and tied to a wooden post.
His hands are secured behind his back.
A black hood is placed over his head.
A priest has already delivered his last rites.
12 American soldiers stand in a line 30 ft away, rifles raised.
A commanding officer barks three words, “Ready, aim, fire.
” 12 rifles discharge simultaneously.
Dostler dies instantly.
His body sags against the ropes binding him to the post.
A doctor steps forward, confirms the death.
Military photographers have recorded every frame of what has just happened on both still and motion picture cameras.
Because this execution, unlike almost any other, was meant to be seen.
It was meant to become a document.
It was meant to say something to every military commander in every future conflict about what happens when you order soldiers to kill unarmed prisoners in American uniform.
Anton Dostler is the only German general officer in history to be tried and executed for war crimes on the sole authority of the United States.
The trial that put him in front of that firing squad was the first Allied war crimes trial held after the end of the war in Europe, preceding even the Nuremberg proceedings.
And the crime at the center of it was the execution of 15 American soldiers who had done nothing wrong except get captured behind enemy lines while wearing their proper uniforms.
Subscribe because this story goes to the heart of what the laws of war actually mean, who they protect, and what happens to commanders who decide an illegal order from above is enough cover to have prisoners shot.
Anton Dostler was born on May 10th, 1891 in Munich, Bavaria, the heart of the German state that would, 40 years later, produce the Nazi Party and deliver him the order that destroyed him.
He was a professional soldier in the oldest sense of the phrase.
He entered the Imperial German Army as a young man, served through the entirety of the First World War, and then continued serving through the Weimar Republic period and into the Wehrmacht, the unified armed forces of Nazi Germany.
By the time the Second World War began, Dostler was a career officer of 30 years standing.
He had risen through every rank through competence, through longevity, through the patient accumulation of military experience that turns lieutenants into generals.
He was not a political ideologue in the way that some SS commanders were.
He was a soldier, a professional, a man who understood military hierarchy, followed orders, issued orders, and expected the system to function correctly in all directions.
That professional background is important because it makes what he did in March 1944 harder to excuse and easier to understand.
And the distinction between those two things is the entire point of his trial.
By early 1944, the Italian campaign had become one of the most grinding, static, attritional fights of the entire war.
The Allied landings at Sicily and then mainland Italy had driven the Germans northward, but the Wehrmacht under Field Marshal Albert Kesselring had established a formidable defensive position, the Gustav Line, anchored at Monte Cassino, blocking the Allied advance toward Rome.
The fighting there had stalled completely.
The Allies had tried to break the stalemate with the Anzio landings in January 1944, but those two had bogged down into a brutal siege.
The entire Central Italian Front needed its German supply lines cut.
The railway running along the Ligurian coast from Genoa south to La Spezia and beyond was one of the most critical arteries feeding German forces at both Cassino and Anzio.
Hundreds of miles of track through tunnels bored through the coastal mountains, supplying ammunition, fuel, and reinforcements from the north.
Allied air operations under the code name Operation Strangle had been hammering German road and rail infrastructure since early 1944, but the mountainous terrain along the Ligurian coast made aerial bombing almost useless against the tunnels.
You couldn’t destroy a tunnel bored through solid rock from 10,000 ft.
You needed people on the ground with explosives.
And that is exactly what the Office of Strategic Services, the OSS, forerunner to the CIA, proposed.
On January 9th, 1944, the OSS approved a sabotage mission targeting tunnels between the small stations of Levanto and Bonassola, approximately 15 miles northwest of La Spezia.
The longest tunnel in the target sector was the La Francesca Tunnel, 510 m long, cut through the rocky cliffs above the Ligurian Sea.
If it could be demolished, German supply traffic along the entire coastal route would be disrupted for weeks, potentially months.
The mission was given the name Ginny.
The team assembled for Operation Ginny was not random.
The OSS had specifically recruited Italian-American soldiers, men from the 2077 Special Reconnaissance Battalion who spoke Italian, some of whom had been born in Italy and emigrated to the United States with their families.
They knew the country, the culture, the dialect.
They could pass through coastal Italian communities without drawing immediate suspicion.
15 men were selected, commanded by First Lieutenant Vincent Russo from Montclair, New Jersey.
The team included men from Brooklyn, from Staten Island, from Detroit, from Connecticut and Pennsylvania.
American soldiers with Italian names and Italian grandmothers who had volunteered for some of the most dangerous work the war produced.
On the night of February 27th, 1944, Operation Ginny I launched from Bastia, Corsica aboard two US Navy PT boats.
The team paddled ashore in rubber dinghies, found they had landed in the wrong location, could not locate the target tunnel in the darkness, and was extracted.
Mission aborted.
No casualties.
Try again.
On the night of March 22nd, 1944, Operation Ginny II launched with the same team and essentially the same plan.
The two PT boats approached the Ligurian coast near Stazione di Framura.
The team paddled ashore in three rubber dinghies under a moonless, cloudy sky, carrying 650 lb of dynamite.
They landed again in the wrong location near a village called Carpeneggio, roughly 2 miles from the intended landing point and 1 mile from the target tunnel.
Lieutenant Russo conducted a reconnaissance, established their actual position, and made the decision to wait for darkness before attempting the demolition.
They hid their rubber dinghies and equipment and sheltered overnight.
On March 23rd, Russo and one of his men went to a nearby farmhouse looking for food.
A young farmer named Franco La Gaxo saw them, recognized them as American soldiers, provided food, and even guided them on a reconnaissance that located the target tunnel.
That evening, PT boats left Corsica to extract the team, but were forced to turn back.
One boat suffered a mechanical failure.
The other detected German naval activity nearby and had to disengage.
The team was stranded.
On the morning of March 24th, a local fisherman from the village of Bonassola returned ashore and spotted the rubber dinghies the team had hidden.
He informed the fascist militia.
The farmer La Gaxo tried to warn the Americans, but it was too late.
A combined force of Italian fascist militiamen and German Army troops surrounded their position.
All 15 men were taken without a fight.
They were in full American military uniform.
They carried no civilian clothing, no forged identity documents, no German or Italian uniform.
They were soldiers in uniform carrying weapons openly on a legitimate military operation.
Under the Geneva Convention of 1929, which Germany had signed and ratified, they were entitled to be treated as prisoners of war.
This was not legally ambiguous.
It was not a gray area.
Soldiers in proper military uniform captured in the field were prisoners of war.
Full stop.
The 15 men were taken to the headquarters of the 135th Fortress Brigade near La Spezia, commanded by a German colonel named Kurt Almers.
A German intelligence officer named Georg Sessler interrogated them in fluent English.
The Americans confirmed they were on a sabotage mission.
Sessler sent his report up the chain of command.
The information reached the 75th Army Corps headquarters at Sant’Andrea near Parma.
The commanding general of the 75th Corps was Anton Dostler.
Dostler received the intelligence report on the captured Americans and immediately communicated upward to his own superior, Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, the supreme commander of all German forces in Italy.
Dostler told Kesselring what had been captured, 15 American soldiers in uniform on a sabotage mission.
He asked for instructions.
Kesselring’s response, according to Dostler’s own adjutant at the time, was to order the execution.
Dostler then sent a telegram to Colonel Almers at the 154th Brigade on March 25th, 1944, the captured American commando party was to be executed immediately.
The legal authority he cited was the Commando Befehl, Hitler’s commando order of October 18th, 1942.
That order deserves its own examination because it sits at the legal and moral center of everything that followed.
On October 18th, 1942, Adolf Hitler had issued a secret directive, classified, distributed in only 12 copies marked for commanders only, never to fall into enemy hands.
The order was issued in response to two British commando operations, a raid on Dieppe in August 1942, where a copy of Allied operational orders mentioning the binding of prisoners had been captured, and a small raid on the German-occupied Channel Island of Sark in October 1942, where captured German soldiers were bound during extraction, and one was killed attempting to escape.
Hitler had gone into a rage over what he characterized as Allied violations of the Geneva Convention, and issued what he considered a reciprocal measure.
From now on, the order stated, “All men operating against German troops in commando raids in Europe or Africa are to be annihilated to the last man.
>> [clears throat] >> This is to be carried out whether they be soldiers in uniform or saboteurs, whether without arms.
Even if these individuals make obvious their intention to give themselves up as prisoners, no pardon is on any account to be given.
” Hitler’s own lawyers at the OKW had deliberated over this order before it was issued.
They knew it was illegal under international law, the 1907 Hague Convention and the 1929 Geneva Convention, both of which Germany had ratified, were explicit.
It was forbidden to declare that no quarter would be given, and enemy soldiers in proper uniform were entitled to prisoner of war status and treatment.
The commando order violated both of these provisions directly and deliberately.
It was not a legal gray area that Hitler’s jurists had identified and exploited.
It was a flagrant violation of international law that they had noted, raised concerns about, and been overruled on by Hitler himself.
Some German commanders received the commando order and quietly ignored it.
Field Marshal Erwin Rommel in North Africa was among the most notable.
He read it, set it aside, and never applied it.
Other commanders received it and applied it with varying degrees of enthusiasm.
Anton Dostler received it through the chain of command, understood exactly what it required, and when 15 American soldiers in proper uniform landed in his area of responsibility, he reached for it.
Colonel Almers at the 135th Brigade did not want to carry this out.
He knew it was illegal.
He made that clear, approaching Dostler twice to request the execution be delayed or reconsidered.
He knew that executing uniformed prisoners of war violated the 1929 Geneva Convention.
He raised this with his superior.
Dostler’s response was a second telegram confirming the order and rejecting any suspension.
One member of Dostler’s own staff, a man named Alexander zu Donaschlabiten, refused to sign the execution order entirely, stating openly that it violated the Geneva Convention.
Dostler dismissed him from the Wehrmacht for insubordination and signed the order himself.
On the morning of March 26, 1944, the 15 men of the Ginny 2 team were loaded onto trucks.
During the drive, they made a desperate attempt to escape.
They failed.
They were brought to Punta Bianca, a rocky headland south of La Spezia in the municipality of Ameglia.
Their hands were bound.
They were made to stand at a grave that German soldiers had dug for them beforehand.
They were shot.
Their bodies were buried in a mass grave, which was then camouflaged to hide its existence.
The following day, German and Italian fascist radio announced that an American commando force had been annihilated.
The men were listed as missing in action by the American military, their families receiving no information about what had actually happened to them for months.
The 15 men were First Lieutenant Vincent Russo, First Lieutenant Paul Traficante, Sergeant Dominic Mauro, Technical Sergeant Livio Vieselli, and 11 enlisted men, Dave Flumeri, Tremonte, Farrell, Disclafani, Sirico, Savino, Leonia, Squatrito, Libardi, and Calcara.
Italian Americans, most of them from New York and New England, who had volunteered for the most dangerous work the OSS could offer.
They had done everything correctly.
They were in uniform.
They were carrying out a legitimate military operation.
They had surrendered without resistance when captured.
Under every applicable rule of international law, they should have spent the remainder of the war in a prisoner of war camp.
Instead, they were in a mass grave on an Italian headland, camouflaged under soil and brushwood.
Germany surrendered unconditionally on May 8, 1945.
Anton Dostler was taken into American custody on the same day.
Once investigators established what had happened to the Ginny 2 team, the case against him was assembled with remarkable speed.
The first Allied war crimes trial convened at the Royal Palace in Caserta, the seat of the Supreme Allied Commander, on October 8, 1945.
It lasted 4 days.
Dostler was charged with ordering the execution of uniformed American prisoners of war in violation of the laws of war and the 1929 Geneva Convention.
His defense had two main pillars.
First, he maintained he had not actually issued the original order, that he had merely passed downward an order that came from Kesselring above him, who had received it from Hitler’s commando order framework.
Second, that even if he had issued the order, he was following a superior command, and in the military structure he inhabited, following superior orders was not only expected, but required.
The superior orders defense, what would later be known in legal history as the Nuremberg defense, was the argument that a soldier who follows a command from above cannot be held personally responsible for the results.
The prosecution countered both pillars.
On the first, the evidence showed Dostler had sent two telegrams, one ordering the execution, one confirming it after Almers pushed back.
He had not merely relayed a message, he had personally confirmed and reinforced the order when a subordinate raised legal objections.
On the second, the prosecution argued that the superior orders defense did not and could not apply when the order being followed was itself obviously and flagrantly illegal under international law.
German soldiers were not required to follow illegal orders.
In fact, the German military’s own code explicitly stated that no soldier was obligated to obey an order that violated international law.
Dostler had not merely followed an order, he had followed an illegal order after being told by a subordinate that it was illegal, and had dismissed the man who refused to sign it.
The military commission found Dostler guilty on October 12, 1945, the sentence, in the formal language of army courts-martial, was to be shot to death by musketry.
Dostler requested clemency.
The commission rejected it.
The execution was scheduled.
The significance of what the commission had ruled extended far beyond one German general and 15 dead American soldiers.
By rejecting the superior orders defense, the tribunal had established a precedent that would be codified months later as principle IV of the Nuremberg principles.
The fact that a person acted pursuant to an order of their government or of a superior does not relieve them from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was actually possible.
Dostler had been given multiple moral choices.
Almers had raised the legal objection.
Donaschlabiten had refused to sign.
The illegality of the order had been placed in front of Dostler explicitly, and he had dismissed it, dismissed the man who raised it, and confirmed the execution.
A moral choice had been possible.
He had made it.
December 1, 1945, Dostler was brought to the post at Aversa.
He received last rites from a priest.
American military photographers set up their cameras, still and motion picture, because this was not just an execution, it was a document.
The photographs would be published and the film footage would be archived.
The message was deliberate.
This is what the United States military does to commanders who execute uniformed American prisoners of war.
This is the consequence.
This is permanent.
At 8:00 in the morning, a 12-man firing squad took aim.
The command was given.
Dostler died instantly.
His body was removed on a stretcher, wrapped in a white cotton mattress cover, and driven away in an army truck.
He was buried at the Pomezia German War Cemetery in grave number 93, section H.
Field Marshal Kesselring, Dostler’s superior, the man who had almost certainly given or confirmed the order that Dostler then passed downward, was tried separately in Venice in 1947.
At his trial, Kesselring denied any involvement in the Ginny executions.
He denied being in La Spezia on the day the Americans were shot.
He lied.
Subsequent research, including work by historian Richard Raaber published in a book called Anatomy of Perjury, established that Kesselring had been in La Spezia that very day, that records had been falsified and destroyed to conceal his presence and his complicity, and that his denial was deliberate perjury.
Kesselring was convicted of other war crimes and sentenced to death, but his sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment, and he was released in 1952 for health reasons.
He lived until 1960.
The man who almost certainly ordered the deaths of the Ginny team died peacefully in Bad Nauheim, aged 74.
The asymmetry of those two outcomes, Dostler shot at a post in Aversa at 54, Kesselring dying in a German health spa at 74, is one of the sharper ironies in post-war justice history.
The man who passed the order down was executed.
The man who passed it down to him was not because his records were destroyed and his perjury succeeded.
That is not a comfortable conclusion, but it is [clears throat] the accurate one.
What the Dosler case left behind is a framework, not a resolution.
The principle that superior orders do not excuse war crimes was inscribed into international law at Nuremberg and has been the foundation of every international criminal tribunal since, from the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal to
the International Criminal Court.
It means that every military officer in every armed force in the world operates under a legal obligation not merely to follow orders, but to evaluate whether those orders are lawful.
The defense of I was only following instructions was specifically and permanently removed as a shield for crimes committed against prisoners of war.
The 15 men of Operation Genie 2, Russo and Trafficante and Mauro and Viaselli and 11 others, Italian-American soldiers from Brooklyn and Staten Island and New England, who paddled toward a dark Italian coastline with 650 lb of dynamite and every intention of destroying a railway tunnel and coming home were entitled to that protection.
They had earned it by wearing their uniforms, by following the rules of war, by surrendering when captured.
They were murdered because a German general decided a secret illegal order from Adolf Hitler was sufficient cover.
It was not.
It never was.
On the morning of December 1st, 1945, the United States Army made that answer permanent.
