THE TERRIBLE EXECUTION OF GERMAN GENERAL ANTON DOSTLER BY FIRING SQUAD ON.....

THE TERRIBLE EXECUTION OF GERMAN GENERAL ANTON DOSTLER BY FIRING SQUAD ON.....

German General Anton Dostler is prepped for execution by firing squad on 1 December 1945 in Aversa, Italy.

He was condemned to death for ordering the execution of 15 American POW's in 1944 near La Spezia, Italy.

 The Americans had landed behind German lines as apart of Operation Ginny II in March 1944 on a commando raid and were fully uniformed. 

However, Dostler ordered their execution as saboteurs (supposedly on orders from Kesselring). I doubt Dostler afforded them a chaplain before carrying out his order. 

Anton Dostler (10 May 1891 – 1 December 1945) was a German army officer who fought in both World Wars. During World War II, he commanded several units as a General of the Infantry, primarily in Italy.

 After the Axis defeat, Dostler was executed for war crimes—specifically, ordering the execution of fifteen American prisoners of war in March 1944 during the Italian Campaign.

Dostler was tried during the first Allied war crimes trials to be held after the end of the war in Europe; at Nuremberg, he mounted a defense on the grounds that he had ordered the executions only because he himself was obeying superior orders, and that as such only his superiors could be held responsible.

 The Nuremberg judges rejected Dostler's defense, ruling, in an important precedent (later codified in Principle IV of the Nuremberg Principles and the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights), that citing superior orders did not relieve soldiers or officers of responsibility for carrying out war crimes.

 After being found guilty, Dostler was sentenced to death and executed by a United States Army firing squad.

TRAIL AND EXECUTION

Dostler was taken prisoner of war by the United States Army and, after it discovered the fate of the commando raiding team, was put on trial for war crimes on 8 May 1945. A military tribunal was held at the seat of the Supreme Allied Commander, the Royal Palace in Caserta, on 8 October 1945. In the first Allied war crimes trial carried out by the United States, he was accused of carrying out an illegal order. 

In his defense he maintained that he had not issued the order but had only passed it to Colonel Almers from Field Marshal Kesselring, and that the execution of the OSS men was a lawful order. Dostler's plea of superior orders failed before the tribunal, which found that in ordering the mass execution he had acted on his own outside the Führer's orders.

 The Military Commission also rejected his plea for clemency, declaring that the mass execution of the commando party was in violation of Article 2 of the 1929 Geneva Convention on Prisoners of War, which prohibited acts of reprisals against prisoners of war. In its judgment the Commission stated that "no soldier, and still less a Commanding General, can be heard to say that he considered the summary shooting of prisoners of war legitimate, even as a reprisal."

Under the 1907 Hague Convention on Land Warfare, it was legal to execute spies and saboteurs disguised in civilian clothes or enemy uniforms, but not those captured in uniforms of their own army.

 Because the 15 U.S. soldiers were properly dressed in U.S. uniforms behind enemy lines, and not disguised in civilian clothes or enemy uniforms, they should not have been treated as spies but as prisoners of war, a principle which Dostler had violated in enforcing the order for execution.

The trial found General Dostler guilty of war crimes, rejecting the "superior orders" defense.

 He was sentenced to death, and executed in Aversa by a 12-man firing squad at 0800 hours on 1 December 1945. The execution was photographed on black and white still and movie cameras. 

Immediately after the execution Dostler's body was lifted onto a stretcher, shrouded inside a white cotton mattress cover, and driven away in an army truck. His body was buried in Grave 93/95 of Section H at Pomezia German War Cemetery.

Of the Nazi war criminals to be executed by the U.S. military, Dostler was one of only two who were shot instead of hanged. The other exception was Curt Bruns.

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