20th of July, 1944. Just a few hours after German military officers attempt to assassinate Adolf
Hitler at the Wolf's Lair, his East Prussian headquarters at Rastenburg, the Führer keeps
his appointments including meeting with Italy's fascist leader Benito Mussolini.
The plot was the culmination of efforts by several groups in the German resistance which
hoped that Hitler's violent death would signal an anti-Nazi revolt and overthrow
the Nazi German government. Yet this effort must be seen as an attempt to
regain control of the war effort before Germany is destroyed rather than as an attempt to halt
the Holocaust in which some of the conspirators themselves are deeply implicated. In addition,
many members of the German military murdered or were complicit not only in the murder of Jews,
but also people with disabilities, Roma, eastern European civilians as well as prisoners of war.
One such military member is a German General Anton Dostler.
Anton Dostler was born on the 10th of May 1891 in Munich then part of the German Empire.
In June 1910, Dostler, then 19 years old, joined the 6th Infantry Regiment of the
Bavarian Army as a cadet and 2 years later he was promoted to lieutenant.
The First World War began on the 28th of July 1914.
In January 1916 Dostler was promoted to Superior Lieutenant and in October 1918 to captain.
For gallantry in action, he was awarded the Iron Cross 1st class and
Bavarian Order of Military Merit, 4th Class, with Swords.
The First World War ended on the 11th of November 1918 when the German leaders signed
the armistice in the Compiègne Forest in France. The introduction of new weapons like the machine
gun and gas warfare led to enormous losses and the war claimed the lives of ten million
soldiers. Property and industry losses were catastrophic. As a result, the victorious powers
imposed a series of treaties upon the defeated powers. Among the treaties, the 1919 Treaty of
Versailles held Germany responsible for starting the war and liable for massive material damages.
The treaty imposed harsh penalties on the Germans including the loss of 13% of its
prewar territories, extensive reparation payments and demilitarization of the
Rhineland. The Reichswehr – the German Army – was restricted to 100,000 men.
In the new Weimar Republic, which was the government of Germany from 1918 to 1933,
Dostler served in the newly created Reichswehr and on the 1st of October 1924 he was transferred
to the military intelligence department in the Reichswehr Ministry in Berlin. At the same time,
he began to study at the local university and in 1932 he was promoted to Major.
Before Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party came into power in 1933, the often-conservative
leadership of the German military initially saw Hitler as a radical and as a political
upstart. They did not support his attempted coup, the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch. Instead,
they fired on Hitler and his fellow insurrectionists rather than joining him.
However, the SA or the Storm Troopers, under the control of Ernst Röhm, posed
a threat to the army. Röhm wanted the SA to replace the professional military as a
people’s army. Consequently, in 1934, military leaders agreed to support Hitler’s undermining
of the SA’s power and the elimination of much of its leadership in exchange for a
guarantee of their status as the sole national military organization. On the 30th of June 1934,
when the SS murdered Röhm and many of the SA’s top officials, the military did not intervene.
The Nazis also murdered other old enemies with whom the regime had a score to settle,
such as General Kurt von Schleicher, who had preceded Hitler as Chancellor and had criticized
his cabinet. In his speech to the Reichstag on the 13th of July justifying his actions,
Hitler denounced Schleicher for conspiring with Röhm to overthrow the government and
alleged that both Schleicher and Röhm were traitors working in the pay of France.
This purge became known as the Night of the Long Knives.
Two months later, the military changed its oath of service. In the new version, soldiers
swore “unconditional obedience” to the Führer personally rather than to the German constitution.
In 1935, in accordance with Nazi racial law, the military prohibited Jews from
joining its ranks and those already serving were dismissed. In 1938,
Hitler assumed the title of supreme commander of the entire German military.
All of these moves helped solidify the union between Hitler and his generals.
While the highest-ranking officers were aristocrats and upper-middle class professions
who did not always agree with the Führer, they found a common ground that allowed them to partner
with Hitler, to whom they often referred the “Corporal or “Bohemian corporal" behind his back.
First, Hitler succeeded in rebuilding the German
military after the humiliating reductions of the Versailles Treaty after World War I.
Second, he promised the opportunity to fight their enemies in France and the Bolshevist Soviet Union.
Finally, many generals received systematic bribes from Hitler in the form of extra pay,
grants, and even gifts of lands and estates. Meanwhile, as the German army increased in size,
it also became more politically extreme. While senior officers may not have always
been committed Nazis, younger soldiers and officers entered the service having
come of age under the constant propaganda of the Third Reich. Building upon this, the Wehrmacht
continued to ideologically indoctrinate German troops. Army newspapers and bulletins, films,
and lectures by “educational officers” spread racist and antisemitic propaganda and emphasized
that Germany was fighting a defensive war against “Judeo-Bolsheviks” and “plutocratic” conspirators
eager to destroy European civilization and enslave the German people. While it is not possible to
generalize completely about an organization of 17 million men, increasingly the German army became
willing to support the Nazi leadership’s aggressive wars and genocidal policies.
World War 2 started on the 1st of September 1939 when Germany invaded Poland. The campaign in
Poland ended on the 6th of October the same year with Germany and the Soviet
Union dividing and annexing the whole of the country. The German Army was followed by the
Einsatzgruppen which were Nazi mobile death squads sent to Poland to kill the civilians,
mostly the Polish intelligentsia such as teachers, priests, physicians, and
other prominent members of Polish society. This happened to the consternation of some generals.
For example in February 1940, Johannes Blaskowitz, German military commander for
the eastern territories, complained about the SS policy of slaughtering some 10,000 Jews and Poles,
which he believed would hurt Germany. He argued that such actions strengthened enemy propaganda
about German atrocities, united Jews and Poles against Germany, weakened the respect of the
Wehrmacht, and led to the spread of mass depravity among Germans. He urged that those units found
guilty of carrying out such murderous actions be held accountable by military authorities.
To prevent such criticism from erupting following Operation Barbarossa - the invasion of the Soviet
Union in June 1941, SS and army leaders crafted a detailed agreement beforehand under which
the army would provide logistical support to the Einsatzgruppen as they carried out the systematic
mass murder of 1.5-2 million Jewish men, women, and children throughout the East. The army was
fully aware of the activities of these units through liaison officers and its own reports.
During the Operation Barbarossa which started on the 22nd of June 1941,
Anton Dostler commanded the 57th Infantry Division which took part in the campaign as
part of Army Group South, where it assaulted Kiev. Army Group South, commanded by an avowed Nazi
Walter von Reichenau, cooperated with the SS Einsatzgruppen in the
commission of the massacre at Babi Yar. On the 29-30 of September 1941, SS and
German police units and their auxiliaries, under the jurisdiction of Einsatzgruppe C,
murdered the Jewish population of Kiev at Babi Yar, a ravine northwest of the city.
This was one of the largest mass murders at an individual location during World War II.
According to reports by the Einsatzgruppe to headquarters,
33,771 Jews were massacred in two days. Most of those who had been killed were women, children,
the elderly, those who were ill or those who had been unable or unwilling to flee earlier.
Between June and December 1942, Dostler commanded the 163rd Infantry Division
which fought alongside the Finnish Army during Operation Barbarossa against the
Soviet Union in 1941 and then spent most of the war in Finland where it
remained until the Germans withdrew from Finland back to Norway in autumn 1944.
On the 8th of September 1943, an Italian general Badoglio announced Italy's unconditional surrender
to the Allies. Until then Italy had been an ally of Nazi Germany. The Germans, who had
grown suspicious of Italian intentions, quickly occupied northern and central Italy as well as the
Italian zones in Yugoslavia, Greece, and France. SS paratroopers freed Mussolini from prison and
installed him as the head of a pro-German Italian Social Republic, based in Salò in northern Italy.
In January 1944 Dostler was appointed commander of 75th Army Corps in Italy
which was created on the 15th of January 1944 in Frankfurt am Main.
On the 24th of January 1944, the Corps was put on transport, via Munich and Verona to Liguria. The
Corps became responsible for the coastal defence of the Ligurian coast, as well as anti-partisan
actions, and construction of fortifications on the Elba and around Genoa, La Spezia and
Livorno. This lasted until mid-July 1944, when the front line reached Liguria from the south.
On the 22nd of March 1944, 15 soldiers of the U.S. Army, including two officers,
landed on the Italian coast about 15 kilometers north of La Spezia,
400 km (250 miles) behind the then established front, as part of Operation Ginny II. They were
all properly dressed in the field uniform of the U.S. Army and carried no civilian clothes. Their
objective was to demolish a tunnel at Framura on the important railway line between La Spezia
and Genoa. Two days later the group was captured by a combined party of Italian Fascist soldiers
and troops from the German Army. They were taken to La Spezia, where they were confined near the
headquarters of the 135th Fortress Brigade, which was under the command of German Colonel Almers.
His immediate superior was the commander of the 75th Army Corps, General Anton Dostler.
The captured American party was interrogated by Wehrmacht intelligence officers, and an officer
revealed the mission. The information, including that it was a commando raid,
was then sent to Dostler at the 75th Army Corps H.Q. The following day he informed his superior,
Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, commanding general of all German forces in Italy,
about the captured U.S. commandos and asked what to do with them.
According to Dostler's adjutant, Kesselring responded by ordering the execution.
Later that day Dostler sent a telegram to the 135th Fortress Brigade passing on the order that
the captured commando party was to be executed, in line with the Commando Order of 1942 issued
by Adolf Hitler, which stated that all Allied commandos captured in Europe and Africa should
be summarily executed without trial, even if in proper uniforms or if they attempted to surrender.
Colonel Almers was uneasy with the execution order, and approached Dostler again to delay the
execution command. In response Dostler dispatched another telegram ordering Almers to carry out the
execution as previously ordered. Two last attempts were made by Colonel Almers to stop the execution,
including some by telephone, as he knew that executing uniformed prisoners of war
was in violation of the 1929 Geneva Convention on Prisoners of War. His appeals were unsuccessful,
and the 15 Americans of the commando raid were executed on the morning of the 26th of March 1944,
at Punta Bianca, south of La Spezia, in the municipality of Ameglia. Their bodies were buried
in a mass grave that was camouflaged afterwards. Alexander zu Dohna-Schlobitten, a member of
Dostler's staff who, unaware of the existence of Hitler's "Commando Order", had refused to sign the
execution order for the American commandos, was dismissed from the Wehrmacht for insubordination.
After the execution of fifteen American prisoners, General Dostler’s life carried on as usual.
From November 1944, he was reassigned to the 73rd Army Corps, where he finished the war.
Justice finally caught up with Dostler when he was taken prisoner of war by the United States Army.
Unlike the 15 soldiers he had executed, General Dostler, after the Americans discovered the fate
of the commando raiding team, had his day in court and was put on trial for war crimes on the
8th of May 1945. A military tribunal was held at the seat of the Supreme Allied Commander,
the Royal Palace in Caserta, Italy, on 8th of October 1945. In the first Allied war crimes
trial, he was accused of carrying out an illegal order killing fifteen American prisoners of war.
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 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 rejected the "superior orders" defense as Dostler 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 court
martial's denial of Dostler's defense set an important precedent for the trial of
Nazi war criminals several months later at Nuremberg because it did not allow
the accused to claim in their defense that they were only following orders.
On the 12th of October 1945 the American military tribunal found General Dostler
guilty of war crimes and sentenced him to be shot to death by musketry.
Anton Dostler was 54 years old when shortly after sunrise on the 1st of December 1945, the prisoner
guard delivered him to the execution party. The officer in charge then read aloud the charge,
the finding and the sentence and granted Dostler a brief moment with a Roman Catholic chaplain.
Things moved quickly after that: Three soldiers tied him to a post with his hands
behind his back. Next, a medical officer placed a black hood over Dostler’s head and attached a
four-inch white target over his heart. After a 12-man firing squad took their
positions from a distance of 50 feet from Dostler, the officer in charge gave the
command to fire. After the shots rang out in unison, Dostler’s body slumped forward, dead.
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, driven away in an army truck and then buried at German War Cemetery in Pomezia, Italy.
Almost immediately after the end of the war, the myth arose that the German military had
merely fought their enemies, including the Soviets, in a conventional war and was not
involved in the Holocaust or other genocidal policies. This legend began at Nuremberg where
the SS was deemed a criminal organization, but the military was not. Only the members
of the High Command were tried as war criminals. However, ongoing research shows just how willingly
and profoundly the military participated in the Holocaust and other atrocities of the Nazi regime.
There were no tears shed for Anton Dostler.
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