Anatomy of Perjury: Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, Via Rasella, and the GINNY Mission (review)

This book is about two war crimes committed in March 1944 by German troops in Italy. The first of these occurred on March 24th when, as an act of reprisal, 335 Italian civilians were killed in the Ardeantine Caves outside Rome. In the second, on March 26th, fifteen captured American soldiers were executed near the northern city of La Spezia. Field Marshal Kesselring was the General Officer Commanding German forces in Italy and was implicated in both events. The author's thesis is that by admitting involvement in the first and lying about his itinerary, Kesselring avoided a certain death penalty for the second.

The Ardeantine Caves event is well known. On March 23rd, a partisan group exploded a bomb on via Rasella in Rome as a police unit marched by. Thirty-two people, including two passersby, died instantly. Many others were injured and the perpetrators escaped. By that evening, the authorities were told that the Fuehrer had decreed that ten hostages would be shot for every policeman killed. Kesselring, who had been captured in May 1945 and had spent the next eighteen months appearing as a witness in other war crimes trials, was charged with the reprisal killings. At his trial in 1947 Kesselring testified that he had been visiting the Cassino front in the south that day, returned to his headquarters in Rome that evening, transmitted the Fuehrer's order, slept, and returned to Cassino. His defense counsel made two points: that reprisals against civilians were permitted by the law of war (as they were until the Geneva Conventions of 1947) and that Kesselring had been told that those executed were all subject to the death penalty. The British Military Commission were impressed by his soldierly demeanor, but they condemned him to death, apparently because five more civilians were killed than the Fuehrer had authorized. It was a harsh sentence, and was subsequently commuted. Kesselring was released from prison in 1952 and died in 1960.

In the mid 1990s Richard Raiber, a retired physician who had been accepted as a graduate degree candidate in history at the University of Delaware, was encouraged by his advisor, Director of the Alexandria Microfilming Project of Captured German Records, to undertake a dissertation on Kesselring's trial. By then, German historians knew that Kesselring hadn't been at Cassino but didn't know where he had been. Raiber discovered that Kesselring was in northern Italy in March 1944. A Canadian researcher at the Archives told Raiber of an OSS operational group on a mission code-named GINNY who were captured on March 24th and executed on the 26th. General Dostler, commander of German units for that part of the Italian coast, who had ordered their execution, was convicted of the offense by a U.S. military commission in October 1945, and executed in December. Dostler had testified that the GINNY team, captured after they had been landed by boat to demolish a rail tunnel, were executed pursuant to the "Commando Order" issued by Hitler in 1942. The Order, which contravened the law of war, directed that soldiers caught behind German lines be killed. Although the Germans had destroyed the GINNY records, Raiber discovered evidence which put Kesselring in La Spezia the day the prisoners were brought there. It was inconceivable that Dostler would not have told his superior, whom he met at noon that day in La Spezia, of the capture and discussed the commando order. Kesselring's Chief of Staff falsely corroborated Kesselring's lie that he was at Cassino. In 1996 Raiber demonstrated, through a meticulous review of German records what others had suspected: Kesselring had lied to avoid Dostler's fate, and his subordinates corroborated his lies. The German Military History Office published Raiber's findings in the next...