Albert Kesselring died of a heart attack on July 16, 1960, in a sanatorium at Bad Nauheim, West Germany. He was 74 years old. The man once known as Smiling Albert had commanded German forces across three continents and had spent the final months of World War II in charge of Hitler’s last stand on the Rhine. But he had not died in uniform, nor in defeat on the battlefield.
He died eight years after his release from a British military prison, where he had been serving a life sentence for war crimes committed against Italian civilians. His death drew one final gathering of the old guard. Members of the Stahlhelm, a right-wing veterans organization, served as pallbearers and fired a rifle volley over his grave, an honor inconceivable for a convicted war criminal in any other Western country. Among the mourners were some of the most notorious figures of the Third Reich: SS-Obergruppenführer Josef Sepp Dietrich, who had commanded Waffen-SS divisions; Franz von Papen, the former chancellor who had helped Hitler rise to power; Field Marshal Ferdinand Schörner, one of Hitler’s most brutal commanders; and Großadmiral Karl Dönitz, Hitler’s designated successor as head of state.
Also present was SS-Standartenführer Joachim Peiper, responsible for the Malmedy massacre, and Otto Ernst Remer, who had helped crush the July 20, 1944 plot against Hitler. Their presence illustrated how intact the networks of former Nazi military and SS officers remained in West Germany during the early 1960s. That the war ended for Kesselring on May 6, 1945, when American forces near Berchtesgaden took him into custody after he surrendered the southern half of German forces to General Maxwell Taylor. Unlike many Nazi leaders who fled or committed suicide, Kesselring surrendered formally, still wearing his field marshal’s uniform.
For his wife Liny and their adopted son Rainer, the arrest marked the beginning of a different kind of battle. Liny, the daughter of an apothecary from Bayreuth, had married Albert in 1910 and had spent 35 years as a military wife, moving from garrison to garrison through two world wars. Now, with her husband in Allied custody, her contact with him was cut off entirely. She remained in Bavaria, uncertain whether she would ever see him again or what charges might be brought.
From late 1945 through early 1947, Kesselring was held awaiting trial. Allied interrogators focused on his role in atrocities against Italian civilians. He portrayed himself as a professional commander who had conducted operations according to the laws of war, denying personal responsibility for specific atrocities. The interrogators were skeptical.
They held documents showing that orders he had issued in June and July 1944 effectively granted his troops immunity for using excessive force against partisans. The charges centered on two main accusations. First, that Kesselring bore responsibility for the Ardeatine massacre of March 24, 1944, when 335 Italian civilians were executed in caves outside Rome in reprisal for a partisan attack that killed 33 German soldiers. Second, that he had incited and commanded his troops to kill Italian civilians as reprisals throughout the summer of 1944.
Both charges carried the death penalty. The trial opened in Venice on February 17, 1947, before a British military court. It lasted 57 days. The defense portrayed Kesselring as a commander who had tried to spare civilians, arguing that the Ardeatine reprisal had been ordered directly by Hitler and that Kesselring had merely transmitted the order through the chain of command.
The prosecution presented devastating evidence, including orders signed by Kesselring calling for brutal measures against Italian partisans. On May 6, 1947, the court found him guilty on both charges and sentenced him to death by firing squad. The verdict sent shockwaves through West Germany and provoked controversy in Britain. The Italian government, which had abolished the death penalty in 1944, flatly refused to carry out the sentence.
This created a diplomatic problem for the British. On July 4, 1947, Lieutenant General Sir John Harding, commander of British forces in the Mediterranean, commuted the sentence to life imprisonment. The decision reflected growing uncertainty about executing senior German commanders at a time when the Western Allies were beginning to see West Germany as a potential partner against Soviet expansion. Kesselring was transferred to a more permanent facility at Wolfsberg in Carinthia, Austria.
He declined an escape offer from a former SS major, saying it would be seen as a confession of guilt. He worked on military histories for the US Army Historical Division and secretly wrote his memoirs. Liny, now living in modest circumstances in Bavaria, became an active campaigner for his release. In 1952, she gave interviews presenting herself as a suffering wife, carefully avoiding the war crimes themselves and focusing on the human cost of continued incarceration.
A magazine campaign entitled Justice Not Clemency featured Kesselring alongside Field Marshal Erich von Manstein. The Cold War shifted the political landscape. Field Marshal Harold Alexander, who had commanded Allied forces against Kesselring in Italy, sent a telegram to Prime Minister Clement Attlee stating that as his old opponent on the battlefield, he had no complaints against him, and that Kesselring and his soldiers fought against us hard but clean. In 1952, Chancellor Konrad Adenauer made clear that West German ratification of the European Defense Community Treaty depended on the release of German military figures.
Under increasing pressure to secure West German cooperation in NATO, and after Kesselring was diagnosed with a cancerous growth in his throat, British authorities released him in October 1952 on grounds of ill health. He was 66 years old. Almost immediately, Kesselring accepted leadership positions in three veterans organizations. The most controversial was Der Stahlhelm, a right-wing organization widely seen as a haven for unrepentant former Nazis.
His attempts to reform it, proposing that the new West German flag be flown and that Social Democrats be allowed to join, were rejected by the membership. In 1953, he published his memoirs, A Soldier to the Last Day, which defended his conduct point by point and provided no acknowledgment of the Holocaust or reflection on the criminal war Germany had launched. Kesselring’s comment that Italians should build him a monument provoked outrage. Italian jurist Piero Calamandrei responded with a bitter poem titled Epitaph for Kesselring, suggesting that if Kesselring returned to Italy he would find a monument made not by Italian hands but of the bones of resistance fighters murdered by German forces.
The poem was placed on monuments in several Italian towns, including sites of Nazi massacres, a permanent reminder that while Germans might rehabilitate their field marshals, Italians had not forgotten the crimes committed under their command. Kesselring also supported imprisoned war criminals through quiet networks. With Field Marshal von Manstein and Großadmiral Dönitz, he sponsored an organization that collected petition signatures and raised legal defense funds for SS criminals Herbert Kappler and Walter Reder, imprisoned in Italy for their roles in the Ardeatine and Marzabotto massacres. By 1957, they had collected 189,212 signatures for the prisoners’ release.
Liny Kesselring died on January 28, 1957, at age 69. She had never wavered in her loyalty to her husband. There is no record of her ever criticizing Albert or expressing regret over his wartime role. The bonds of marriage, whatever conviction they reflected, never broke.
She was buried at the Bergfriedhof Cemetery in Bad Wiessee, and Albert would join her there three years later, after the Stahlhelm funeral attended by the remnants of the Nazi old guard. Decades after Kesselring’s death, evidence emerged that fundamentally undermined the image he had cultivated. Documents proved that he had perjured himself at his own trial. Kesselring had personally approved the execution of 15 American Office of Strategic Services prisoners in March 1944, then denied any knowledge of the order and allowed his subordinate Anton Dostler to be executed for carrying it out.
The truth arrived too late to matter. His memoirs had been widely read, his reputation among veterans established. He had spent his final years as honored president of veterans organizations rather than as a convicted war criminal living under the shadow of his crimes.
The choice of loyalty and silence, made by Liny and Albert alike, left a grave in Bad Wiessee around which conflicting narratives could still gather: the skilled military commander and the man who ordered the deaths of Italian civilians.