Anton Dostler was a German general whose name became tied to one of the first Allied war crimes trials after World War II. He was born on May 10, 1891, in Munich, then part of the German Empire.
In June 1910, at age 19, Dostler joined the 16th Infantry Regiment of the Bavarian Army as a cadet. Two years later he was promoted to lieutenant.
When World War I began on July 28, 1914, Dostler was already an officer in the Bavarian Army. In January 1916 he was promoted to first lieutenant, and in October 1918 to captain.
For gallantry in action, he was awarded both classes of the Iron Cross and the Bavarian Military Merit Order, the kingdom's main decoration for bravery and military merit.
After World War I ended on November 11, 1918, Dostler served in the new Weimar Republic's Reichswehr, the German Army restricted to 100,000 men. On October 1, 1924, he was transferred to the military intelligence department in the Reichswehr Ministry in Berlin, and he also began studying at a local university. In 1932 he was promoted to major.
Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party came to power in January 1933. In 1935, in line 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.
During the invasion of the Soviet Union, codenamed Operation Barbarossa and launched on June 22, 1941, the German Army provided logistical support to the Einsatzgruppen as they carried out the systematic mass murder of 1.5 to 2 million Jewish men, women, and children throughout the East. The Army was fully aware of these units' activities through liaison offices and its own reports, and almost no officers voiced objections to Hitler's orders for the ideological war against the Soviet Union.
When Germany and its allies attacked the Soviet Union, Dostler commanded the 57th Infantry Division, which took part in the campaign as part of Army Group South and assaulted Kiev. Army Group South, commanded by the avowed Nazi Walter von Reichenau, cooperated with SS Einsatzgruppen in the massacre at Babi Yar on September 29 and 30, 1941.
At Babi Yar, a ravine northwest of Kiev, SS and German police units and their auxiliaries under Einsatzgruppe jurisdiction murdered the Jewish population of the city. According to Einsatzgruppe reports, 33,785 Jews were massacred in two days, most of them women, children, the elderly, the ill, or those 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. The division remained there until the Germans withdrew from Finland back to Norway in autumn 1944.
On January 1, 1943, Dostler was promoted to major general. He later performed temporary stand-in duties at corps level.
On September 8, 1943, Italian General Pietro Badoglio announced Italy's unconditional surrender to the Allies. Until then, Italy had been an ally of Nazi Germany. The Germans, suspicious of Italian intentions, quickly occupied northern and central Italy as well as Italian zones in Yugoslavia, Greece, and France. SS paratroopers freed Italian fascist leader Benito Mussolini from prison and installed him as head of a pro-German Italian Social Republic based in Salò in northern Italy.
In January 1944, Dostler was appointed commander of the 75th Army Corps, created on January 15, 1944, in Frankfurt am Main. On January 24, 1944, the corps was transported via Munich and Verona to La Spezia in Italy. It became responsible for coastal defense of the Ligurian coast, anti-partisan actions, and construction of fortifications on the Alps and around Genoa, La Spezia, and Livorno. This lasted until mid-July 1944, when the front line reached La Spezia from the south.
On March 22, 1944, 15 soldiers of the US Army, including two officers, landed on the Italian coast about 15 kilometers north of La Spezia, roughly 400 kilometers behind the established front. As part of Operation Ginny II, they were properly dressed in US Army field uniforms 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 German troops. They were taken to La Spezia and confined near the headquarters of the 135th Fortress Brigade, commanded by German Colonel Almers. His immediate superior was the commander of the 75th Army Corps, General Anton Dostler.
The captured Americans were interrogated by German intelligence officers, and an officer revealed the mission. The information, including that it was a commando raid, was sent to Dostler at the 75th Army Corps headquarters. The following day, Dostler informed his superior, Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, commanding general of all German forces in Italy, about the captured US 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. This was 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. In response, Dostler dispatched another telegram ordering Almers to carry out the execution as previously ordered. Last attempts were made by Colonel Almers to stop the execution, including by telephone, as he knew that executing uniformed prisoners of war violated the 1929 Geneva Convention on Prisoners of War. His appeals were unsuccessful.
On the morning of March 26, 1944, the 15 Americans of the commando raid were executed at Punta Bianca, south of La Spezia in the municipality of Ameglia. After the execution, their bodies were buried in a mass grave that was camouflaged afterward.
Alexander zu Dohna-Schlobitten, a member of Dostler's staff who was unaware of Hitler's Commando Order, had refused to sign the execution order for the American commandos. He was dismissed from the Wehrmacht for insubordination.
After the execution, Dostler's life carried on as usual. From November 1944 he was reassigned to the 73rd Army Corps, where he finished the war.
Justice caught up with Dostler when he was taken prisoner of war by the United States Army. Unlike the 15 soldiers he had executed, he had his day in court after the Americans discovered the fate of the commando raiding team.
On May 8, 1945, a military tribunal was held at the seat of the Supreme Allied Commander, the Royal Palace in Caserta, Italy. On October 8, 1945, in the first Allied war crimes trial, Dostler was accused of carrying out an illegal order by killing 15 American prisoners of war.
In his defense, Dostler maintained that he had not issued the order but had only passed it on to Colonel Almers from Field Marshal Kesselring, and that the execution of the 15 men was a lawful order. His 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 violated Article 2 of the 1929 Geneva Convention on Prisoners of War, which prohibited acts of reprisal 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 the uniforms of their own army. Because the 15 US soldiers were properly dressed in US uniforms behind enemy lines and not disguised, they should not have been treated as spies but as prisoners of war, a principle Dostler violated in enforcing the execution order.
The trial rejected the superior orders defense as Dostler argued that he had ordered the execution only because he himself was obeying superior orders, and that only his superiors could be held responsible. The court'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 October 12, 1945, the American Military Tribunal found General Dostler guilty of war crimes and sentenced him to be shot to death by musketry. Dostler was 54 years old when, shortly after sunrise on December 1, 1945, the prisoner guard delivered him to the execution party.
The officer in charge read aloud the charge, the finding, and the sentence, and granted Dostler a brief moment with a Roman Catholic chaplain. Three soldiers tied him to a post with his hands behind his back. A medical officer placed a black hood over Dostler's head and attached a four-inch-wide target over his heart.
After a 12-man firing squad took positions 50 feet from Dostler, the officer in charge gave the command to fire. After the shots rang out, 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 the German War Cemetery in Pomezia, Italy.
Almost immediately after the end of the war, a myth arose that the German military had merely fought its 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 members of the high command were tried as war criminals, and further legal prosecution of the military was almost non-existent in postwar Germany.
Ongoing research shows just how willingly and profoundly the German military supported Hitler and participated not only in the use of forced labor but also in the mass murder of Jews and other groups targeted by the Nazis. There were no tears shed for Anton Dostler.