Synthesizing the work of contemporary German and Italian historians with her own exhaustive archival research, she shows that Kesselring bore much greater guilt for civilian deaths than had been proven in court-and that the war on the southern front had been far from clean. Kerstin von Lingen's close analysis of the Kesselring case reveals for the first time how a network of veterans, lawyers, and German sympathizers in Britain and America achieved the commutation of Kesselring's death sentence and his eventual release-reinforcing German popular conceptions that he had been innocent all along and that the Wehrmacht had fought a "clean war" in Italy. While some sought the harshest punishments available for anyone who had participated in the war crimes of the Nazi regime, others believed that the repatriation of alleged war criminals would help secure the allegiance of a rearmed West Germany in the dangerous new Cold War against the Soviet Union. His conviction, however, created a real dilemma for the United States and western Europe. He was held responsible for his troops having executed nearly 9,000 Italian citizens-women, children, elderly men-in retaliation for partisan attacks. In 1947 German Field Marshal Albert Kesselring was tried and convicted of war crimes committed during World War II.
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