Anton Dostler (10 May 1891-1 December 1945) was a German Wehrmacht General der Infanterie who commanded army corps during World War II. He was executed by a US Army firing squad for presiding over the executions of American prisoners in Italy in March 1944.
Biography[]
Dostler at his execution.
Anton Dostler was born in Munich, Bavaria, Germany in 1891, and he joined the Imperial German Army in 1910 and served as a junior officer during World War I. He continued his military service as an officer in the Weimar Republic's Reichswehr, and, at the start of World War II, he became chief-of-staff of the German 7th Army.
From January to July 1944, he commanded the LXXV Armeekorps in Italy and then the LXXIII Armeekorps on the Venetian coast from September 1944 to May 1945. In March 1944, he exercised Adolf Hitler's "Commando Order" by executing 15 American commandos who had been sent to sabotage a railway tunnel from La Spezia to Genoa, in spite of his subordinate repeatedly attempting to convince Dostler that executing the prisoners was against the 1929 Geneva Convention.
At the end of the war, Dostler was taken prisoner by the US Army and was put on trial for war crimes on 8 May 1945 after the fate of the commando raiding team was discovered. Because the captured US soldiers were wearing their army uniforms, they were not legally allowed to have been executed as spies, and, on 8 October 1945, a military tribunal held at the Royal Palace of Caserta found Dostler guilty of war crimes and sentenced him to death. At 8:00 AM on 1 December 1945, he was executed at Aversa by a 12-man firing squad.