Every WWII Commander Who Thought They Got Away — Until They Didn't

Every WWII Commander Who Thought They Got Away — Until They Didn't On December first, nineteen forty-five, German General Anton Dostler stood before a firing squad at the Aversa stockade near Naples, becoming the first German general to be executed by American forces after the war in Europe. He had spent the weeks since his trial apparently certain that the defense he had offered was legally sound, that the order he carried out had been mandated from above and that mandate would protect him. It did not. The order he trusted to shield him became the precise instrument of his condemnation, read aloud in a courtroom in Rome before an American military tribunal that had heard enough.