Pressed for Time

Staring at a crucifix on the courtroom wall, the most hated man in Italy sat apparently unmoved last week while Roman spectators screamed and cursed at him.

Herbert Kappler had heard Italians scream before--at the Ardeatine Caves, for instance, where in 1944 he, as 55 chief in Rome, had directed the massacre of 335 Italian hostages as reprisal for the bombing of 32 Nazi police in a Roman street.

The memory of the Ardeatine slaughter burns in Italian minds more vividly than any other calamity of the. war. Day after day black-clad men & women, carrying huge bundles of flowers, trudge up a barren hill six miles south of Rome to the dismal caverns, where candles burn day & night by rows and rows of plain pine coffins.

Many an onlooker at Kappler's trial (the first war crimes trial by an Italian court) had made the Ardeatine pilgrimage to mourn husband or son; the crowd stiffened with horror as Kappler dryly told how 30 SS men had rounded up the victims and taken them out to the cave. The officer who was to fire first got sick at the scene; Kappler explained to the court that he had had to fire the first shot to encourage the weakling.

Kappler (who became a Roman Catholic convert just before the trial began) testified that he had refused his victims religious assistance "because we were pressed for time, and I know that people who are about to be executed always indulge in talking to the minister." At this the maddened courtroom audience, broke into howls of "Schweinehund!", and surged forward towards Kappler's bench. A muscle danced in his jaw and the saber scar on his left cheek blazed crimson as carabinieri forced the crowd back.

After six hours, the head of the five-judge military tribunal gravely pronounced the stiffest sentence he could give under Italian law:* life imprisonment, including four years' solitary confinement, for "repeated and premeditated murder."

*Kappler's superiors, Field Marshal "Smiling Albert" Kesselring and Generals Kurt Maeltzer and Eberhard von Mackensen, were originally condemned to death by a British military court on similar charges, later had their sentences commuted to life imprisonment.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.