Donovan's Devils
Page 31
Other Italians in La Spezia helped Manzani and Lanier pinpoint the location where the fifteen Americans had been buried. Staff from the Graves Registration and local laborers began excavating the grave on May 20, 1945. After three days, they located fifteen bodies at the bottom of the hole, fifteen feet below the surface of the road. Major Clifford M. Bassett and Captain Robert J. Willoughby, medical officers from the 103rd Station Hospital arrived at the site and assisted in the exhumation of the bodies from the common grave, taking notes on their condition. Each man had the hands secured tightly behind the back with strong wire. None of the men wore shoes. Most of the men had their military olive drab shirts, jackets, and trousers on. Three of the bodies wore no outer clothing—they were in undershirts and underwear.
The bodies were badly decomposed, and it was hard to identify the men. Manzani and Lanier were able to identify only seven men upon disinterment. Some men still had laundry tags on their clothes with the last name’s initial letter followed by the last four digits of their serial number. Some others had their sergeant stripes on their jackets. Only one had his dog tags still around his neck. They used dental records to identify another one. Major M. Pedro Souza, the medical officer of the Italian OGs, who had known the men personally, identified six additional men based on their dental records and personal features that he was able to recognize. They identified the men found without outer clothes as Lieutenant Paul Trafficante, Sergeant Alfred DeFlumeri, and John Farrell.
The medical officers were appalled at the conditions of the bodies. Bassett and Willoughby wrote in their report, “Two skulls were crushed to such an extent that no statement can be made as to whether or not these had been perforated by bullets…. Ten skulls showed extensive fractures, usually unilateral and located over the temporal bone. There was no perforation of the skulls on the contralateral side, such as would be produced by a bullet. The clothing, anterior chest and abdomen of all fifteen bodies were examined for perforations, which could have been caused by bullets. None were found.”
Souza was less succinct in his report. “I found that the fifteen bodies had extreme fractures (unilateral) of the temporal bone; the opposite temporal bone was intact. This excludes the possibility of the personnel having been shot in the head. The bodies showed no bullet perforations (thorax, abdomen, and extremities). Also, the clothes did not show any perforation that could have been caused by a bullet. In my opinion, in all fifteen cases death was caused by a severe traumatism in the temporal region, extensive fractures of the temporal bone, severe brain injury, and hemorrhage.”
The reported conditions in which the bodies of the Ginny mission men were found, without shoes, some of them without clothes on, with shattered skulls and without telltale signs of bullet holes through their bodies outraged the OSS personnel. They were convinced that the Germans had tortured and bludgeoned their men to death. Captain Materazzi offered to head the firing squad that would execute the Germans responsible for the massacre. The outrage was still present forty years after the war when a number of the Italian OG veterans gathered in Italy to reminisce about those events.3
Diagram and identification notes that OSS investigators made upon exhuming the bodies of the fifteen Ginny team members.
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Immediately after the war ended, the OSS created a special unit to investigate war crimes in Italy. At the end of May 1945, Captain Robert Blythin, the unit’s lead investigator for the Ginny mission case, assembled and reviewed all the evidence that Manzani and Lanier had collected up to that point. Based on their information, Blythin pieced together how the Ginny men had spent their first forty-eight hours near Bonasola, until the local Fascists discovered them and handed them over to the Germans. He also knew the conditions in which they were buried in the common grave. Captain Georg Sessler of the German naval intelligence helped the OSS investigators understand the events that transpired in La Spezia that lead to the execution of the Americans.
Sessler was in Milan when the Italian patriots launched the general insurrection on April 25, 1945. Fearing for his safety, he crossed the Swiss border near Chiasso. On May 2, 1945, Sessler requested a Swiss friend who was in contact with British intelligence agents in Milan to notify them that he was willing to return to Italy from Switzerland if he could be of assistance. He was ready to cooperate with the Allied intelligence forces. On May 3, Sessler returned to Milan and began a series of intelligence debriefings with British and American officers. On May 5, Sessler wrote down all the information he knew about German intelligence forces in Italy for an American officer. The information included the first mention of the execution of the fifteen American OGs. On May 12, the British sent Sessler to Florence and handed him over to the Americans who interrogated him for the first time on the case of the Ginny mission. Sessler recounted in detail the events he had witnessed in La Spezia. It is not clear why in these initial interrogations Sessler attributed the order to execute the Americans to General Rudolph Toussaint, who had been the commissioner of the Wehrmacht in Italy at the time.
On May 24, Livermore summarized the results of the investigation for Donovan in Washington. Based on the interrogations of Sessler, Klaps, and Bolze, Livermore reported that the Ginny men had been shot by orders of Colonel Almers who had acted under orders from his commanding officer, General Toussaint. The shooting was done because of Hitler’s order that all persons engaging in sabotage would be executed. Livermore queried Washington as follows: “Are the subordinate commanders and soldiers of the firing squad guilty war criminals when they are carrying our orders of colonels and generals? The latter, if apprehended, will probably say they got orders from the higher up.” Washington replied within the same date as follows:
Defense of superior orders NOT valid, although it may be considered for lenient sentence. All implicated in crime, irrespective of rank, station, or involuntary character of their acts, are to be regarded as war criminals, and full information on all is required. For international trials, especially interested in all from commissioned officers up as defendants. Soldiers of firing squad, etc., may be material witnesses in international trial and also defendants before American military commissions. Army Field Manual 27–10 now being amended to conform to foregoing.
At the end of May, Sessler revised his story and explained that he had erroneously named Toussaint as the general who had ordered the execution of the fifteen Americans. It was Anton Dostler, commanding general of the 75th Army Corps, who had sent the orders for the execution. Dostler at the time was in custody of the British at a POW camp in Taranto, in the south of Italy. On June 7, 1945, the Americans took Dostler under their custody and sent him to the Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Center (CSDIC) at the Cinecittà complex for detailed interrogations.
Mussolini had inaugurated Cinecittà in 1937 as a complete movie making and production facility intended to rival Hollywood studios. Within the first six years, the Italian film industry produced six hundred movies there, most of them toeing the Fascist propaganda line.4 When the Germans took over Italy in 1943, they looted the film studios and turned Cinecittà into a holding center for British prisoners. A British intelligence officer who visited the facility shortly after the liberation of Rome said about it, “The floors were deep in straw and alive with fleas. It took some weeks before the place became habitable—thanks to DDT, which the Germans did not have.”5 In 1944–1945, the Allies used the complex as an interrogation center and holding area for prisoners of war.
Captain Blythin interrogated Dostler for the first time at the CSDIC camp in Cinecittà on June 9, 1945. A British-American intelligence agent by the name of Alexander Golodetz served as the interpreter. Dostler recalled immediately the incident of the fifteen Americans captured in this sector. He said that he had received word from the Almers Brigade that they had captured a group of Italian-speaking American saboteurs. Dostler said he asked his chief of staff to pass the message to the higher echelon, the headquarters of the army group commanded by Genera
l von Zangen, and to query whether the prisoners fell under the Führerbefehl, Hitler’s order on the treatment of commando groups captured by the German army. The army group replied in the affirmative so Dostler ordered the men shot. He did not remember whether von Zangen himself or his chief of staff, Colonel Nagel, gave the order but he believed the chief of staff would not have given such an order without referring it to the army group commander in person. Dostler said that, independently of orders from the army group, he read the Führerbefehl, and it appeared that this party came directly under it. “I cannot remember the exact details,” Dostler said. “All I do know is that I read the Führerbefehl at the time and that according to its wording it seemed clear that these men were saboteurs as defined therein. I would not, however, assume the responsibility for having the prisoners shot, but referred it to the Army, who took the decision.” Repeatedly during that interrogation, Dostler emphasized these two points. He expressed anxiety about producing the Führerbefehl itself and hoped a copy of it would surface.
On June 10, Livermore sent the following telegram to Donovan, “I have interrogated General Dostler who commanded 75th Corps. He freely admits that he gave orders to Colonel Almers to have the Ginny men executed. He states that this was in compliance with the Hitler order that all persons apprehended while engaging in sabotage would be executed. He also said he received orders from Army commander General von Zangen to execute them.”
After their first interrogation of Dostler, Blythin and Golodetz crosschecked his story with the information that Sessler was providing. On June 12, they interrogated Dostler again. Golodetz told him, “According to information on hand, the Almers Brigade received a first teletype message ordering the execution from your HQ as early as 1000 hours of the day following the capture of the Americans. As they had only reported the case to you during the afternoon of the day of capture, it looks as if the decision was taken at your HQ without reference to Army.”
Dostler replied, “It is possible that I may have issued a preliminary order, but the men were not executed until the morning of the day after, by which time I had received definite orders by phone from the Army on the subject.” Blythin later described Dostler’s demeanor as uneasy and nervous when he posed the question. “The thing that I noticed particularly was that beads of perspiration appeared on his neck and his brow,” Blythin said.
Blythin arranged the transfer of General von Zangen from Western Europe, where he was captured at the end of the war, to Rome for interrogation. Von Zangen categorically denied any involvement in the execution of the Americans. “It is simply impossible that I should not remember the shooting of fifteen men, especially members of the American army in uniform, had it taken place on my own, or the order of a member of my staff,” von Zangen told Blythin. During interrogations, he explained very methodically that he had never heard of the execution before. Due to the large area under his responsibility, he was away from his headquarters most of the time. Colonel Nagel, his chief of staff, had authority to take action on routine matters, but on all matters of higher importance, he had orders to wait for von Zangen’s decision or, if the matter was urgent, to ask for a decision at the next higher echelon, Kesselring’s headquarters.
The execution of fifteen Americans, von Zangen said, was not a matter Nagel could have handled and Nagel had not reported to van Zangen that he had ordered the execution. The logical conclusion then was that the higher authority that had ordered Dostler to execute the Americans must have been either Kesselring’s headquarters or the High Command of the Wehrmacht itself. Von Zangen urged strongly that the investigators locate the Führerbefehl and interrogate Nagel and Kraehe, Dostler’s chief of staff, who could clarify the matter.
The record does not show what efforts Blythin made to interrogate Nagel or Kraehe, although they were available in the prisoner of war enclosures where German soldiers and officers were confined at that time. He tried to locate Colonel Almers, but without results. Almers had been in a POW enclosure near Pisa until the end of May 1945, when he assumed the identity of a noncommissioned officer and disappeared. Someone said that Almers had talked about hiding in a villa by the sea, in a rather isolated spot near La Spezia where he had lived during the war. Blythin located the villa, searched it, and interrogated its inhabitants to no avail. When a report arrived that Almers had been spotted in a POW enclosure in Taranto, Blythin traveled there, taking Koerbitz, one of Almers’s staff officers, with him. “We examined I would say twenty thousand Germans in several cages, trying to locate Almers,” Blythin said later. In Taranto Blythin found Hans-Georg Schultz, the adjutant to Almers, who had detailed knowledge of the events surrounding the execution of the Americans and was willing to testify.
By mid-June, Blythin believed there was sufficient evidence to take to trial and convict a dozen German Army and Navy intelligence officers, ranging from noncommissioned officers to three-star generals. However, in early September all the regular personnel of the office of the judge advocate, including Brigadier General Adam Richmond, the theater judge advocate, received orders to repatriate to the United States. The turnover in personnel required that the case be brought to trial quickly and without delay. In a letter to the OSS headquarters in Washington, Captain Lanier wrote:
OSS has about given up hope of finding Col. Almers and General Richmond does not think there is any case against General von Zangen. Also, he thinks there is not much of a case against the various small-timers down the line who merely obeyed superior orders. So, the plan is to try General Dostler alone on the main charge that he exceeded discretion in giving the execution order. In other words, he took it upon himself to interpret the Hitler Saboteur order and to decide that our Ginny Mission men came within its purview. That exercise of personal discretion will be the War Crime of which he is guilty.
Thus, at the beginning of September, when the US Army decided to send the case to trial, only Anton Dostler was on the docket, the first German general to be tried for war crimes committed during World War II.
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The fate of Major Holohan, commander of the Mangosteen-Chrysler mission, remained a mystery for the OSS. Besides Aldo Icardi’s initial report on the disappearance of the major, the OSS headquarters in Sienna received information from other sources, as well. One of them was from Tullio Lussi, the Italian professor-agent who had parachuted with the American mission and had introduced Holohan to the leaders of the CLNAI. Lussi had been in the Lake Orta area by chance right after the events of December 6. He wrote in a report prepared for the OSS, “I remained in the area for a day to conduct an exhaustive investigation, but I failed to come up with any positive elements.”6 British officers of Mission Cherokee that operated in the area reported rumors they had heard from their Italian sources. According to them, Holohan had been murdered to rob him of large sums of money, as high as $400,000, which he carried with him in a suitcase at all times. The OSS in Sienna could not have believed such reports, but they asked the British to meet with Icardi anyhow and check these rumors.7
At the beginning of April 1945, Aminta Migliari crossed the border into Switzerland and then traveled to Florence. The OSS had special interest in talking to him, since he had been responsible for the personal security of the mission. Max Corvo, the OSS Secret Intelligence officer in Sienna, debriefed Migliari and asked him to prepare a written report of the events. When Corvo received the report, including a map of the Lake Orta area that Migliari drew, he found them very similar to the first report that Icardi had sent in January 1945. “Reading the text and comparing the map, there was no doubt that both reports were written by the same person,” Corvo wrote. When asked about it, Migliari admitted that he had written both reports. Corvo felt that the security of the mission had been lax, especially since they had operated in military uniforms, and that the mission should have been attached to one of the partisan units in the area rather than leave its security in Migliari’s hands.8
At the end of April 1945, as soon as Milan was
liberated, an OSS team assigned to probe the disappearance of Major Holohan arrived in the Lake Orta area to investigate. Icardi made a full report to the investigators, explaining the numerous lines of inquiry he had pursued after Holohan’s disappearance and in the months since, providing the names of all the people that had been involved with the mission before that event, and presenting an analysis of the situation at that time. The group questioned Icardi at length and asked him to relate in narrative fashion the events of that night. “I was happy to offer what assistance I could to find Major Holohan,” wrote Icardi later.9
The working hypothesis was that the major had been hit during the firefight and had either fallen in the lake or hidden in the mountains and died of his wounds. The investigators dragged the lake, set off explosives in the water, dug up the mountainside, and checked every lead in the area but found no trace of Holohan. In early August 1945, Icardi was preparing to return to the United States when the OSS investigating team called him again for questioning about Major Holohan. Icardi said he spent an entire day with the officer investigating the matter, recounting the events leading up to and that transpired during the night of December 6, 1944. After this interview, Icardi received clearance to return to the United States. The investigators continued to interview everyone who might have been involved in the case. Crosschecking of records revealed that there had been no German or Fascist operations in the area around December 6, 1944. This reinforced the sentiment expressed by several locals who had never believed the story of a Nazi-Fascist ambush and had attributed the disappearance of Holohan to individuals who saw Holohan as an obstacle to their political ambitions or were after the money he carried with him.10