Historians commonly view the release of prominent German war criminals as the price paid by the Allies for German rearmament. Kerstin von Lingen's study now reveals the various leading characters and their methods for achieving this trade-off based on the case of General Field Marshall Albert Kesselring. On the narrow base of evidence available then, a British military court sitting in Venice in 1947 sentenced Kesselring to death for his conduct as commander in chief of the Wehrmacht's Italian operations, particularly for the Fosse Ardeatine massacre. Lingen argues that the trial and the international activism to overthrow this verdict shaped the image of the Wehrmacht's conduct in Italy, and the evolution of British and German Vergangenheitspolitik.

The images of the “good General” evoked in Kesselring's trial and during the early Cold War, she argues, became the basis for the myth of the Wehrmacht's decency in Italy and beyond. Kesselring had won his final battle—at least for the moment. Lingen also summarizes and adjudicates the two-decade-old historiography of the Wehrmacht's conduct in Italy in support of her conclusion that Kesselring's release represented the rehabilitation of an old elite at the expense of historical truth. The so-called special case thesis that Germany's occupation of Italy reflected a quasi-western model and thus relied relatively little on repression she finds clearly wanting (p. 47).

General Field Marshall Kesselring proved more churlish than sympathetic, but as a symbol of the Wehrmacht he benefited from the orchestrations of high-echelon members of the Wehrmacht, the churches, and politics, and their influence on public discourse through plenty of media coverage. At the center of this web was Kesselring's attorney Hans Laternser, the consummate political animal who had cut his teeth on the work as defense counsel at the Nuremberg Trial and honed them further at the Auschwitz trials years later. Laternser was the kingpin of the international activism on Kesselring's behalf up until the general's release in 1952. His frontline allies in the cause stepped forward willingly from Germany but also from the U.K. and the U.S. Clerical leaders, talking of unity and reconciliation, “increasingly found themselves acting as unofficial spokespeople” for Kesselring and other Wehrmacht officers imprisoned for war crimes (p. 154). While a few spoke out for the “justice” of punishing Kesselring, the other side scolded Kesselring's guilty verdict as “victor's justice.” Veterans' Associations insisted on the release of all incarcerated Wehrmacht men as a precondition for German rearmament, and several bestowed on Kesselring the mantel of soldierly role model by appointing him their president. Within Britain, domestic pressure, headed by Winston Churchill and taken up by the press, brought about the reversal of Kesselring's sentence and his freedom.

By 1949, Laternser's theater of battle was the realm of public opinion rather than the courts. Although war crimes soon dominated memory politics, large segments of the public were now confused about who had committed war crimes and even unaware of the crimes themselves (p. 260). A minority of letters to the editor called for justice, but no major voice or group from Germany, Britain, or the U.S. stepped forward to represent this perspective. Such silence strikes the main contrast between the attempt to bring Wehrmacht suspects to trial during the first postwar decade and the efforts to try them today: during the past decade groups in Germany strong enough to plant their imprint on public opinion and memory, and with allies in power and abundant press coverage, have mobilized for the investigation and trial of Wehrmacht suspects.

Throughout his “last battle,” when he thought he was warring for honor, Kesselring made predictably outrageous statements. His more frank testimony in initial statements soon coarsened during further courtroom appearances, a pattern that has held for various other Wehrmacht suspects down to today. The Allied powers meanwhile welcomed the image of an honorable Wehrmacht since it fostered German willingness to rearm. By 1956, the first NATO general secretary Lord Ismay used his position to advance general amnesty for war criminals and the termination of trials in return for the Federal Republic's contribution to the alliance. While others have identified the government in Bonn as the petitioner that brought a halt to Italy's program of prosecuting Wehrmacht suspects, Lingen points to Ismay, who was concerned that the thirty suspects the military court of Rome was then demanding that Germany extradite included even the potential commander of NATO land forces in central Europe (p. 266).

Trial records have provided useful sources for historians, but they have also served to exonerate and rewrite Wehrmacht history in an official venue. Kesselring claimed to the press that his case was “very simple,” for he had done his duties and held to military standards even at the cost of “significant disadvantages for the German conduct of the war” (p. 122). This was a new false memory comparable in the way it stood historical truth on its head to the “stab in the back” myth. Kesselring and other Wehrmacht personalities and associations refused to acknowledge that they had been extremely poor losers, preferring instead to claim that the Allies were very poor winners who dressed up their efforts to dominate in legal proceedings.

Lingen's excellent work on Kesselring may overstate the significance of his case in Vergangenheitspolitik by presenting it without the context of other cases, such as the one Hermann Frank Meyer lays out on General Lanz in Blutiges Edelweiss (Berlin, 2008). Lanz was convicted at Nuremberg but soon had influential work for rearmament, Veterans' Associations, and the German Liberal party. He soldiered on, crafting an image of himself as a resister so successfully that he was given a place in the catalog of the traveling exhibit “Aufstand des Gewissens” which opened June 25, 1984, in the German Bundestag.

Lingen's welcome work establishes new departure points and turns up evidence useful for sorting out controversies today, whether about Wehrmacht generals or Wehrmacht Vergangenheitspolitik. Kesselring's self-righteous testimony, for example, supports Harald Welzer's conclusions that World War II war criminals never repressed guilt because they never felt guilty in the first place.