Kerstin Von Lingen – författare

In 1947 German Field Marshal Albert Kesselring was tried and convicted of war crimes committed during World War II. He was held responsible for his troops having executed nearly 9,000 Italian citizens - women, children, elderly men - in retaliation for partisan attacks. His conviction, however, created a real dilemma for the United States and western Europe. While some sought the harshest punishments available for anyone who had participated in the war crimes of the Nazi regime, others believed that the repatriation of alleged war criminals would help secure the allegiance of a rearmed West Germany in the dangerous new Cold War against the Soviet Union. Kerstin von Lingen's close analysis of the Kesselring case reveals for the first time how a network of veterans, lawyers, and German sympathizers in Britain and America achieved the commutation of Kesselring's death sentence and his eventual release - reinforcing German popular conceptions that he had been innocent all along and that the Wehrmacht had fought a 'clean war' in Italy. But von Lingen shows that Kesselring bore much greater guilt for civilian deaths than had been proven in court - and that the war on the southern front had been far from clean. Von Lingen weaves together strands of the story as diverse as Winston Churchill's ability to mobilize support among British elites, Basil Liddell Hart's need to be recognized as an important military thinker, and the Cold War fears of the 'Senators' Circle' in the United States. Through this rich narrative, she shows how international politics shaped the trial's proceedings and outcome - as well as the memory and meaning of the war for German citizens - and sheds new light on the complex interplay between the combatants' efforts to 'master the past' and the threatening state of international relations in the early Cold War. In analyzing the efforts to clear Kesselring's name, von Lingen shows that the case was about much more than the fate of one convicted individual; it also underscored the pressure to wrap up the war crimes issue - and German guilt - in order to get on with the business of bringing a rearmed Germany into the Western alliance. ""Kesselring's Last Battle"" sheds new light on the 'politics of memory' by unraveling a twisted thread in postwar history as it shows how historical truth is sometimes sacrificed on the altar of expediency.

This book examines the circumstances surrounding SS-Obergruppenführer Karl Wolff's escape from prosecution for war crimes in 1945. Wolff avoided prosecution because of his role in 'Operation Sunrise', negotiations conducted by high-ranking American, Swiss and British officials - in violation of the Casablanca agreements with the Soviet Union - for the surrender of German forces in Italy that enabled the Anglo-American forces to take Trieste. After 1945, Allied officials, amongst them Allen Dulles, in a move that later helped him ascend to the head of the CIA, shielded Wolff from prosecution to maintain secrecy about the negotiations. 'Operation Sunrise' thus relates to the early origins of the Cold War in Europe and had wide-ranging implications, even in the field of justice: new evidence suggests that the Western Allies not only failed to ensure cooperation between their respective national war crimes prosecution organizations, but in certain cases even obstructed justice by withholding evidence from the prosecution.

Japan’s contradictory roles in the Second World War as brutal oppressor of conquered regions in Asia and as liberator of Asia from both Western colonialism and stultifying tradition set the stage for a tangled legal and political debate: just where did colonized and oppressed peoples owe their loyalties in time of war?

This book investigates the political context and intentions behind the trialling of Japanese war criminals in the wake of World War Two.

Japan’s contradictory roles in the Second World War as brutal oppressor of conquered regions in Asia and as liberator of Asia from both Western colonialism and stultifying tradition set the stage for a tangled legal and political debate: just where did colonized and oppressed peoples owe their loyalties in time of war?