Wednesday, January 17, 2018

pencil sketch of a Nazi by Dr K Prabhakar Rao


HERBERT KAPPLER.  NAZI Image may contain: 1 person, drawing

1 comment:

Dr K Prabhakar Rao said...

Hev was SS. Police officer of rank Lt Col and was the head of security services in Rome. Kappler's first action as head of German security forces in Rome was to help plan the rescue of Benito Mussolini by SS special forces, a task which was accomplished by Otto Skorzeny. Kappler was next entrusted with Jewish roundups for transport to Auschwitz; in his first action, 1,023 Italian Jews were deported with only 16 surviving, and Kappler would later arrange the deportation of a further 993 Roman Jews, nearly all of whom would eventually perish in Nazi gas chambers. During this action, he demanded 50 kilograms of gold from the Jewish community in Rome, which he later claimed was an attempt to prevent the round-up and the deportations. He was responsible for massacre of civilians at Ardeatine where335 were killed .In 1948 after the war Kappler was tried by an Italian military tribunal and sentenced to life imprisonment in the Gaeta military prison. Kappler and his first wife divorced while he was serving his sentence; later, he married Anneliese Kappler, a nurse who had carried on a lengthy correspondence with him, before marrying him at a prison ceremony in 1972. By this time Kappler had also converted to Catholicism,partly due to the influence of his war-time enemy, the Vatican diplomat Hugh O'Flaherty, who often visited him in prison, discussing literature and religion with him.
By 1975, at the age of sixty-eight, Kappler was diagnosed with terminal cancer and he was moved to a military hospital in Rome in 1976. Appeals by both his wife and the West German government to release him were denied by Italian authorities. Because of Kappler's deteriorating condition and his wife's nursing skills, Anneliese Kappler had been allowed almost unlimited access to him during his time in the Italian hospital. On a prison visit in August 1977, Kappler's wife carried him out in a large suitcase (Kappler weighed about 47 kg at the time) and escaped to West Germany, assisted by apparently unwitting carabinieri. The Italians unsuccessfully demanded that Kappler be returned, but the West Germany authorities refused to extradite him and did not prosecute Kappler for any further war crimes, reportedly owing to ill-health.He died in 1978 at the age of 70.