Herbert Kappler

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Herbert Kappler (23 September 1907 in Stuttgart, Germany - 9 February 1978) was an SS-Obersturmbannführer of Nazi Germany who was posted to Rome. As head of the Sicherheitsdienst there, he cooperated closely with the Italian Fascist police. In 1944, he became head of the Gestapo in Rome. Kappler helped organize the rescue of Benito Mussolini by the SS. He arranged the deportation of about ten thousand Roman Jews. He was responsible for the deaths of many other Italian Jews and non-Jews during the war. After the war he was tried by an Italian military tribunal and sentenced to life imprisonment, but he escaped in 1977 and died the next year in Soltau near Lüneburg, Germany.

[edit] In fiction

He is portrayed by Christopher Plummer in the 1983 TV movie, The Scarlet and The Black, and his post-war time seeking asylum in the Vatican (and his resultant friendship with Monsignor Hugh O'Flaherty, a Vatican priest whom Kappler had often tried to assassinate during the war) was dramatised as a radio play by Robin Glendinning, entitled The Scarlet Pimpernel of the Vatican, first broadcast on Thursday 30 November 2006 on Radio 4.