Herbert Kappler

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Herbert Kappler (23 September 1907 - 9 February 1978) was an SS-Obersturmbannführer of Nazi Germany.

[edit] Biography

Kappler was born in Stuttgart.

In 1939 he was posted to Rome as head of the Sicherheitsdienst there, and he cooperated closely with the Italian Fascist police. He acquired greater power after the Armistice between Italy and the Allied Forces of September 8, 1943. the following month he organized the deportation of 1,007 Italian Jews to Auschwitz: only 10 survived extermination. At the beginning of 1944 he became head of the Gestapo in Rome.

Kappler also 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 in the military prison of Gaeta.

Recovered in Rome in 1977, he managed to escape, but died the next year in Soltau, near Lüneburg, Germany.

[edit] In fiction

Kappler is portrayed by Richard Burton in 1973 feature film Massacre in Rome.

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 30 November 2006 on BBC Radio 4.