For 1,413 Lives

Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, tough and able pal of Hermann Goering (and like him a onetime drug addict), never made any bones about his ruthlessness in war, except for the standard excuse of "military necessity." He was proud of having ordered the bombing of helpless Warsaw and of surrendered Rotterdam. He was "very happy" for the opportunity to try to blast Coventry off the map.

In his masterly retreat from Rome in 1944, it was "a military principle" which led him to order 10-for-1 reprisals for the killing of 32 SS troopers by Italian guerrillas. He ordered the killing of 335 Romans in the Ardeatine Caves (among the victims were women, schoolchildren, babies and 15 persons rounded up at the last minute as "extras"). Two subordinate German generals have been sentenced to death for that outrage (TIME, Dec. 9). But pug-faced, "Smiling Albert" Kesselring was still a good enough soldier to insist, "If there is any guilt, it is mine and mine alone."

Last week in Venice a British court weighed Kesselring's guilt as a war criminal, found him responsible not only for the Ardeatine massacre but also for the reprisal killings of 1,078 other Italians. Kesselring flushed and he sat down heavily when he heard the sentence--death by a firing squad.

Last week the U.S. war crimes tribunal at Nuernberg issued an indictment accusing Field Marshals Wilhelm List and Maximilian von Weichs and ten generals with responsibility for killing 13,000 persons in the Balkans and in Norway.

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