SIR DAVID MAXWELL-FYFE: Your prior point was to take a third attitude, or some people might say, “terrorize” the population, so that they would not repeat or do anything against the German Army.
KESSELRING: I do not know—this expression comes from the Rotterdam examination. As far as I know and believe I did not use this expression. I have to repeat that I stood, if I may say so, on ideally friendly terms with the Italians—for this very reason I was called to Italy—and that I had the most compelling reason to win friendship and not to sow enmity; and I intervened there, and certainly in a decisive way, only because it was a matter of cutting off the root of this evil growth within a short time.
SIR DAVID MAXWELL-FYFE: I asked you various questions about your acts of friendship to the Italians this morning and I am not going back to them. I only want to ask you one other point about which perhaps you will be able to relieve my mind. On the 2d of November 1943 were you the commanding general in Italy, that is, after you became . . .
KESSELRING: May I add something to the first point?
SIR DAVID MAXWELL-FYFE: You must come on to this point, and I want you to tell whether you were the commanding general in Italy on the 2d of November 1943? Were you?
KESSELRING: Since November, since 2 November 1943?
SIR DAVID MAXWELL-FYFE: Do you remember sending a telegram to the OKW that three British Commandos taken prisoner near Pescara were to be given special treatment? That means murder, “special treatment”; it means that they were killed by the SS.
KESSELRING: No. I beg your pardon . . .
SIR DAVID MAXWELL-FYFE: What do you mean by “special treatment”?
KESSELRING: That these people at Pescara, as I have already mentioned once today, were not shot, but rather the wounded were taken to a hospital and, as far as I recall, the unwounded to a prisoner-of-war camp.