War Criminal’s Widow Appeals Order Barring Her from Italy

Describing herself in an open letter as “a 63-year-old woman that Italian democracy has no reason to fear,” the widow of Nazi war criminal Herbert Kappler has appealed to President Francesco Cossiga to allow her to enter Italy.

Annaliese Kappler, a resident of West Germany, is promoting a book she wrote about her late husband, an SS colonel accused of wartime atrocities.

An order barring her from entering Italy was issued Oct. 18 by Interior Minister Antonio Geva. He acted on the advice of Foreign Minister Giulio Andreotti.

She had planned to launch the Italian edition of her book at a news conference here on Oct. 20. The date coincided with solemn observances, by Italian Jews and former resistance fighters, of the 50th anniversary of the racial laws promulgated by Mussolini’s fascist regime.

Excerpts from the book published in Italian newspapers left little doubt that it is an apologia for Kappler and for the Nazi occupation of Italy in general.

The Kappler widow stresses a sensational incident — when she smuggled her husband out of a military prison hospital in Rome in 1977. Wasted by cancer, he was concealed in a suitcase.

“Was it a serious crime to have helped my husband escape from Rome to enable him to die at home with his family?” the widow wrote.

Herbert Kappler was held responsible for, among other things, ordering the massacre of scores of Roman residents, in reprisal for a resistance attack on a Nazi patrol.

“I wanted to come to Rome, but I did not mean to provoke anyone,” his widow said in the open letter. “I understand and profoundly feel the grief of the many people struck by the horrible war, and I respect, and have always done, the memory of their loved ones.”

She begged Cossiga to annul “the too harsh condemnation by which the Italian government declared me to be an undesirable.”