On March 22, 1944, a commando of 15 American soldiers, including two officers, landed on the Italian coast, in the rear of the front line, with the mission of destroying a railway tunnel between the cities of La Spezia and Genoa. Two days later, the members of the commando were located and taken prisoner by Italian and German soldiers. The members of the U.S. commando were imprisoned near La Spezia for interrogation. One of the two American officers confessed the reasons for their presence in the rearguard, which led General Anton Dostler, commander of the military zone in which they were, to order the execution of the 15 American soldiers, a sentence that was carried out on March 26, 1944.

During the first trial organized by the Allies after the end of the war, Anton Dostler was tried, charged with war crimes and, after being found guilty, shot by a firing squad to carry out the death sentence handed down by the Tribunal.

In the first Allied war crimes trial, he was accused of carrying out an illegal order. In his defense, he argued that he had not issued the order, but had only transmitted it to Colonel Almers by supreme command, and that the execution of the OSS men was a lawful order. Dostler's plea to carry out superior orders failed before the court, which found that in ordering the mass execution he had acted on his own outside the Fuehrer's orders. The Military Commission also rejected his request for clemency, stating that the mass execution of the commando group violated Article 2 of the 1929 Geneva Convention on Prisoners of War, which prohibited acts of reprisal against prisoners of war. In its Judgment, the Commission stated that "no soldier, let alone a Commanding General, can be heard to say that he considered the summary shooting of prisoners of war, even as a reprisal, to be lawful."

Under the 1907 Hague Convention on Land Warfare, it was legal to execute spies and saboteurs disguised in civilian clothes or enemy uniforms, but not those captured in uniforms of their own army. Because the 15 U.S. soldiers were properly dressed in U.S. uniforms behind enemy lines, and not disguised in civilian clothes or enemy uniforms, they should not have been treated as spies but as prisoners of war, a principle Dostler had violated in carrying out the execution order.

The trial found General Dostler guilty of war crimes, rejecting the defense of "superior orders." He was sentenced to death and executed at Aversa by a 12man firing squad at 8:00 a.m. on December 1, 1945. The execution was photographed on still and blackandwhite film cameras. Immediately after the execution, Dostler's body was lifted onto a stretcher, wrapped in a white cotton cover and driven away in an army truck. His body was buried in grave 93/95 of section H in the German war cemetery of Pomezia.