After Field Marshal Albert Kesselring was convicted of war crimes by a British military court for ordering the massacres of Italian civilians, the Ardeatine massacre for example, Hankey used his influence to have one of Kesselring's interrogators, Colonel Alexander Scotland, publish a letter to "The Times" in 1950 calling the verdict into question. Scotland's picture of Kesselring as an honourable, apolitical soldier-airman who could not have possibly known that Italian civilians were being massacred had considerable impact on British public opinion, and led to demands that Kesselring be freed. The picture of Kesselring drawn by Hankey and his circle was that of a chivalrous leader who was unaware of the massacres of Italian civilians during 1943–45, and would have stopped them had he known. Hankey focused on Kesselring's "professionalism" as a general, noting he had much success in delaying the advancing Western Allied Forces in Italy through 1943–45, which he used as evidence that Kesselring could not have committed war crimes, though Lingen noted that there is no evidence that "professionalism" excludes the possibility of criminality. The extent of Hankey's influence could be seen in that when the leader of the main German veterans group, the VdS, Admiral , visited Britain in 1952 to discuss the Kesselring case, the first person he visited was Hankey.