Ask Bizarre - Hanging Nazi war criminals
D: Is it true that one of those condemned to death for war crimes at Nuremburg (Goebbels or Himmler, I think) had to be physically strangled by two men swinging on his ankles after he had survived the drop on the gallows?
Sergeant Woods
Dr Mike: The manner in which the Allies executed 10 senior surviving Nazis remains a matter of some controversy.
Officially, the executions were carried out cleanly, but contemporary accounts make it clear that one was so botched it did indeed become necessary to swing on the legs of the condemned man in order to finish him off.
Unofficially, neo-Nazis have long charged that all the hangings were designed to make the last moments of Germany's criminal war leaders as painful as possible. The neo-Nazi netzine Stormfront, for example, quotes the less-than-reputable Stag Magazine, (Vol. 3, No. 1, December 1946) to suggest that the executioner - Master-Sergeant John C. Woods, US Army - was Jewish. Woods, they allege, "used a short rope that prevented instantaneous death from a broken neck, instead insuring a slow death by strangulation. He built the trap door too small so that their facial features would be mutilated during the fall. Woods would later boast to the U.S. Army's Stars and Stripes newspaper that he enjoyed the task, saying that "hanging those Nazis was the best thing I ever did."
Julius Streicher
The men who died at Nuremberg were Ribbentrop, Keitel, Kaltenbrunner, Rosenberg, Franck, Frick, Streicher, Seyss-Inquart, Sauckel and Jodl. Part of the neo-Nazi argument concerns the length of time it took doctors to pronounce the men dead once they had been hanged:
- Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop -18 minutes
- Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel - 24 minutes
- SS General Ernst Kaltenbrunner - 13 minutes
- Minister Afred Rosenberg -10 minutes
- Governor General of Poland Hans Frank -10.5 minutes
- Minister of the Interior Wilhelm Frick -12 minutes
- Anti-semitic newspaperman Julius Streicher - 14 minutes
- Slave labour chief Fritz Sauckel - 14 minutes
- General Alfred Jodl - 16 minutes
- Arthur von Seyss-Inquart, governor of the Netherlands and Austria - no time cited
In total, the executions took from just after one until just before three on the morning of 16 October 1946. Much of that time, supposedly, was spent waiting for each victim to be slowly strangled at the end of Woods's rope.
The official version of events is rather different. The Allied authorities at least implied that all the men died of broken necks, and detailed accounts of the executions make it clear that the apparent delay was the product of a decision to construct three sets of gallows - two for the executions themselves and one spare - and to hang the condemned Nazis one after the other, but on two different gallows. The doctors present did not enter the enclosed areas beneath the traps to pronounce one hanged men dead until the man on the adjacent gallows had also been hanged; thus, after Ribbentrop and Keitel had both dangled, they pronounced Ribbentrop dead; then Kaltenbrunner was hung on Ribbentrop's gallows while Keitel was still strung up, after which Keitel's body was cut down and examined, and so on. This was the cause of the apparent delay in pronouncing death.
In one case, however, the hanged man appears to have died of strangulation and not of a broken neck. Perhaps fittingly, the man in question was Julius Streicher (pictured above), the odious editor of the racist newspaper Der Sturmer, and the only one of the condemned who went to his death still shouting "Heil Hitler".
According to US journalist Kingsbury Smith, of the International News Service,
"..The trap opened with a loud bang. [Streicher] went down kicking. When the rope snapped taut with the body swinging wildly, groans could be heard from within the concealed interior of the scaffold. Finally, the hangman, who had descended from the gallows platform, lifted the black canvas curtain and went inside. Something happened that put a stop to the groans and brought the rope to a standstill. After it was over I was not in the mood to ask what he did, but I assume that he grabbed the swinging body of and pulled down on it. We were all of the opinion that Streicher had strangled."
Incidentally, neither Goebbels nor Himmler were involved in the Nazi war crime trials; Goebbels and his entire family committed suicide in Hitler's bunker the day after the Fuhrer, and Himmler munched a cyanide capsule in May 1945 after being captured by British forces whilst attempting to flee in disguise.