The room in which the ten condemned men of the International Military Tribunal were hanged in the early hours of 16 October 1946 was the gymnasium of the Nuremberg prison. It was approximately seventeen metres long, twelve metres wide, and high-ceilinged enough for the army engineers to build three temporary gallows side by side at one end of the room without any need to break through the roof. The gallows were of standard United States Army design, wooden uprights with crossbeams, trapdoors at the top of thirteen-step staircases. They had been built in the prison workshop in the previous fortnight on the orders of the prison commandant Burton C. Andrus. The hangman was a thirty-five-year-old American Master Sergeant named John C. Woods who had been brought to Nuremberg specifically for the work. He had previously executed approximately sixty American military prisoners during the war and a small number of German war criminals at the Bergen-Belsen and other early postwar trials. He told the press correspondents who interviewed him on the morning after the hangings that he had no objection to his work and that he had slept well.
The hangings began at one minute past one in the morning of 16 October 1946 and were completed by three minutes to three. Each hanging took, on average, between fifteen and twenty minutes from the prisoner’s entry into the gymnasium to the doctor’s pronouncement of death. The ten condemned men were brought from their cells one at a time, escorted by a four-man American military police detail, marched the short distance to the gymnasium, brought into the room, identified by their full names, asked whether they had a final statement, given the chance to make it, hooded by Woods, fitted with the noose by Woods, and dropped through the trapdoor at the moment Woods cut the support cord with his sergeant’s clasp knife. The bodies were left to hang for a full ten minutes after the drop. The two doctors present, Lieutenant Colonel Charles J. Roska and Major Rudolf Rother, examined them, pronounced death, and signed the certificates. The bodies were then cut down and laid on stretchers along the gymnasium wall. The eleventh body, Hermann Göring’s, was brought down from the cell block and placed in the row at the end. The four-power photographer, working under official authorisation, took photographs of each body for the record.
The order
The hangings were carried out in alphabetical order of surname, with two adjustments. Göring would have been first; his suicide had moved the schedule. Joachim von Ribbentrop went first instead, brought into the gymnasium at one minute past one. Wilhelm Keitel was second. Ernst Kaltenbrunner, third. Alfred Rosenberg, fourth. Hans Frank, fifth. Wilhelm Frick, sixth. Julius Streicher, seventh. Fritz Sauckel, eighth. Alfred Jodl, ninth. Arthur Seyss-Inquart, tenth. Each man was identified at the foot of the gallows by his full name spoken aloud by Andrus. Each was then asked, formally, whether he had a final statement.
The final statements
Most of the condemned men had final statements. They are recorded in the trial’s official transcript and in the contemporaneous press despatches.
Ribbentrop: God protect Germany. God have mercy on my soul. My final wish is that Germany realise its entity and that an understanding be reached between East and West. I wish peace to the world.
Keitel: I call on the Almighty to have mercy on the German people. More than two million German soldiers went to their death for the fatherland before me. I follow now my sons. All for Germany.
Kaltenbrunner: I have loved my German people and my fatherland with a warm heart. I have done my duty by the laws of my people, and I am sorry my people were led this time by men who were not soldiers, and that crimes were committed of which I had no knowledge. Germany, good luck.
Rosenberg made no final statement. The transcript records: The defendant declined to speak.
Frank: I am thankful for the kind treatment I have received during my captivity, and I ask God to receive me with mercy. He had converted to Catholicism in his cell over the previous months and had made his peace with the chaplain. He went to the gallows steadier than most.
Frick: Long live eternal Germany!
Streicher, who throughout the trial had refused all spiritual counsel and had remained an open and unrepentant antisemite, shouted on the scaffold: Heil Hitler! The Bolsheviks will hang you one day! When the hood was placed over his head he added Adele, my dear wife. The trapdoor opened. The drop was, by the assessment of the witnesses, badly miscalculated; Streicher’s body did not snap quickly and he was heard to groan from beneath the platform for several seconds.
Sauckel: I am dying innocent. The verdict was wrong. God protect Germany and make Germany great again. God protect my family.
Jodl: My greetings to you, my Germany.
Seyss-Inquart: I hope that this execution is the last act of the tragedy of the Second World War, and that a lesson will be learned, so that peace and understanding may exist between peoples. I believe in Germany.
The technical problems
Several of the hangings did not go cleanly. The trapdoor at the top of each gallows had been built to a width of approximately seventy-five centimetres, which on subsequent professional review was too small for the body weights involved. The drop, which Woods had calculated using a standard British military formula, was on the short side; the technical opinion of the British executioner Albert Pierrepoint, expressed in his memoirs after he became aware of the Nuremberg arrangements, was that Woods had used drops of approximately five and a half feet for prisoners who, on Pierrepoint’s calculations, would have required drops closer to seven feet for an instantaneous neck-fracture death. Pierrepoint was Britain’s most experienced executioner and his criticism carries weight.
The result was that several of the condemned men did not die immediately of broken necks but slowly of strangulation. Streicher was the most notorious example; the press despatches and the prison medical officer’s notes record that he was alive on the rope for several minutes after the drop. Sauckel and Jodl were also reported to have struggled. The detail was suppressed in the official Allied account of the executions and was not made public until the late 1940s when Pierrepoint’s professional review entered the British press.
Woods himself was unembarrassed about the technical performance and said in the days after the hangings that all ten had died, which had been the requirement. He returned to the United States Army’s regular hangman duties and was killed in 1950 by accidental electrocution at a base in the Marshall Islands while servicing electrical equipment unrelated to executions.
The disposal of the bodies
After the photographer had documented each body, the eleven were loaded into United States Army trucks and driven the same morning to the Munich East Cemetery, where the bodies were cremated. The ashes were collected, transported to a tributary of the Isar River, the Conwentzbach, and scattered in the running water. The location was deliberately kept secret to prevent the establishment of any future site of pilgrimage. The cemetery records were sealed at the time. The cremation receipts, made out to the false name “Lebrun” to disguise the cargo, are now held in the United States National Archives at College Park, Maryland.
The decision to cremate without a grave was Andrus’s, taken in consultation with the Allied Control Council. It was the right decision. The fate of Hess’s grave at Wunsiedel in northern Bavaria, which became a neo-Nazi pilgrimage site after his death at Spandau in 1987 and was eventually exhumed and the remains scattered at sea by his family in 2011, was the warning case the Allied authorities had wished to prevent.
What the hangings were for
The IMT had not been a court of summary justice. The defendants had been given counsel of their choice, access to the documents introduced against them, and the right to call witnesses. Three had been acquitted. Several had drawn lesser sentences than the prosecution had requested. The hangings were the carrying-out of judicial sentences passed under proceedings that, by the standards of any postwar criminal trial in any country, had been more than adequately fair.
The Allied authorities took the view, defended in print by Andrus and others, that the hangings should be carried out without ceremony, in private, and with the bodies disposed of in a manner that would not allow them to become martyrs. The view prevailed. The press correspondents present at the hangings were strictly limited in number and were briefed afterwards rather than allowed to observe the proceedings directly. The photographs taken by the official photographer were published in a small number of approved outlets and have been reprinted in the Holocaust historical literature ever since. The hangings were, on the day, a procedural conclusion to a procedural process. The procedural process had taken ten and a half months. The hangings took two hours. The procedural process had been the point.
See also
- Julius Streicher
- Hermann Göring
- Ernst Kaltenbrunner
- Joachim von Ribbentrop
- The Nuremberg Trials
- Wilhelm Frick
Sources
- Burton C. Andrus, The Infamous of Nuremberg, Leslie Frewin, 1969
- Stanley Tilles and Jeffrey Denhart, By the Neck Until Dead: The Gallows of Nuremberg, Cumberland House, 1999
- Albert Pierrepoint, Executioner: Pierrepoint, Harrap, 1974
- Kingsbury Smith, INS dispatches from the Nuremberg execution chamber, 16 October 1946
- Whitney R. Harris, Tyranny on Trial, Southern Methodist University Press, 1954
- Joseph E. Persico, Nuremberg: Infamy on Trial, Viking, 1994
- Werner Maser, Nürnberg: Tribunal der Sieger, Econ, 1977