WAR CRIMES: Night without Dawn

Through the cold, wet darkness, the people hurried homeward silently, drawing threadbare coats tightly around hunched shoulders. Policemen paced beneath feeble street lights, stamping their feet. A sharp wind whispered through shattered walls and broken towers, bringing shivers to everyone in Nürnberg. This was a night which had been longed for by millions in death cells, in all of Europe’s fearful prisons and pens. But now, in the piercing wind, victors and vanquished alike felt the chilling doubts that invariably attend man’s deliberate killing in the name of justice.

9 p.m. The eleven men for whom this night held no dawn ate a last supper of potato salad, sausage, cold cuts, black bread and tea. At 9 p.m., the prison lights were dimmed. At 10:45, U.S. Army Security officer Colonel Burton C. Andrus walked across the prison courtyard to set the night’s lethal machinery in motion. The whole prison was permeated by the thought of impending death. (The Courthouse movie announced the next day’s attraction: Deadline for Murder.)

Just then Hermann Göring was crunching a phial of potassium cyanide (no one knew where it came from). When guards and a chaplain rushed into his cell, he was dying. Meanwhile, near Nürnberg’s old imperial Castle, a band of German children hung Göring in effigy. Then they burned the makeshift scaffold and silently marched around the fire, watching it scatter weird shadows among the rubble.

In the small gymnasium of the jail (its floor dusty, its walls dirty grey), three black gallows had been erected with more attention to numerology than to efficiency. The platforms were eight feet apart, stood eight feet above the ground, measured eight feet square. From each platform rose two heavy beams, supporting a heavy crosspiece with a hook for the rope in the middle. An inconspicuous lever served to open the traps. The space beneath the traps was hidden by curtains. 1:11 a.m. Two white-helmeted guards led Joachim von Ribbentrop from his cell down the corridor and across the courtyard. He walked as in a trance, his eyes half closed. The wind ruffled his sparse grey hair. Overhead, the same wind whipped clouds into bizarre patterns.

At 1:11 a.m. he entered the gymnasium, and all officers, official witnesses and correspondents rose to attention. Ribbentrop’s manacles were removed and he mounted the steps (there were 13) to the gallows. With the noose around his neck, he said: “My last wish … is an understanding between East and West. . . .” All present removed their hats. The executioner tightened the noose. A chaplain standing beside him prayed. The assistant executioner pulled the lever, the trap dropped open with a rumbling noise, and Ribbentrop’s hooded figure disappeared. The rope was suddenly taut, and swung back & forth, creaking audibly.

The executioner was U.S. Master Sergeant John C. Woods, 43, of San Antonio, a short, chunky man who in his 15 years as U.S. Army executioner has hanged 347 people. Said he afterwards: “I hanged those ten Nazis . . . and I am proud of it. … I wasn’t nervous. . . . A fellow can’t afford to have nerves in this business. . . . I want to put in a good word for those G.I.s who helped me . . . they all did swell. . . . I am trying to get [them] a promotion. . . . The way I look at this hanging job, somebody has to do it. I got into it kind of by accident, years ago in the States ”

2:14 a.m. During Nürnberg’s preliminary deliberations, the British had opposed hangings: their long experience in political executions (Essex, Sir Thomas More, Charles I, Robert Emmet, Nathan Hale) had taught them that posterity remembers the victim’s dramatic last appearance better than the execution cause. The condemned at Nürnberg did not fail to make the most of their chance. While the late Joachim von Ribbentrop was still swinging from the first gallows, Field Marshal General Wilhelm Keitel, in well-pressed uniform and gleaming boots, mounted the second scaffold briskly, as though it were a reviewing stand, and said: “. . . More than two million German soldiers went to their deaths for the Fatherland. I follow now my sons.”

Then Ernst Kaltenbrunner: “… I have loved my German people and my Fatherland with a warm heart. . . . Germany, good luck. . . .” Then Philosopher Alfred Rosenberg, who had nothing to say. Then Hans Frank: “I am thankful for the kind treatment during my imprisonment and I ask God to accept me with mercy.” Then Wilhelm Frick: “Long live eternal Germany!” Then Julius Streicher, who looked wild-eyed and yelled “Heil Hitler.” When asked for his name, he roared: “You know it well.” From the gallows he jeered: “Purim Festival 1946”-and: “The Bolsheviks will hang you one day.” As the black hood was placed over his head, his raucous voice could be heard saying: “Adele, my dear wife.” At 2:14, the trap swallowed him. Reported Sergeant Woods: “. . . He kicked a little while, but not long.”

Later, it was charged that the executions had been cruelly bungled. Cecil Catling, correspondent for London’s Star (a veteran crime reporter and an expert on hangings), declared that there was not enough room for the men to drop, which would mean that their necks had not been properly broken and that they must have died of slow strangulation. In addition Catling claimed that they were not properly tied, so that some hit the platform with their heads as they went down and their noses were torn off. The U.S. Army denied his story.

2:57 a.m. Woods and his assistants seemed to be getting impatient as they moved from one scaffold to the other, using a new rope for each man. At 2:26 it was Fritz Sauckel’s turn. When summoned for his last walk, he had refused to dress, so he went to the gallows coatless. He cried: “I am dying innocent. . . . I pay my respects to U.S. soldiers and officers, but not to U.S. justice.” (Conflicting versions claimed that he did not mention “U.S. justice but “U.S. Jews.”) Then Colonel General Alfred Jodl. Then, finally, Arthur Seyss-Inquart, who limped as he mounted the steps. He said, “I hope this execution is the last act in the tragedy of World War II. . . .” It was 2:57 when he was pronounced dead. Said Woods: “Ten men in 103 minutes. That’s fast work.” He added that he was ready for a “stiff drink afterwards.”

The sagging body of Hermann Göring was carried into the gymnasium on a stretcher. His skin showed a poisoned, greenish tinge. His toes were curled. After the official witnesses had taken a good look, he was carried behind a black curtain where the other ten corpses were waiting. Photographers took pictures of the bodies both dressed and naked. The photographs, labeled top secret, were taken to the Allied Control Council in Berlin. A few hours later, the corpses were removed in two vans, cremated and the ashes “secretly dispersed” at an undisclosed place.

Thus Death, as it must to all men, came to the eleven by whose instrumentality so many thousands had died (more horribly and without a chance for historic histrionics).*

The wind had blown through the night and swept away the clouds. The morning which the eleven did not see dawned clear and brilliant over Nürnberg, but it held neither cheer nor reassurance for the victors. They had permitted new doubts of Nürnberg’s justice to arise even out of this last, relatively simple business of hanging ten men by the neck. And they had given Germany a sense of victory when they permitted Hermann Goring to die not as they willed but as he willed.

*A Jewish early spring festival commemorating the story of Haman, a sth Century B.C. Jew-baiter and Prime Minister of Persia’s King Xerxes (Ahasuerus). The King finally had him hanged for his virulent anti-Semitism upon the intervention of Queen Esther, a beautiful Jewess. *In Ipswich, England, Tommy Hailstone, 12, was found by his sister last week, hanging by a cord in a storeroom. Said his father: “I believe Tommy had been reading in the papers about the Xiirnberg hangings and was staging a hanging himself.”