“Many of us, when we see the headline, picture this: a trial in one of the spacious halls of the city of Nuremberg. At the trial, a military tribunal of representatives of four countries, a judge who listens to the indictments, Nazi bigwigs in their uniforms and headphones, study the translation from unfamiliar languages, say something in their defense.”
“But this is just the cover of a more global process. This is only for the most significant war criminals. And what about other express executions without trial? Not all captured Nazis made it to court. This is logical. Many were not going to surrender, resisting even in a hopeless situation and received a saving bullet in the forehead or a burst of machine gun fire all over the body.”
“Secondly, mainly soldiers and officers of the Wehrmacht were taken prisoner, as well as people from those detachments of the Italian, Croatian, Hungarian, Bulgarian, Romanian, and Finnish corps in 1940, who were not exposed in places of genocide of the civilian population and in locations where people were tortured.”
“And if the opposite is true? Who will sort it out here, even if they were not SS men? Ordinary soldiers were captured in such places. Those who captured them didn’t think about any kind of convention. They simply shot the enemy or jabbed him in the stomach for three reasons at once. First, emotion. Second, place. Third, the absence of a commander. War wrote everything off.”
“There was such a case with one soldier who captured a prisoner only on his eleventh sortie. His relatives had been killed by the Nazis, and his sisters had even been raped before that. This soldier’s name was Tikhonov, and he beat the floodplains with his fists, but he couldn’t restrain himself after observing what remained after the Nazis’ reprisals against the civilian population.”
“And it is better not to describe here what ordinary Japanese soldiers did in the captured territories. It’s not for nothing that the Japanese sought to commit suicide even before they were captured. Even after Germany’s official surrender, people were executed without trial or investigation right there for no reason, and it didn’t even matter that someone threw down a rifle or machine gun and raised their hands up as expected.”
“According to the Geneva Convention, war criminals were sentenced to death by firing squad, who were arrested by military units that simply did not have the ability to bring the surrounded, surrendered Nazis to the place where the trials were held. For example, there were too many who surrendered, and there were enough reinforcements in this small town.”
“What kind of work? If you think that after the official capitulation, absolutely everyone who fought for the Third Reich surrendered, then you are deeply mistaken. As for the Forest Brothers, for example, they were finished off in 1947. And I don’t particularly bother about the passing of everyone, the murderers themselves and their accomplices, and even those who had to help them, because everyone whose relatives died or even suffered greatly, having reached the gun, were ready to carry out lynchings. Even official courts were ready to sentence indirect accomplices to the death penalty, not just criminals, but as a reduction in punishment, they were precisely the ones who were shot. If a bullet hit a vital organ during a swarm outbreak, then the person was finished off with a shot in the head. He didn’t have time to really feel any suffering.”
“But hanging implied a more painful execution. Hanging was the first such method of removing a person from the world of the living, used by the ancient Celts back in the Iron Age. It wasn’t an execution at all, but a sacrifice, and to which the victim agreed. Lidi Prim. For commoners, nobles had their heads chopped off with an axe, and for people of royal blood, with an extremely sharp sword.”
“Sending them to heaven happened in a split second. There was no torment, not a gram of shame, but those who had committed even less terrible atrocities were hanged. Real villains were generally quartered, burned or drowned, and sometimes within an hour. In the East, a person remained disabled, even for theft, their hand was chopped off for each episode.”
“After all, it was the instrument of crime. Also, in some Islamic countries, a rapist still has his genitals publicly chopped off. The instrument of crime against virginity, the genital organ, is cut off. In short, in less civilized centuries, hanging wasn’t even considered something special. An infernal execution for people of all classes below the nobility in modern and contemporary times, hanging continued to be a symbol of shame, hinting at the low status of the convicted person.”
“Even when people in the West stopped dividing into castes based on genealogy in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, hanging continued to associate the convicted person’s crime with something particularly vile. For example, even now in some countries there is both execution by firing squad and hanging.”
“Execution by firing squad is considered a more honorable form of punishment, while hanging sent fascists of various nationalities to the gallows, made it clear that these are second-class people who violated the laws established by humanity. This is a key point. Remember this because, compared to execution by injection with a lethal drug, and for many, the electric chair, hanging seems more terrible not only in the physical but also in the moral aspect.”
“Where is the guarantee that a person will be able to leave life quickly and gracefully? No one has such a guarantee, except perhaps a lady with a particularly graceful neck that will immediately break, or a similarly skinny person with a normal, especially a river, neck. And the ladies, for example, one senior warden, for a long time, puffed.”
“Many bigwigs, SS men, or servicemen of various ranks from other units had to twitch for a long time and comically in convulsions in front of the crowd and wet their pants. For such people, suffocation occurred in the range of 14 to 28 minutes, that is, many vital functions, the most primitive, were accessible to them.”
“Their brains were the first organ to die from lack of satisfactory respiratory activity, that is, oxygen. The fact is that there was usually a large row somewhere on the hanging places to avoid long preparations. The bodies of trucks served as bridges. There were many rows. I mean, you didn’t have to wait for a person’s complete death to be removed from the hanging in order to send him to someone else.”
“This is something with Toto, making faces when a person was elevated to the scaffold. After him, they hung calmly with their heads hanging crookedly and their eyes bulging as much as possible. And we also often forget about posthumous shame. According to the decision of the Soviet post-war tribunals, hanged men were required to decorate public places in all cities affected by the Nazis.”
“The VRI noted that the residents of Riga pulled down the pants and underwear from the corpse of Yelny, the main organizer of Nazi terror and mass murder in the Baltic cities, presenting him to the world, so to speak, more openly. This military official then ensured that the dead were not left for long, and very timely.”
“In other settlements in the western part of the Soviet Union, dead bodies were cut off at night. Armed forces, which acted and that’s far from all of it. It would seem that such a banal punishment would be humane. In European countries, it would not have been banned. The chronicle preserved a report on the peculiarities of the death of various German occupiers.”
“The execution of most of the world’s most famous fascists, especially the SS, was led by a hereditary British doctor, Albert Pierpont, leaving records of asphyxia. The layer of cardiac arrest compressed the recurrent nerve, strongly bulging eyes – this is a sign. A person could die from catastrophically increased cranial pressure because of it, without even waiting for death from oxygen starvation, especially if he had already suffered enough concussions during life.”
“That is, people often went to their forefathers not even from asphyxia, the most important instrument of execution, but from a heart attack, stroke, or fracture of the cervical vertebrae. The latter outcome, although painful, was. But the fastest at the end of this section, it is imperative to add for you something else noteworthy that executioners specializing in the gallows still have many types of boas, including those with sliding or fixed knots.”
“Execution lo and pitchfork kam bym gallows, but aggressors from the Third Reich or those who carried out orders from there awaited more terrible death punishments. Which, having reached the devastation, prisoners of death camps or the surviving inhabitants of burned villages in the West of the USSR often executed them with whatever first came to hand.”
“An axe, a crowbar, and a saw were always stored somewhere separately. While a service station entrenching tool in a shed right next to the door. And often, due to all kinds of work, villagers or concentration camp prisoners forced to work with it daily did not let go of it. Many fascists did not manage to shoot them. There was nothing to shoot at once. Old men without a top, without a head, were completely unidentifiable.”
“The bodies of SS men, policemen, and other punishers were before the photographer. They were about to die from dozens of wounds. Of course, a quick fate, but for some time, a person experienced unbearable pain. Only those who fainted from the pain shock were saved. Therefore, further on, we will talk about the reprisals against the Nazis, during which the condemned was doused with water so that he would come to his senses and continue to experience hell.”
“A short journey involving a horse, but not on horseback. Once, when captured German soldiers were forced to build an airfield in their midst, representatives of the civilian population who suffered at the hands of the police identified a guard of the death camp, a certain Kolychev. He learned a lot of German, changed into the uniform of a dead Wehrmacht soldier in time, and successfully pretended to be someone covered by all the provisions of the Geneva Convention.”
“His problem was that the airfield was being built near a concentration camp, and some locals knew him by sight. So, his special diligence in work did not save him. The executioner was overpowered by local peasants who brought in carts everything necessary for the specified work. Then they informed the first lieutenant, Lika, who was in charge.”
“Therefore, after listening to all the information about what was happening in that concentration camp, he came up with this. He ordered Kolychev to be firmly tied to the horse’s tail. This was carried out with particular care in front of a large crowd of villagers. Then he scared the horse so that it would run away naked.”
“And surprisingly, this execution, characteristic of the first half of the Middle Ages, lived in the memory of people. Death under iron tracks. Traitors aroused the same hatred among the people as the Nazis themselves. They were simply laid out in a row, and then they crushed them with tanks, this fact is recorded in the chronicles and it was useless.”
“The partisans massively exterminated all prisoners. Why such formalities? The forest Avengers never made noise and saved ammunition, time, and wooden materials. Therefore, it is not difficult to guess that neither the firing squad nor the gallows, as the most humane forms of execution in that war, were no longer offered to strangers.”
“As it was the most charming execution – a knife in the heart or climbing over the throat, but to the deep regret of the partisans of the EU occupiers. It was in winter. The prisoners were stripped to the skin, their scrotums were cut off, and after putting it in their mouths, they waited for the body to stiffen, and then such sculptures were used to decorate the roads, which were still used by other Nazis.”
“But what about in the warm season, the executions were even more cruel the more they allowed themselves to do so, their comrades were sent to hell. Hell is when you burn a bunch of prisoners, well tied up, then cover them with a little diesel fuel. Although the Armed Forces tried to protect it in the most cruel, even before the first Nazis set foot in the Balkans, heads were cut off from living people.”
“What kind of execution could they expect if they themselves disfigured the Serbs like that? According to the report, the Partisans were particularly cruel. I witnessed policemen being beaten until they bled, cut with knives, set on fire, their hair tied to their feet, and lassoed with a horse. The Polesie Partisans, most of them carried out treasury work without any expense, drowning captured aggressors in swamps, and some of the Nazis cleared minefields made by their fellow soldiers for them.”
“Fascists or collaborators ran back and forth under the threat of a well-aimed shot to the head. Fedorov’s Partisans, a terrible terror. Fedorov’s detachment not only derailed trains and carried out other sabotage, but also surrounded small enemy combat units. He executed everyone in such a unit except one. The last one, foaming at the mouth, was supposed to frighten Nazis from whom he temporarily broke away, terrible memories from which he probably could never sleep normally again, what awaited the Nazis at Fedorov’s, their fingers, legs, olives, hair, heads set on fire, after which, with the help of a horse and Arkan, lochi loudly wailing, everything was especially sad, traitor, the word that can cause the greatest rage, because he strikes in the back, and even secretly broken notes for just a prelude to the torment for such people if they ended up in the hands of the forest Avengers, then this person was processed with ordinary sticks, he screamed and writhed in pain. But this was not the end.”
“Then they moved on to blows with a club or logs on the head for a long time, they tried not to touch it, from this the condemned could faint or die, on the contrary, if a Nazi lost consciousness, then his okawa with ice water and continued for clarity, an excerpt from the Diary of one commander of a partisan detachment at the headquarters of the unit baptized a spy who was brought in early in the morning after my baptism.”
“The escaped partisans destroyed this bastard with sticks, beat him, pushed him with clubs, and even poured boiling water on him. At that time, they brought the burgomaster, a loyal servant of the Germans, in the evening, he was brought to the headquarters of the unit here. The partisan hand beat this scoundrel with whatever they could.”
“In addition, they poured boiling water on him in the American zone. So-called death squads operated in the American zone of occupation, led by Major Merej Bens, who dreamed of Rask Veta for the exterminated Jews. The total number of those executed by the squadron is unknown; some American historians believe there were several thousand of them.”
“Prim killed the discovered Nazis in exotic ways; some were thrown out of windows to the sound of whistles and hoots from Kanye; others were drowned; they could blow up with a grenade or simply have their throats slit, in addition to the squadron and the rest of the American soldiers acted harshly, to put it mildly. This especially concerned the German tankers and, although about a hundred captured tankers were shot by the verdict of the tribunal, many simply did not live to see the trial, dying.”
“Inhuman beatings often resulted in the smashing of many heads in concentration camps. The most original execution of captured Nazis was the punishment of the executioners of the concentration camps. They were forced to carry and bury, often half-decomposed, bodies without protective equipment. Liberated or released prisoners of concentration camps were dealt with cruelly.”
“Without weapons, people exhausted by constant torture and humiliation beat their tormentors with shovels and sticks, drowned them in wells, strangled them with ropes, had their throats broken, and their heads smashed with stones. Some were chained alive to posts and beaten to death. The executioners were often simply torn apart.”
“There are known cases of guards being placed in torture racks for beatings and themselves being beaten to death. How the main executions took place. On October 1, 1946, the verdict of the international tribunal was announced. 12 of the 24 convicted were sentenced to death, among them Nazi number D Reichsmarschall and head of the Luftwaffe Hermann Göring.”
“Nazi number 3 Rex, Minister of the Eastern Occupied Territories and one of the leading ideologists of Nazism; Alfred Rosenberg, Minister of Foreign Affairs; Joachim von Ribbentrop, Chief of the Reich Main Security Office; Himmler’s Deputy; Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Chief of Staff of the Supreme Command; Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel; Chief of Staff Rust of the Wehrmacht; Colonel General Alfred Jodl, Governor General of Occupied Poland; Hans Frank Reis, Protector of Bohemia and Moravia and Minister of the Interior; Wilhelm Frick, Gauleiter of Franconia; Julius Streicher, Commissioner for the Netherlands and head of Austria; Artur Seyss-Inquart, Reis Commissioner for Labor; Fritz, the deadline for filing a petition for clemency. October 15, 1945, was the last day for the main Nazi criminals. The execution took place in the Nuremberg gymnasium, where three gallows had been installed beforehand; two were operational and one was a spare.”
“The gallows led 13. The lower part of the structure was fenced off with boards and covered with a tent so that those present could see it. It opened with the press of a lever. A professional executioner, US Army Sergeant John Woods, a seemingly smiling, kind man, was appointed chief executioner. His assistant was Joseph Malta.”
“In the room where the execution took place, in addition to the prison authorities, a doctor, and a priest, two correspondents from each of the Czech countries, an ally, a doctor, and a military representative, were allowed in. In total, about four people had gathered. Two hours before the execution, the prison warden, US Army Colonel Beton Andrews, was informed that the prisoner, Göring, was showing no signs of life.”
“A capsule of poison had somehow gotten into the ring. Potassium cyanide had saved the Nazi from the gallows. They say Göring allegedly left a suicide note with the words, ‘Marshals don’t hang.’ A little over an hour before the execution, those included were offered a last supper of sausages with potatoes and pancakes with fruit salad. The execution itself began.”
“Around one o’clock in the morning on October 16, 1946, the prisoners were given the right to a final confession. Joachim Ribbentrop was the first to ascend the scaffold, having climbed the last 13 steps. His last words were: ‘God bless Germany!’ They placed a cap on his head and the executioner turned the lever. Arthur Seyss-Inquart was the last to be hanged.”
“Before his death, he said, ‘I hope that this execution will be the last tragedy of World War II and that what happened will serve as a lesson that peace and understanding must exist between peoples.’ I am in the arnitsa, one corpse, another condemned man, the other day, a noose around the neck, and yet, it was not without incident. It is unknown.”
“And it is unlikely that we will ever know the truth. Was this done on purpose or by accident? Strong Manila ropes were used for the execution. However, they turned out to be thick. They did not die from broken cervical vertebrae. What usually happens to those hanged, but directly from suffocation. As a result, the Nazi leaders had to suffer before their death.”
“It took the longest time to die. Field Marshal Keitel, Woods’ assistants even tied a sandbag to his legs for more than 20 minutes. To speed up the process, a stretcher with Göring’s body was brought in after the execution and symbolically placed in front of the gallows. Then the ropes on which the criminals were executed, along with their clothes, were placed in a coffin.”
“The corpses were photographed again in one of the Munich bodies of the Nazi leaders were cremated during the day before sending the next coffin to the oven. It was opened by representatives of the allied countries that the person named was lying in the coffin, after which the coffin with the body was consigned to the fire.”
“They say that upon returning home to the United States, Wood was offered several thousand dollars for each rope from those on which the main Nazis were hanged. However, the executioner, in response to all tests and promises, he answered with dignity that rope belonged to the hanged and was going with him to the crematorium, which was true.”
“A slightly conspiracy story came out with the ashes of the Nazis. According to the official reports, the ashes of the Nazi leaders were scattered from an airplane in an unknown location. However, according to testimony, on October 17, a cordon of American soldiers was posted around midnight.”
“A truck drove onto the bridge from which boxes were unloaded. The contents of the boxes were poured into the waters of the canal. Locals assume that these were the remains of the leaders of Nazi Germany.”
