The Nazi Hunters (4 page)

Had something gone wrong—or was this no accident? Lieutenant Stanley Tilles, who was charged with coordinating the Nuremberg and earlier hangings of war criminals, later claimed that Woods had deliberately placed the coils of Streicher’s noose off-center so that his neck
would not be broken during his fall; instead, he would strangle. “
Everyone in the chamber had watched Streicher’s performance and none of it was lost on Woods. I knew Woods hated Germans . . . and I watched his face become florid and his jaws clench,” he wrote, adding that Woods’s intent was clear. “I saw a small smile cross his lips as he pulled the hangman’s handle.”

The procession of the unrepentant continued—and so did the apparent mishaps. Sauckel, the man who had overseen the vast Nazi universe of slave labor, screamed defiantly: “I am dying innocent. The sentence is wrong. God protect Germany and make Germany great again. Long live Germany! God protect my family.” He, too, groaned loudly after dropping through the trapdoor.

Wearing his Wehrmacht uniform with its coat collar half turned up, Alfred Jodl only offered up the last words: “My greetings to you, my Germany.”

The last of the ten was Arthur Seyss-Inquart, who had helped install Nazi rule in his native Austria and later presided over occupied Holland. After limping to the gallows on his clubfoot, he, like Ribbentrop, presented himself as a man of peace. “I hope that this execution is the last act of the tragedy of the Second World War and that the lesson taken from the world war will be that peace and understanding should exist between peoples,” he said. “I believe in Germany.”

At 2:45, he dropped to his death.

Woods calculated that the total time from the first to the tenth hanging was 103 minutes. “
That’s quick work,” he declared later.

While the bodies of the last two condemned men were still dangling from their ropes, guards brought out an eleventh body on a stretcher. It was covered by a U.S. Army blanket, but two large bare feet protruded from it and one arm in a black silk pajama sleeve was hanging down on the side.

An Army colonel ordered the blanket removed to avoid any doubt about whose body was joining the others. Hermann Göring’s face was “still contorted with the pain of his last agonizing moments and his final gesture of defiance,” Smith reported. “They covered him up quickly and
this Nazi warlord, who like a character out of the Borgias, had wallowed in blood and beauty, passed behind a canvas curtain into the black pages of history.”

• • •

In an interview with
Stars and Stripes
after the hangings, Woods maintained that the operation had gone off precisely as he had planned it:

“I hanged these ten Nazis in Nuremberg and I am proud of it; I did a good job. Everything went A1. I have . . . never been to an execution which went better. I am only sorry that that fellow Göring escaped me; I’d have been at my best for him. No, I wasn’t nervous. I haven’t got any nerves. You can’t afford nerves in my job. But this Nuremberg job was just what I wanted. I wanted this job so terribly that I stayed here a bit longer, though I could have gone home earlier.”

But in the aftermath of the hangings, Woods’s claims were fiercely disputed. Smith’s pool report left no doubt that something had gone wrong with Streicher’s execution, and probably also with Sauckel’s. A report in
The Star
of London claimed that the drop had been too short and the condemned men were not properly tied, which meant they hit their heads as they plunged through the trapdoor and “
died of slow strangulation.” In his memoirs, General Telford Taylor, who helped prepare the International Military Tribunal’s case against the top Nazis and then became the chief prosecutor in the subsequent twelve Nuremberg trials, pointed out that the photographs of the bodies laid out in the gym seemed to confirm such suspicions. Some of the faces appeared to be bloodied.

This prompted speculation that Woods had bungled some parts of the job. Albert Pierrepoint, the British Army’s highly experienced hangman, did not want to criticize his American counterpart directly, but he did refer to newspaper reports of “
indications of clumsiness . . . arising from the unalterable five-foot drop and the, to me, old-fashioned four-coiled cowboy knot.” In his account of the Nuremberg trial,
German historian Werner Maser asserted that Jodl took eighteen minutes to die, and Keitel “as much as twenty-four minutes.”

Those claims did not tally with Smith’s pool report, and some of the
subsequent accounts of the hangings may have deliberately exaggerated or sensationalized what went wrong. Still, the hangings were hardly the smooth operation that Woods insisted he had carried out.
He tried to deflect the criticism prompted by the photographs by saying that sometimes victims bit their tongues during hangings, which would account for the blood on their faces.

The debate about Woods’s performance only underscores the issue that several of the condemned men raised in the first place: why was hanging chosen over the firing squad? Woods was genuinely convinced about the virtues of his trade. Obermayer, the young GI who had known Woods when he carried out earlier executions, recalled “
a more-or-less drunken moment” when one soldier asked the hangman whether he would like to die at the end of a rope or by some other means. “You know, I think it’s a damn good way to die; as a matter of fact, I’ll probably die that way myself.”

“Aw, for Christ’s sake, be serious, that’s nothing to kid about,” another soldier interjected.

Woods wasn’t laughing. “I’m damn serious,” he said. “It’s clean and it’s painless, and it’s traditional.” He added: “It’s traditional with hangmen to hang themselves when they get old.”

Obermayer was not persuaded about the putative advantages of hanging over other forms of execution. “Hanging is a special kind of humiliating experience,” he said, looking back at those encounters with Woods. “Why so humiliating? Because when you die, all your sphincters lose their elasticity. You become a shitty mess.” In his view, it was hardly surprising that the top Nazi officials at Nuremberg pleaded so desperately for the firing squad instead.

Nonetheless, Obermayer was convinced that Woods was sincere in his belief that he was carrying out a job that needed to be done with maximum efficiency and decency. Pierrepoint, his British counterpart, whose father and uncle had plied the same trade, made a similar claim at the end of his career: “
I operated, on behalf of the State, what I am convinced was the most humane and dignified method of meting out death to a delinquent,” he wrote. Among Pierrepoint’s victims during his tour in
Germany were the “Beasts of Belsen,” including the former commandant of Bergen-Belsen Josef Kramer and the infamously sadistic guard Irma Grese, who was only twenty-one when she went to the gallows.

Unlike Woods, Pierrepoint lived to an old age, and eventually turned against the death penalty. “Capital punishment, in my view, achieved nothing except revenge,” he concluded.

Obermayer, who had returned to the United States before the hangings at Nuremberg, remained convinced that Woods approached all of his assignments, including his most famous one, with professional detachment. It was “just another job for him,” he wrote. “I’m sure his approach to it was much more like that of the union workman who stands on the slaughtering block in a Kansas City packing house than that of the proud French fanatic who guillotined Marie Antoinette in the Place de la Concorde.”

But in the aftermath of the war and the Holocaust, it was hardly surprising that the notions of revenge and justice were often intermingled, whatever the motives of the executioners themselves.

As for Woods, he was proved wrong in his prediction about how he would die. In 1950, he accidentally electrocuted himself while repairing a power line in the Marshall Islands.

“
If this Jewish business is ever avenged on earth, then have mercy on us Germans.”

Major Wilhelm Trapp, the commander of Reserve Police Battalion 101, one of the most notorious German killing squads in occupied Poland

I
t wasn’t just “this Jewish business” that prompted cries for revenge as the Allied armies made their final push into Germany, although the maniacal, methodical implementation of the Final Solution against an entire race of people was in a category of its own. Every country that had been overrun by Hitler’s troops—its citizens terrorized and murdered, many of its cities and towns reduced to rubble—had ample motivation to seek payback. In particular, the Nazis’ treatment of
Untermenschen
, the Slavic “subhumans” to the east who were to be enslaved and worked or starved to death, triggered the fury of the Soviet Union’s Red Army.

Hitler’s policies of mass murder in the newly conquered territories and brutal treatment of Soviet POWs, which ensured that most Red Army troops quickly became convinced that capture meant near certain death, constituted a generous gift to Stalin’s propaganda efforts to whip up hatred of the invaders.

In August 1942, Ilya Ehrenburg, a war correspondent for the Red Army newspaper
Krasnaya Zvezda
, penned his most famous lines: “
Now we know. The Germans are not human. Now the word ‘German’ has become the most terrible swear word. Let us not speak. Let us not be indignant. Let us kill. If you do not kill the German he will kill you. . . . If you have killed one German, kill another. There is nothing jollier than German corpses.”

Before the term “Nazi hunters” first surfaced, there was hunting for Nazis—or more accurately, hunting for Germans. There was little time or inclination to draw distinctions between the rank-and-file troops and civilians and their military and political leaders. The motive was simple: victory and vengeance. But as Hitler’s armies encountered growing resistance and their ultimate defeat looked more and more likely, the Allied leaders began grappling with the issue of how far to push the doctrine of retribution, how many should pay the ultimate price for their country’s crimes.

When the foreign ministers of the Big Three powers met in Moscow in October 1943, they agreed to jointly try major German war criminals while others who were responsible for more geographically circumscribed atrocities would be “
sent back to the countries in which their abominable deeds were done.” Although this Moscow Declaration set the stage for future trials, Secretary of State Cordell Hull left no doubt that he saw any judicial proceeding for the top political leaders as a mere formality. “If I had my way, I would take Hitler and Mussolini and Tojo and their arch-accomplices and bring them before a drumhead court-martial,” he declared to the delight of his Soviet hosts. “And at sunrise on the following day there would occur an historic incident!”

At the Tehran conference six weeks later, Joseph Stalin charged that Winston Churchill, who had drafted the key language of the Moscow Declaration, was too soft on the Germans. As an alternative, he proposed the kind of solution that he so freely applied in his own country. “
At least fifty thousand—and perhaps a hundred thousand—of the German command staff must be physically liquidated,” he declared. “I propose a salute to the swiftest possible justice for all Germany’s war criminals—justice
before a firing squad! I drink to our unity in killing them as quickly as we capture them. All of them!”

Churchill immediately expressed his outrage. “I will not be party to any butchery in cold blood,” he said. He went on to distinguish between the war criminals who “must pay” and those who had simply fought for their country. He added that he would rather be shot himself “than sully my country’s honor by such infamy.” President Franklin D. Roosevelt tried to defuse the tense moment by making a lame joke. Perhaps, he proposed, the two leaders could arrive at a reasonable compromise on the number of Germans to be shot—“say, forty-nine thousand, five hundred.”

But by the time of the Yalta summit in February 1945, the positions of Churchill and Stalin on what to do with Nazi war criminals had undergone a seemingly startling evolution. Guy Liddell, head of counterespionage at MI5, had kept wartime diaries that were only declassified in 2012.
According to his entries, Churchill backed a plan put forward by some of his officials that “certain people should be bumped off” while others would be imprisoned without resorting to Nuremberg trials. What was meant by “certain people” was the top Nazi leadership. Summing up the reasoning behind this recommendation, Liddell wrote: “This would be a much clearer proposition and would not bring the law into disrepute.”

As Liddell’s diary makes clear, this created an odd realignment of the Big Three. “Winston had put this forward at Yalta but Roosevelt felt that the Americans would want a trial,” he wrote a few months after the summit. “Joe supported Roosevelt on the perfectly frank grounds that Russians like public trials for propaganda purposes. It seems to me that we are just being dragged down to the level of the travesties of justice that have been taking place in the USSR for the past 20 yrs.”

In other words, Stalin saw Roosevelt’s push for trials as just another opportunity to replicate the Soviet show trials of the 1930s, which was exactly what Churchill wanted to avoid—even at the price of authorizing summary executions of top Nazis without any judicial process. Although the Americans would prevail, setting the stage for Nuremberg, the seeds of doubt about those proceedings had already been planted.

• • •

In the final stage of the war, much of the Red Army gave full vent to their fury. They had fought for nearly four years on their own soil, enduring staggering losses and watching the devastation wrought by the German invaders. Then, as they mounted their drive for Berlin, their enemy refused to surrender to the inevitable. German troops died in record numbers—
more than 450,000 in January 1945 alone, the month when the Soviet Union launched its largest offensive of the war. This was more than the United States lost during the entire war on all fronts.

That was no accident. The Nazi leaders had stepped up the terror against their own people to force obedience to Hitler’s order to resist till the end. New “
Flying Courts Martial of the Führer” traveled to threatened areas to order summary executions of soldiers who were suspected of desertion or undermined morale, effectively allowing them to shoot almost anyone. This was an eerie echo of Stalin’s orders to carry out frenzied executions of his own officers and men during the German offensive against his country, ostensibly for the same reasons. Although undermanned and completely outgunned, German units kept inflicting heavy casualties on the attackers.