Hitler’s executions of his
victims
The first two volumes of my memoirs are titled, WHISTLING IN THE FACE OF ROBBERS which
includes approximately 450 words each. There are six volumes of my memoirs altogether
beginning in January 1933 and ending in the first decade of the Twenty-first
century. In two thirds of the text
in each of my volumes of my memoirs, I describe historical events beginning in
January 1933 and ending in the first decade of the Twenty-first Century. The
other one third of the text in my books is about my own life. In this article
that I am submitting to you, is an excerpt of the true story of the executions
relating to criminals and the conspirators who attempted to kill Hitler on July
20, 1944. Their executions were pretty gruesome but then, Hitler was also
pretty gruesome. In the book there is no space between the paragraphs but in this article, I have spaced the paragraphs. And now, the excerpt of the story taken from Volume Two.
___________________________________
In Plötzensee, (a prison located in a suburb
northwest of downtown Berlin, the prison named after the suburb) as in other prisons,
executions were usually carried out in the early mornings. The condemned person
had to be informed of the impending execution the evening before by a public
prosecutor in the presence of other officials. An official report of this
meeting was recorded. After this, the condemned prisoners were transferred to a
special wing in House III, called the House
of the Dead, where they were closely guarded and later bound and could only
be visited by their attorney and the prison chaplain. At dawn, prison guards
led the condemned persons, their hands tied behind their backs, one by one to
the execution shed (one story brick building divided into two large rooms) next
to House III. (a wing of the prison). There the verdict was pronounced in front
of the assembled persons and the prison chaplain was given the opportunity to
say a short prayer. Next, the executioner's helpers grabbed the victim and
placed him on a bench and his or her head secured in a hole of the guillotine Then
the executioner did his work. An official report of the proceedings was
recorded and the body released to the Institute of Anatomy and Biology of the
Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin. In 1933, Adolf Hitler had a
guillotine constructed and tested on a condemned man. He was impressed enough
to order 20 more constructed and which were then pressed into immediate
service. National Socialist records indicate that between 1933 and 1945,
16,500 people were executed by guillotine in Germany and Austria.
The
actual act of beheading the prisoner took only a few seconds. The falling blade
would take approximately a 70th of a second to fall. It would take
approximately 2/100th of a second to slice through the neck of the
victim. The precise post-execution lifespan of the human brain will depend on
how much oxygen, and other chemicals were in the brain at the point of
decapitation; however, eyes could certainly move and blink. A person could in
theory remain self-aware of what has happened to him or her for several
seconds. There is no consistency in this answer, as the precise length of both actual
and practical survival will vary depending on the victim and how fast the
oxygen in the blood in the brain of the victim is used up.
On February 17,
1937, the guillotine arrived in Plötzensee Prison from Bruchsal prison, where
executions had previously been performed, and was erected in the execution
shed. Beheadings nevertheless still took place prior to that date. On June 14,
1934, Richard Hüttig, age 26, was beheaded with an axe in the prison yard of
Plötzensee Prison. He belonged to the Communist group, Rotfrontkämpferbund (Alliance of Red Front Fighters) and was
tried before the Special Court in Berlin for having allegedly shot and killed
an SS leader during a penal expedition by the SA and SS in his residential
district. The Special Court admitted as its grounds for its decision that it
could not be proven that Hüttig, who had been unarmed, had committed the deed.
In spite of this, Richard Hüttig was sentenced to death on February 16th
1934, for ‘severe breach of the public peace and attempted murder, which in
those days was a capital offence.
From
February 17, 1937 on, the number of executions in Plötzensee and elsewhere
increased rapidly. By March 1940, Plötzensee had already seen 277 executions
since 1933. Three years later, the executioner in Berlin
no longer submitted invoices for these ‘services’ annually but every month. For
example, there were 114 executions in March and 124 in May of 1943.
In late 1942,
facilities were provided for hanging up to eight people simultaneously in the
execution shed. The first victims executed in this manner were members of the Harnack/ Schulze-Boysen resistance
group.
When the guillotine in Plötzensee was
damaged in an air raid during the night of September 3-4, 1943, over three
hundred people were awaiting their execution in House III, which itself was
severely damaged. During the raid, three of them succeeded in escaping but were
apprehended shortly thereafter. This raid seemed to affirm the circular order
issued by new Reich Minister of Justice Otto Thierack on August 27, 1943, which
provided for accelerated execution of death sentences due to the risk of
further air raids.
Thus on September 7th, 1943, the
Reich Ministry of Justice, acting at Hitler's personal request, resolved to
shorten clemency proceedings in the manner proposed by Thierack, and to execute
all condemned prisoners in Plötzensee in rapid succession. To save time in
forwarding the death warrants, the names of the condemned were relayed by
telephone from the Reich Ministry of Justice to Plötzensee where the
responsible public prosecutor compared them with prepared lists. Sometimes
there were mistakes. During the first night, the 186 persons executed included
four whose clemency proceedings had not yet been completed.
Since the guillotine could only be
repaired a few weeks later, the prisoners were hanged. Protestant cleric Harald
Poelchau described the executions which took place during the night of
September 7-8, 1944.
“As darkness fell
on September 7th the executions began. The night was cold. Every now
and then the darkness was lit up by exploding bombs. The beams of the
searchlights danced across the sky. The men were assembled in several columns
one behind the other. They stood there, at first uncertain about what was going
to happen to them. Then they knew. Eight men at a time were called by name and
led away. Those remaining men hardly moved at all. On one occasion that night,
the executioners interrupted their work because bombs thundered down nearby.
The five rows of eight men already lined up had to be confined to their cells
again for a while. Then the executions continued. All the men were hanged. The
executions had to be carried out by candlelight because the electric lights had
failed. It was only in the early morning at about eight o'clock that the
exhausted executioners paused in their work, only to continue with renewed
strength in the following evening.” unquote
The prisoners weren't hanged from scaffolds as there wasn't enough room
in the execution shed for scaffolds. Instead, the victims were each made to
stand under a meat hook by the windows that was screwed into an iron I-beam
about 12 inches below the ceiling. There were eight such hooks in a row. Two
executioners then grabbed each victim by his or her upper legs, lifted
them upwards a couple of feet while a third executioner placed the end of the
loop of the thin rope or piano wire onto the hook while the larger loop at the
other end of the rope or wire was placed around their victim's necks. The
victims were then dropped a foot or so to strangle until they suffocated to
death. Most would be dead within eight or ten minutes.
A group of foreign convicts
in Plötzensee included about a dozen young Belgians and Frenchmen sentenced to
death for burglary. They belonged to the large contingents of slave laborers
from the many occupied eastern and western European countries, some of whom
were abducted to Germany and some of whom had been lured there with false promises.
Most of them were about 20 years old and had been in Berlin for varying periods
of time before being accused by the Gestapo of committing a series of
burglaries and thefts. Two of them, the Frenchman Gaston Deflin and the Belgian
Richard Havron, had not even reached the age of eighteen. Deflin had worked in
Germany since the age of fifteen and, like most of the others, had no police
record. He visibly suffered from malnutrition and, answering a questionnaire
through his interpreter, stated that he had only stolen because of hunger.
Despite this, the Special Court's prosecutor at the Regional Court, Berlin,
petitioned the court to sentence Deflin and Havron to death because,
“considering their precocious Latin hereditary traits, they were “obviously to
be regarded as equivalent to persons over the age of eighteen.”
On July 23rd,
1943, eleven convicted prisoners were executed in Plötzensee, among them Deflin
and Havron. Deflin's mother had since heard of her son's arrest through unknown
channels. She appealed to the director of the Plötzensee prison in an urgent
letter, requesting information and assistance. The callous indifference of the
response sent to her in August 1943 by the prison director via the German
embassy in Paris requires no further comment: “The particular deterrent to the
general public that the state of war dictates in the interest of preserving
public security has required this sacrifice from you.” That statement was mean
and cruel.
After air raids had severely damaged
the execution site in Plötzensee in September 1943, the penitentiary in
Brandenburg-Görden was declared the new central execution site for the appellate court district of Berlin.
Plötzensee was intended to serve as execution site only for sentences of the
People's Court and the Special Courts in Berlin. Yet with the mass executions
after the assassination attempt of July 20, 1944, Plötzensee again became a
focal point of National Socialist
capital punishment. Between August 1944 and April 1945, 86 death sentences
against conspirators and accessories to the unsuccessful attempt were carried
out, along with executions for other offenses.
In the subsequent days, Hitler's police rounded up the remaining
conspirators, many of whom were tortured by the Gestapo to reveal their
confederates and then hauled before the Volksgericht
(People's Court) to be screamed at by the dreaded Nazi judge, Roland Freisler.
The sound film tells no lies, and this entire court scene was filmed and
exhibited. Hoepner later explained his account of how he had objected to
his court-martial sentence and had demanded that he be given a chance to be
heard. He could justify himself, he had said; “I am not a Schweinehund.” (pig
dog) as Freisler screamed that he was. “You
are not a Schweinehund?" Roland Freisler wearing his bright red robes
stretched in his judge's seat and spitefully barked at the defendant: “Well,
then, if you don't want to be a Schweinehund, tell us what zoological class you
consider to be your proper category?” Hoepner hesitated briefly. With the sound
camera grinding away, Freisler pursued his point. "Well, what are you? An
ass?” Nowadays, a judge who acted like that during a trial would be benched
permanently.
One
day the camera people of the Deutsche Wochenschau (German newsreel) received an
order from the then Reich film superintendent, Hans Hinkel, to make films of
the court proceeding of July 20, 1944; it was allegedly to be shown in the
newsreel. The camera man later said;
“We were taken to the People's Court, and
there we were told to make sound-film takes and close-up shots of the
proceedings, as inconspicuously as possible. We installed temporary lighting,
and set up our sound camera behind the doors, so as to make the shots through a
hole. One camera-man was to make close-up shots and shots of the general
atmosphere in the court-room.” unquote
Then the Reich film superintendent chose
which of the camera-men was to do the filming. He also noted the number of feet
of film used for each sequence, so that he was sure every bit of footage was
handed over to him. The president of the People's Court, Dr. Freisler,
consented enthusiastically to the idea of films being made and agreed that by
all means everything was to be filmed.
The footage began with the defendants being
led into the court. Their handcuffs being taken off and their seats assigned to
them. Then the two other judges arrived including the chairman and also court
president, Dr. Freisler, and the trial started. Every major defendant had to be
filmed with the sound camera.
During the first recess, the film
superintendent, Hans Hinkel,and the president of the People's Court asked how
the pictures had turned out. He had to inform the president that he had shouted
too loud at the defendants, so that it was not possible for the
sound-modulation man to get a balance between the shouting voice and the low
voices of the defendants. Unfortunately, the president of the court continued
his shouting at the other sessions, so that what was taken was technically
inadequate
There were two
days of proceedings before the People's Court. The defendants were visibly
exhausted from the interrogations and torture. Freisler had them brought before
the court in tattered clothes, accompanied every step of the way by two
policemen. None of the defendants were allowed to speak without interruption,
if any of them were even permitted to speak at all. The defense attorneys were
not prepared to give their clients any meaningful assistance which was probably
out of fear.
Fortunately, many bad things
finally come to an end. Fate being as it is, Roland Freisler came to a
fitting end nine months later. On the 3rd of February 1945, he was
conducting a Saturday session of the People's Court, when American bombers were bombing Berlin.
Government and Nazi Party buildings were hit, including the Reich
Chancellery, the Gestapo headquarters, the Party Chancellery, and yes, the
People's Court. According to one report,
Freisler hastily adjourned court and had ordered that that day's prisoners to
be taken to the nearby shelter, but he paused to gather that day's files.
Freisler was then killed when an almost direct hit on the building caused him
to be struck down by a beam in his own courtroom. His body was reportedly found
crushed beneath a fallen masonry column, clutching the files that he had tried
to retrieve. Among those files was that of Fabian von Schlabrendorff, a member of the
20 July Plot
who was on trial that day and was waiting for the sentence of death to be
passed onto him by Freisler. He was returned to the Plötzensee Prison. Fortunately for him, he
survived the war.
On
August 8, 1944, Erwin von Witzleben, Erich Hoepner, Hellmuth Stieff, Albrecht
von Hagen, Paul von Hase, Robert Bernardis, Friedrich Karl Klausing, and Peter
Graf Yorck von Wartenburg were sentenced to death by hanging immediately after Freisler
pronounced his verdict. They were then taken to Plötzensee for immediate
execution.When their executions began under the auspices
of so-called special actions, it caused fear and unrest in the entire prison.
All told, about 180 to 200 plotters were shot
or hanged at Plötzensee and those who were hanged were viciously hung from the
eight great meat hooks with piano wire around their throats.
A camera-man, Sosse, one of the camera people who had to film the executions,
described how the conspirators were hanged. He described this way;
“The
building, which must have been heavily damaged previously by air raids, had
been put together again in a make-shift way. The room was about 13 feet wide
and 26 feet long. A black curtain divided this room in two. Only a little
daylight came in through two small windows. Immediately in front of these two
windows were eight hooks in the ceiling, and from these the condemned were to
be hanged. There was also a contrivance in the room for beheading. It
wasn’t used then because strangling with piano wire around their necks was
Hitler’s preferred method of execution for these men.
“A former general was the first prisoner to be led through the black
curtain into the small make-shift room by the windows. Two executioners brought
him to the hooks. Moments earlier, the prosecutor had once more read the death
sentence to each of the condemned men in the ante-room, with the words:
'Defendant, you have been sentenced by the People's Court to death by hanging.
Executioner, perform your function.'
“The defendant went to the end of the room with his head high, although
urged by the hangmen to walk faster. After arriving there, he had to make an
about-face. Then a piano wire loop was placed around his neck. He was then
lifted upwards by two of the executioner's assistants. The upper loop of the
piano wire was attached to the hook on the ceiling. The prisoner was then
dropped with great force, so that the noose tightened around his neck
instantly.” unquote
In
my opinion, death came very slowly as it's unlikely that his neck was broken
with such a short drop. When Saddam, the dictator of Iraq was hanged, the
hangman placed a soft piece of black cloth around his neck before he placed the
rope around his neck just before he was dropped to his death.
The first sentence had been carried out and filmed, a narrow black curtain was
drawn in front of the hanged man, so that the next man to be executed would not
see the first one dangling at the end of the rope, possibly still twitching
right after the second condemned man arrived. (I don’t think the curtain would serve its purpose since the second man
while standing under his hook would see the previous man beside him still
twitching.) The executions were carried out in very rapid succession. Each
doomed man walked his last steps erect and manly, without a word of complaint.”
unquote
For his participation in the 20 July plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler
at the Wolf’s General Wolf-Heinrich
von Helldorf who had been at the Lair Volksgerichtshof
was condemned by Roland
Freisler and later put to death at Plötzensee Prison. So enraged was Hitler at his
participation in the plot that Hitler ordered that he be forced to watch all
the others hanged before him so that he would see in advance the suffering he
would have to endure.
On the 20th of July, von Helldorf was
in communication with the coup d'état plotters. His place was to command his
Berlin police during the coup, and not interfere with the military takeover.
Then he was to aid the new government.Only the most important of the remaining
executions were filmed, again on order of the then Reich film superintendent.
Nine camera-men took turns in making the films. This was because every
camera-man disliked the assignment and didn't want to return to the execution
chamber.
The report is based on the statement of a prison warden. If the macabre details of
the execution appear in my book, it is only because they typify the satanic
cruelty of the man who ordered them. The prison warden first describes the
place of execution; “Imagine
a room with a low ceiling and white-washed walls. Below the ceiling a rail was
fixed. There were several windows a
short distance from the rail. From it hung eight big hooks, like those
butchers use to hang their meat. In one corner stood a movie camera with
reflectors casting a dazzling, blinding light; like those in a photographic
studio. The camera was in the corner so that even though a black curtain
covered the front of each of the condemned men hanging from the hooks, the
camera filmed the areas behind the black curtains. In this strange, small room
was where the Prosecutor General of the Reich, the hangman with his two
assistants, two camera technicians, and I myself with a second prison warden
stood. At the wall there was a small table with a bottle of cognac and glasses
for the witnesses of the execution.
“The convicted men were led in. They were wearing their prison garb, and
they were hand-cuffed. They were placed in a single row while the hangman got
busy. a second prison warden stood next to him.
“One after another, all ten took their turn.
All showed the same courage. It took, in all, 25 minutes. The camera worked
uninterruptedly since Hitler wanted to see and hear how his enemies had died.” unquote
He
had had the executioner come to him at the Reich Chancellery and had personally
arranged the details of the procedure: “I want them to be hanged, hung up like
carcasses of meat.” Those were his words.”
Apparently Hitler who was at that time,
staying in his large apartment in an apartment building in Berlin, enjoyed
himself immensely when he saw the film of the hangings of the conspirators from
the meat hooks when they flailed their legs in the air as they strangled while
the piano wire cut into the flesh of their necks. Goebbels on the other hand,
turned his face away from the screen.
In
October 2006, while my wife and I were in Berlin, I visited the scene of those
executions. The Plötzensee Prison is located on the northwest outskirts of
Berlin. The bus I took from the center of Berlin headed to the suburb of
Plötzensee and I arrived at the prison in about half an hour. The day was
bitterly cold and raining. From the bus stop, I walked down a lane towards the
large prison and after a short walk. I saw an opening on my right that led to
the yard that was surrounded by a high wall where the execution shed had been
built. I faced a large white wall in which the name of the execution site was
named. It turned out that near the end of the war, a bomb landed very close the
eastern part of the red brick building and some of the building was destroyed
so years later, a wall was built at the end of the building.
The building is divided into two parts. I
entered the first part of the building through a large opening. No door was
attached to it. At the other end of the large room were two windows at the
center of the south wall that wee round
at the top and flat at the bottom. Across the ceiling at that end of the
building was a large heavy iron bar. Attached to the bar were five meat iron
hooks. Originally there were eight of them but as I mentioned earlier, that end
of the building was destroyed. In 1944, it was from those eight hooks that the
condemned were hanged by piano wire.
When I was in the building, there were flowers in planters nearby.
Along two walls in the second
part of the building were printed articles in English (behind glass) written
about some of the more than 2900 people who were executed in that building. One
story will remain in my mind forever. The victim was a young man who found a
purse near the body of a dead woman lying on the sidewalk next to a bombed
building. He picked up the purse to look inside and was spotted by the police.
He was arrested and taken directly to a court. He was convicted of stealing the
purse. The penalty then for taking anything from a dead body was death. He was
sentenced to death and taken to the Plötzensee Prison. The next morning, he
along with other five other prisoners were taken to the execution shed. The
piano wire was looped around his head and the two guards who had lifted him up
by his legs, placed the smaller loop at the other end of the piano wire onto
the hook and then dropped him and he slowly strangled to death.
Normally
the executioner came twice a week to carry out the executions of the condemned
waiting in the prison for their deaths. His name was Roettger. He didn't so
much walk as creep when he walked about. He always wore a three-quarter length
jacket. He had executed thousands of condemned persons. He was given a bonus of
80 Marks (approximately $8.00 for 80 marks) for every person he executed along
with extra cigarette rations. He always had a cigarette in his mouth. His
helpers were big strong men. They would bring the hog-tied victims to the
gallows. Two prison wardens would lead each of the condemned from their cells
to the execution shed. Each of his assistants got eight cigarettes for doing
this. A man named Appelt acted as overseer in the death building. The prisoners
called him 'the fox.' He loved to pop up suddenly and check their bonds that
had secured them. He was always lurking around.
I
entered the second half of the building and it didn’t have the hanging
apparatus in that part of the building because it was in that room that the
guillotine was previously used. It was no longer there. Almost 3000 people died
in that two-room building.
As
I stood alone in that terrible building with the cold wind blowing through it
and while thinking of the horrors that took place there, I began to shiver. The
grey sky outside added to the gloom I was experiencing.
After being invited to tour
prisons in the United States as a criminologist, I sat on the electric chair in
Florida and in the gas chamber in California. Those experiences weren’t as
eerie as when I was in the small brick execution building in Berlin.
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