Beheadings in the Third Reich

[htk]

wasn't there a queue at the bloody nights at plotzenzee (sept 43) ?

[Paul53]

Waltenbachers research is invaluable i n this,him having researched the actual procedure of execution- the condemneds had to line up(Brandenburg/Görden-)and were processed accordingly.
The Spanner part of the discussion:Spanner simply used the possibilities that were given, yet with some insane overtones-he washed himself out of principle with his home-made soap,and had "trustworthy students"prepare the incoming material.

A detatched,cold personality that used whatever means available for his own goals-an anatomist, and nothing more.So much for Spanner.Probably he is not worth the amount of attention that has been given to him in this forum. Exit Spanner.

[fredric]

wasn't there a queue at the bloody nights at plotzenzee (sept 43) ?

Yes. Rev. Poelchau and others have described this execution. Condemned brought out in batches of 8. Long silent lines waiting in the dark as Poelchau blessed them before they were hanged. I also have a description of another large scale execution in Plotz where the writer, an artist observing the scene from a window, said the prisoners had to strip to their underwear, neatly fold and stack their clothes and wait, shivering, in a long line outside the execution shed. As a name was read the prisoner was led into the shed, heard the summary execution sentence and the scharfrichter did the rest with his fallbeil. And the line grew shorter. Intervals of about every 2-3 minutes until all were gone.

I recall seeing a painting in the Bendlerblock Memorial Center, Berlin, that showed a line of condemned women on their way to the execution building.

I also have heard the stories about the condemned in Nazi prisons sitting just separated from the fallbeil by a curtain until their name was read. Fernand Meysonnier, borreau of Algiers, also says that the condemned in Algiers sometimes had to sit only a short distance from the guillotine which was hidden by a curtain, until their name was read. The terror on their faces was incredible. It is altogether plausible that the only way to carry out the massive sentences was by lining up the the prisoners...and having guards keep the lines orderly...processing them like cattle in a slaughterhouse.

[Deliverance]

Not interested about soap in the slightest. Nothing to do with this topic at all really now was it. Very glad to see the administrators whipped everyone in on that deviation.

[Pete26]

wasn't there a queue at the bloody nights at plotzenzee (sept 43) ?

Yes. Rev. Poelchau and others have described this execution. Condemned brought out in batches of 8. Long silent lines waiting in the dark as Poelchau blessed them before they were hanged. I also have a description of another large scale execution in Plotz where the writer, an artist observing the scene from a window, said the prisoners had to strip to their underwear, neatly fold and stack their clothes and wait, shivering, in a long line outside the execution shed. As a name was read the prisoner was led into the shed, heard the summary execution sentence and the scharfrichter did the rest with his fallbeil. And the line grew shorter. Intervals of about every 2-3 minutes until all were gone.

I recall seeing a painting in the Bendlerblock Memorial Center, Berlin, that showed a line of condemned women on their way to the execution building.

I also have heard the stories about the condemned in Nazi prisons sitting just separated from the fallbeil by a curtain until their name was read. Fernand Meysonnier, borreau of Algiers, also says that the condemned in Algiers sometimes had to sit only a short distance from the guillotine which was hidden by a curtain, until their name was read. The terror on their faces was incredible. It is altogether plausible that the only way to carry out the massive sentences was by lining up the the prisoners...and having guards keep the lines orderly...processing them like cattle in a slaughterhouse.

That execution in Plotzensee was a special case where the condemned prisoner cell block was damaged by a bombing raid and the officials feared that the prisoners would escape. This did not represent a normal execution procedure at all. Under normal circumstances, the condemned were led out of their cells in the cell blocks one at a time by two guards and the new prisoners was brought into the execution room anteroom only after the previous prisoner had been executed and the body removed from the fallbeil, and the black curtain was closed.

Up to 1939 French guillotine executions were public and in case of multiple beheadings, the condemned had to witness the execution of the people before them. In the Third Reich the guillotine executions were always conducted within confines of a prison, and even if it true that in some location(e.g. Brandenbug) the executions were witnessed by selected members of the public, this was generally not the case elsewhere. I still believe that mass executions conducted by forming a line of prisoners entering the execution shed or building, waiting to be beheaded, is an anomaly, rather than the norm. That would only happen in my opinion if a bunch of prisoners were transferred from another prison and there was no room to place them inside the cells and they had to be executed immediately for whatever reason.

Keep in mind that researchers who describe these executions have to rely on the word of experts who are supposedly intimately familiar with all the details. Stanislav Motl, the author of the book "Svedek z Cely Smrti" visited the Brandenburg-Gorden prison and spoke directly with Dr.Thomas Reichel,who is the resident expert on the history of the prison. In case of Pankrac prison, a historian by the name of Dr. Ales Kyr is the resident expert on the prison history and Czechoslovak penology. Interestingly enough, not a word has been said about improper restoration of the fallbeil, or about the discrepancy between claims that the condemned males were executed in their underwear vs wearing only pants. And there is also the hook, which was supposedly used to retrieve the heads from the basin, which is highly doubtful.

[vinnievega]

RE: Plotzensee Prison massacre

During the air raid of early Sept 1943, the execution shed was heavily damaged and the fallbeil was no longer serviceable. In order to prevent escapes from the badly damaged prison and to mollify Hitler who had complained about the lengthy appeals procedure, the Nazis hanged 186 of 300 condemned prisoners on the night of Sept 3rd - 4th, 1943. As was mentioned in an earlier post, the condemned were hanged on hooks in batches of eight. Over the following week, another 60 prisoners were executed by hanging. The executioner was Ernst Reindel

[Pete26]

Antonin Nerad, one of the assistants of Alois Weiss testified after the War that a state representative was timing each execution in Pankrac prison and when it lasted more than about 15 seconds, he admonished the executioner to pick up the pace. It is not clear if such timing was done at all fallbeil execution sites in the Third Reich, but it is entirely possible. This 15 seconds represented the time from the moment the condemned was turned over to the executioner to the time the blade fell and severed the head.

Because the usual interval between successive executions varied between 1 -2 minutes, removal of the body from the fallbeil bench, taking it out of the execution room, and fallbeil clean up and raising of the blade into locked position at the summit had to be done really quickly. This is why I concluded that the body was not left bleeding on the bench for too long after decapitation, and a rag or something similar was most likely thrown over the neck to stop blood from spurting all over the place. After the blood was hosed off the fallbeil, floor, and the wall tiles, one of the assistants probably wiped the bench and the blade dry with a towel and another one raised the blade. It was of course impossible to mask the acrid stench of blood and the floor remained wet, as is obvious from the description of one execution at Plotzensee, where water seeped under the lower hem of the closed black curtain and coppery odor of blood hung in the air. (As reported by a witness in the anteroom where the prosecutor sat at a table and verified the name of each victim).

In Pankrac prison, the dead bodies were carried into the adjacent room through a passage in the wall. In Plotzensee, the bodies were removed through a steel door into the adjacent room. In Wolfenbuttel prison, there was no door leading into an adjacent room from the execution room, so the last window was enlarged and converted into a door and bodies were most likely boxed directly in the execution room and taken directly outside, then most likely loaded onto a truck parked there. Or maybe there was a small shed built against that doorway. After the War, this doorway was walled up and converted back into the original window. This is quite obvious from several photographs of the Wolfenbuttel execution building taken during the War and after. There are no preserved photos of the outside of the Stadelheim execution building, but most likely there also was a doorway leading directly outside from the execution room, through which the bodies were removed and immediately loaded onto a truck.

The layout of each execution room is very similar: the room was divided into two parts by a black curtain, which could be opened by pulling a cord. The fallbeil bench was quite close to the curtain, as is visible in Pankrac photos. The reason for this is obvious - this way only one or two steps were required to drag the condemned to the fallbeil bench. Some execution rooms (e.g. Plotzensee, Pankrac, Brandenburg) also had a hanging beam with several hooks. Another black curtain was provided in front of the hanging beam, and when drawn closed it would hide the hanging victims from view. The hanging beam in Brandenburg-Gorden prison execution room was manufactured by Poldi-Kladno steel works in Czechoslovakia.

[Pete26]

It is obvious that not all people went to their death willingly or quietly. Some resisted and struggled. Here is a brief description of what a witness in a death cell in Brandenburg prison heard:

"The executions began. At intervals I could hear desperate screams, sounds of a short struggle, and repeated blows of the blade."

However, Nazis liked to state in the execution report that "the prisoner was composed and there were no incidents."

[Pete26]

Catholic priest Max Joseph Metzger, sentenced to death for high treason by the People's Court for his anti Nazi activities and beheaded in Brandenburg prison on 17 April 1944.

[Pete26]

Some time ago a video of a fallbeil located in the basement of some building was shown, and a German speaking man tells the visitor how the machine was used. The caption under this photo from the video says that this fallbeil is located in the basement of German Reichstag. If this is true, which fallbeil is this?

[htk]

Hi pete

I think this is from the dutch documentary Water and Fire.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VROzqoekKVQ
From 1.22 it's gets more interesting regarding our subject.

This has been discussed somewhere before (but dont ask me when this was)
The fallbeil is stored in a museum

regards

[Grootendorst]

It is stored in the Deutsches Historisch Museum, Zeughaus/Peibouw, Berlin Unter den Linden, in the depot.
So this must be the original Brandenburg fallbeil.

[Pete26]

Where is the basement that the fallbeil shown in the photo is located? Is this the basement of the Deutches Historich Museum? If yes, then the claim that this is the Reichstag basement is false. Why do you conclude that this is the original Brandenburg fallbeil?

[Pete26]

A senior prosecutor at the Special Court in Prague:

http://translate.google.com/translate?h ... CF0Q7gEwBg

[Pete26]

An interesting article on executions in Pankrac prison.

http://www.historickykaleidoskop.cz/1-2 ... -1989.html

There were three execution sites in Pankrac prison:

1. The courtyards behind the prison hospital and several other buildings , where execution post type gallows were erected

2. The guillotine execution site during 1943-1945. This site also had a hanging beam where an unknown number of persons were hanged by the SS. Alois Weiss did not perform any hangings.

3. The last execution site in the basement of the prison, built in 1954, where some political prisoners as well as common criminals were executed by hanging until 1989. The execution method was a short drop hanging - instead of a hanging beam, the noose was attached to a piece of pipe set in the wall and the condemned was dropped only about 2 ft (60 cm) through a small trap door controlled by a lever form the other side of the wall. This was apparently insufficient to break the neck vertebra. The executions were witnessed by the judge, prosecutor, the prison director, and a physician.

The bodies of executed were typically cremated and ashes held in urns in the prison for up to a year and if no one claimed them, they were destroyed.(This did not apply to Nazi executions where the ashes were dumped in a pit at the crematorium right after the cremation of bodies).

Between 1930 and 1938, 5 criminals were executed by hanging by the executioner Jozef Vasak.

Between 1943 and 1945, 1075 persons were guillotined by the Nazi executioner Alois Weiss.

After WWII, the first Pankrac prison executioner became Frantisek Nenahlo. He performed this function through 1946. He hanged Karl Herman Frank in 1946.

During the communist era in the 1950s and 1960's there were several executioners. Some notable ones are executioner Vladimir Trunda, who executed Milada Horakova in 1950, and executioner Frantisek Skorepa who executed Rudolf Slansky.

The name of the last Pankrac prison executioner is not known. He performed this function until 1989, when the death penalty was abolished in Czechoslovakia.