THE TERRIBLE STORY OF THE HANG MAN OF THE NAZIS "THE PSYCHOPATH THAT HANGED NAZIS"

 THE TERRIBLE STORY OF THE HANG MAN OF THE NAZIS "THE PSYCHOPATH THAT HANGED NAZIS"

 The Psychopath That Hanged Nazis

The Interesting Career of United States Army Executioner John C. Woods and The Men He Hanged at Nuremberg

Nuremberg Palace of Justice
Fuerther Str. 110
Nuremberg, Germany
October 16, 1946
1:13 a.m.

Wilhelm Bodewin Johann Gustav Keitel, former Chief of the High Command of the Armed Forces, stepped into the gymnasium of the Palace of Justice, a place that was practically in the backyard of the courts in which he had been tried, convicted, and sentenced to death.

He was number two of the ten men who would die by the rope that morning. By his side, two American guards held him by the arms. He still would’ve been standing upright if they had been allowed to let go of him. He did not flounder in posture nor in temperament.

He held an rect figure that displayed preparedness, and this being all very according, for perhaps in his mind he held the creed that he had been born a soldier, lived a soldier, and now was to die a soldier, regardless of the fact that he was given a criminal’s death by the rope rather than a soldier’s death by the bullet.

He walked up to the gallows with the stride of professional soldiery, emitting the pride of that distinct Prussian military heritage that could only be associated with the likes of him. But the stride was all he had, having nothing else to show for it.

He wore his old Field Marshall’s uniform though it was naked of any distinction, the whole attire having been stripped from the collar tabs to the medals shortly before the beginning of the trials. Walking to the black gallows whose thirteen steps awaited him, the scene was platformed with a collage of U.S. military officials — a commanding officer overseeing the hanging, a clergyman, guards, and a hangman; a small committee of the international press was also present.

Next to his appointed scaffold, stood a duplicate scaffold that had no party on its business floor. A long rope held taught, going through the empty square of space where a man’s feet once stood, the feet of Joachim von Ribbentrop, formerly Hitler’s foreign minister.