The Nazi Hunters Read Online Free PDF Page A

Abruptly the groans ceased and the rope stopped moving. Smith and the other witnesses were convinced that Woods had grabbed Streicher and pulled down hard, strangling him.
    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 neckwould 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 andthis 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