October 16th, 1946.
1.11 a.m.
A converted gymnasium in Nerburgg prison.
Three black wooden gallows stand under bright lights in a room that was used for basketball games just 3 days earlier.
The first condemned man walks through the door flanked by two army sergeants.
His name is Yaim von Ribbentrop, Hitler’s foreign minister, the man who helped start World War II by signing non-aggression packs and declaring war.
His hands are bound with leather straps.
His face is white as chalk.
He climbs 13 wooden steps to the platform.
The noose goes around his neck.
The trap door opens.
He drops.
But something goes wrong.
The drop isn’t long enough.
His neck doesn’t break cleanly.
Behind a black curtain concealing the space below the gallows.
Witnesses hear sounds that will haunt them forever.
Groaning, struggling, choking.
Yokim von Ribbentrop is dying slowly by strangulation and nine more men are waiting their turn.
This is the story of the Nuremberberg executions when 10 of history’s worst war criminals face justice on the gallows.
And I’m warning you now.
What happened in that gymnasium and how these men died will disturb you beyond measure.
But here’s what makes this story even more shocking.
The executioner was a fraud.
Master Sergeant John C.
Woods lied about his experience, botched multiple hangings, and may have deliberately made the condemned men suffer.
Some took 28 minutes to die.
Some hit their faces on the trapoor as they fell, bleeding and conscious.
Some wet themselves in terror before the drop.
And one Herman Guring, Hitler’s designated successor, cheated the gallows by swallowing cyanide hours before his scheduled execution.
Before we dive in, subscribe and hit that notification bell because this is the story of how Nazi Germany’s leadership faced their final moments.
The incompetent executioner who bungled their deaths in the controversial question that still haunts us.
Should we care that war criminals died painfully? November 20th, 1945, 11 months before the executions.
The first Nermberg trial begins in the Palace of Justice, a massive courthouse in Nuremberg, Germany.
The location was chosen deliberately.
Nuremberg had been the site of massive Nazi party rallies.
Hitler held his most spectacular propaganda events there.
The Nuremberg laws stripping Jews of citizenship were announced there.
Now, Nuremberg would become the place where Nazi leadership faced judgment.
24 defendants sat in the dock, though only 21 would actually stand trial.
Robert Lelay, the head of the German labor front, hanged himself in his cell before trial began.
Gustaf Crup, the industrialist, was deemed too ill to stand trial.
Martin Borman, Hitler’s secretary, was tried in absentia because his whereabouts were unknown.
The remaining 21 defendants represented the entire Nazi power structure.
Herman Guring, Reich’s marshall and Hitler’s designated successor, sat at the far left of the first row, prisoner number one, the lead defendant.
Next to him sat Rudolph Hess, Hitler’s former deputy, who had flown to Scotland in 1941 in a bizarre attempt to negotiate peace.
Then Yoim von Ribbentrop, the foreign minister.
Then Bill Helm Kaidle, chief of the Vermacht High Command.
The second row held more infamous names.
Ernst Colton Bruner, who succeeded Reinhardt Hydrickch as head of the Reich Security main office and oversaw the Holocaust’s final phase.
Alfred Rosenberg, the Nazi party’s chief ideologist.
Hans Frank, the butcher of Poland, who ruled the general government and ordered the murder of millions.
Wilhelmfrick, who drafted the Nermberg laws.
The defendants also included admirals, generals, ministers, governors, and Julius Striker, the pornographic anti-Semitic newspaper publisher.
These were the architects of genocide, the planners of aggressive war, the administrators of the Holocaust.
The charges were unprecedented.
Crimes against peace, meaning planning and waging aggressive war.
War crimes, meaning violations of the laws of war.
Crimes against humanity, meaning murder, extermination, enslavement, and persecution of civilians, and conspiracy to commit these crimes.
The trial lasted 10 months.
Prosecutors presented overwhelming evidence.
Film footage of concentration camps shot by Allied forces during liberation.
Testimony from survivors.
Documents signed by defendants ordering mass murder.
The Einots group in reports detailing the systematic shooting of over a million Jews in the Soviet Union.
The Wan conference minutes outlining plans for the final solution.
Some defendants claimed that they didn’t know about the Holocaust.
Others said they were following orders.
Most blamed Hitler, who had conveniently committed suicide in his Berlin bunker 6 months before the trial began.
But the evidence was undeniable.
These men had known.
These men had participated.
These men were guilty.
On October 1st, 1946, after 216 court sessions, the International Military Tribunal delivered its verdicts.
19 defendants were convicted.
Three were acquitted.
Of those convicted, 12 were sentenced to death by hanging.
Martin Borman, Trident Absencia.
Hans Frank, Wilhelmf Frick, Herman Guring, Alfred Yodel, Chief of Operations for the Vermach High Command, Ernst Cenbrer, Wilhelm Kitle, Yoke Von Ribbentrop, Alfred Rosenberg, Fritz Sle, who organized slave labor, Arthur Seinquart, Wright Commissioner of the Netherlands, and Julius Striker.
When
the death sentences were read, reactions varied.
Guring smirked and shrugged.
He had expected it.
Ribbonrop went pale and trembled.
Kitle told the old soldier stood at attention and accepted his fate.
Striker laughed.
The condemned men were returned to their cells to wait.
Under Allied law, sentences had to be carried out between 7 and 15 days after final judgment.
The executions were scheduled for October 16th, 1946, just past midnight.
For 2 weeks, the condemned men lived knowing exactly when they would die.
Some wrote final letters.
Some prayed with chaplain.
Some maintained defiance.
And Herman Guring began planning his escape.
Not a physical escape.
There was no way out of Nuremberg prison.
But Guring refused to give the allies the satisfaction of hanging him.
Throughout the trial, Guring had been the dominant personality in the dock.
He was intelligent, charismatic, defiant.
He cross-examined witnesses.
He defended Nazi ideology.
He rallied the other defendants right up to the end.
He maintained his arrogance.
After sentencing, Guring wrote multiple letters requesting that his death sentence be changed from hanging to firing squad.
He argued that as a soldier, he deserved a soldier’s death, not the hangman’s noose, which was reserved for common criminals.
The requests were denied.
Hanging was specified in the tribunal’s charter.
All death sentences would be carried out by hanging.
So Guring activated his backup plan.
For months, possibly since his arrest, Guring had hidden a cyanide capsule.
How he got it, how he kept it, despite being searched repeatedly.
How he concealed it from guards who watched him 24 hours a day through a window in his cell door, nobody knows for certain.
The most likely theory is that an American guard was bribed.
But Guring never revealed his source.
On the evening of October 15th, just hours before his scheduled execution, guards checked on Guring multiple times.
At 9:30 p.
m.
, journalists were permitted to observe the condemned men in their cells.
Guring appeared to be sleeping, his hands visible outside his blankets as required by prison rules.
At 10:45 p.
m.
Manstein, if I might be, the guard looked the wrong looked through the window and saw Guring still apparently asleep.
But something was wrong.
At 10:50 p.
m.
, the guard noticed Guring twitching.
He called for the corporal and they rushed into the cell.
Guring was convulsing, his face contorted, his body in spasms.
The doctor arrived within minutes, but there was nothing to be done.
Guring was dying.
He had bitten down on a cyanide capsule.
The poison worked quickly.
Within minutes, Herman Guring was dead 2 hours before he was scheduled to hang.
Guards found a small brass cartridge case near his body containing the broken glass vial.
They also found several letters Guring had written.
One was addressed to the prison commandant explaining that he had possessed the cyanide since his arrest and had always planned to use it rather than submit to hanging.
Another letter was addressed to his wife.
The contents of these letters were never fully released to the public.
Guring suicide enraged the American authorities.
They had wanted him to hang.
They had wanted the world to see the mighty Rice Marshall broken and humiliated on the gallows.
Instead, Guring had won one final victory.
He had cheated the hangman.
He had died on his own terms.
And in doing so, he had forced a change to the execution schedule.
One gallows now stood empty.
10 men would hang instead of 11.
At approximately 1:00 a.
m.
on October 16th, guards began moving the condemned men from their cells to the gymnasium.
The execution chamber was a converted basketball court.
approximately 33 ft wide by 80 ft long with cracked plaster walls.
Three black painted wooden gallows stood in the room.
Two would be used alternately to speed up the process.
The third was a spare in case of mechanical failure.
Each gallows consisted of a platform 8 ft high and 8 ft square reached by climbing 13 wooden steps.
From a cross beam hung a rope with a noose of 13 coils.
The standard military execution protocol called for a trap door beneath a condemned person.
When the lever was pulled, the trap door would open and the person would drop.
If the drop distance was correctly calculated based on the person’s height and weight, the sudden stop would break the neck at the second or third cervical vertebrae, causing instant death.
This was called the long drop method, perfected by British executioners.
But the American military used a different method called the standard drop.
The drop was shorter, only 4 to 6 feet instead of the 8 to 10 ft used by the British.
This meant that death came from strangulation rather than a broken neck.
It took longer.
It was more painful, but it was considered acceptable by American military standards.
The executioner in charge of the Nuremberg hangings was Master Sergeant John C.
Woods, a 35-year-old enlisted man from Kansas.
Woods claimed to have extensive experience as an executioner, telling Army officials he had assisted in multiple civilian hangings in Texas and Oklahoma.
None of this was true.
Woods had lied to get the job.
He had no documented experience as a hangman.
He had learned about hanging from watching cowboy movies as a child.
But the army never verified his claims.
They needed someone to execute 10 Nazi war criminals.
Woods volunteered and they gave him the job.
Woods was assisted by Joseph Malta, a 28-year-old military policeman.
Together, these two men would carry out the 10 executions between 1:11 a.
m.
and 3:00 a.
m.
, roughly 2 hours, for all 10 condemned prisoners.
The first name called was Yawakim von Ribentrop.
Guards entered his cell, removed his handcuffs, and bound his hands behind his back with leather straps.
Ribbonrop was escorted from his cell through a courtyard and into the gymnasium.
When he entered the execution chamber, two army sergeants immediately closed in on either side, gripping his arms.
Ribbentrop appeared composed at first.
Then he saw the three black gallows.
His face went white.
His apparent stoicism crumbled.
An officer standing at the foot of the gallows asked him to state his name.
Ribentrop didn’t answer.
The officer repeated the question.
Ribbonrop almost shouted, “Yo, came von Ribbonrop.
” His voice cracked with fear.
He climbed the 13 steps without hesitation, but his legs were shaking visibly.
On the platform, he was positioned beneath the noose.
The executioner placed the rope around his neck.
Ribbentrop was asked if he had any last words.
He said, “God protect Germany.
God have mercy on my soul.
My last wish is that German unity be maintained, that understanding between east and west be realized, and there be peace for the world.
The words came out in a rush, desperate pleading.
Then the black hood was pulled over his head.
The trap opened, ribbon dropped.
Behind the black curtain, concealing the space below the gallows.
Witnesses heard sounds, groaning, the rope creaking as the body swung.
The execution took longer than it should have.
Ribbentrop didn’t die quickly.
After several minutes, the sounds finally stopped.
The prison doctor, a US Army physician, went behind the curtain to examine the body.
At 1:29 a.
m.
, 18 minutes after Ribbon entered the chamber, he was pronounced dead.
18 minutes.
A properly executed hanging should take less than 5.
Ribbentrop had strangled to death slowly while witnesses listened and nine more men were waiting.
Field Marshall Wilhelm Kitle entered the execution chamber at 1:44 a.
m.
He was 64 years old, the highest ranking military officer among the condemned.
Kaidle had signed orders for countless atrocities, including the Commando Order authorizing the execution of captured Allied commandos and the commasar order authorizing the execution of Soviet political officers.
Over two million Soviet PS died in German custody under conditions Kaidle had approved.
But Kaidle went to his death as a soldier.
He walked steadily between his guards, shoulders back, posture erect.
When asked his name, he stated it clearly and firmly.
He mounted the steps without hesitation.
On the platform, standing beneath the noose, Kiteel spoke his final words.
I call on the Almighty God to be considerate of the German people.
Show them mercy.
Over two million German soldiers went to their death for the fatherland before me.
I now follow my sons.
All for Germany.
The reference to his sons was particularly moving.
Both of Kitle’s sons had been killed in action during the war.
Now their father would join them in death.
The hood was placed over his head.
The trap opened.
Kao dropped and behind the curtain the horrible sounds began again.
Groaning, struggling, the rope creaking with the weight of a body fighting for air that wouldn’t come.
Wilhelm Kitle took longer to die than Ribbon Drop.
Much longer.
Witnesses later reported that Kaidle’s execution took approximately 24 to 28 minutes from the moment the trap opened until the doctor pronounced him dead.
28 minutes of slow strangulation.
Some accounts claim that during those agonizing minutes, witnesses could hear Kaidle praying behind the curtain, his muffled voice crying out to God.
At 2 a.
m.
, Ernst Colton Bruner climbed the gallows.
At 6’7 in tall, Colton Bruner was the largest of the condemned men, a giant with a scarred face and imposing presence.
As head of the Reich Security main office from 1943 until the wars end, Colton Bruner had overseen the Gestapo, the SD, and the administration of concentration camps.
He bore direct responsibility for the murders of millions.
At his trial, he claimed ignorance of the Holocaust despite overwhelming evidence proving his involvement.
Now he faced the consequence.
When asked if he had final words, Colton Bruner said, “I have loved my German people and my fatherland with a warm heart.
I have done my duty by the laws of my people.
I am sorry this time my people were led by men who were not soldiers and that crimes were committed of which I had no knowledge.
” Germany, good luck.
The excuse that he hadn’t known was pathetic.
The evidence had proven he knew everything.
The hood went over his head.
The trap opened.
Because of Calton Bruner’s unusual height, the drop was slightly longer than for previous executions.
He died more quickly than Ribbonrop or Kitle, though still not instantly.
The doctor pronounced him dead at 2:12 a.
m.
, 12 minutes after entering the chamber.
At 2:17 a.
m.
, Alfred Rosenberg walked to the gallows.
Rosenberg was the Nazi party’s chief racial theorist, the man who provided the ideological justification for genocide.
His book, the myth of the 20th century, was second only to minecom as required Nazi reading.
Rosenberg had served as Reich minister for the occupied Eastern territories, overseeing the murder and enslavement of millions of Slavs and Jews.
Of all the condemned men, Rosenberg was the only one who made no statement on the gallows.
He simply stood there silent as the noose was placed around his neck.
Some witnesses interpreted his silence as acceptance of his fate.
Others saw it as stubborn defiance.
The trap opened.
Rosenberg dropped.
He was pronounced dead.
At 2:31 a.
m.
, 14 minutes after entering the chamber.
Next came Hans Frank at 2:38 a.
m.
As a governor general of occupied Poland, Frank had ruled over the deaths of millions.
He called himself the king of Poland and lived in Waw Castle in Crackoff like a medieval tyrant.
Under his administration, the Warsaw Ghetto was created, sealed, and liquidated.
Over 3 million Polish Jews and hundreds of thousands of ethnic Poles died under Frank’s rule.
But Frank underwent a strange transformation during his imprisonment.
He converted to Catholicism or perhaps reconverted and claimed to have rediscovered his faith.
He kept a detailed diary throughout his time as governor general, and during the trial, he testified against other defendants, seemingly eager to confess his crimes.
On the gallows, Frank’s final words were brief.
I am thankful for the kind treatment during my captivity, and I asked God to accept me with mercy.
He sounded almost relieved that his ordeal was ending.
The trap opened.
Frank was pronounced dead at 2:45 a.
m.
, 7 minutes after entering the chamber.
one of the quicker deaths.
At 2:53 a.
m.
, Wilhelmfrick entered the execution chamber.
At 69 years old, Frick was the oldest of the condemned men.
As Reich Minister of the Interior from 1933 to 1943, Frick had drafted the Nuremberg laws that stripped Jews of citizenship and laid the legal groundwork for the Holocaust.
He had signed decrees authorizing the euthanasia program that murdered over 70,000 disabled Germans.
He had overseen the annexation of Austria and the incorporation of occupied territories into the Reich.
Frick seemed the least steady of any of the condemned so far.
He stumbled on the 13th step of the gallows and had to be steadied by guards.
His only words were, “Long live eternal Germany.
” before he was hooded.
The trap opened.
He was pronounced dead at 3:00 a.
m.
7 minutes after entering.
Then came Julius Striker at 3:05 a.
m.
And the Striker was a special kind of evil.
As publisher of Dar Sturmer, the viciously anti-Semitic newspaper, Striker had spent decades poisoning German minds with hatred.
Week after week, year after year, his newspaper published grotesque caricatures of Jews, false accusations of ritual murder, pornographic stories about Jewish men defiling German women.
Historians credit Striker’s propaganda with creating the psychological conditions that made the Holocaust possible.
He had never personally killed anyone.
He had never run a concentration camp, but his words had murdered millions by making their murder acceptable to ordinary Germans.
Striker entered the execution chamber wearing a threadbear suit in a worn blue shirt buttoned to the neck, but without a tie.
He was ugly, dwarfish, malevolent.
While guards removed his manacles and bound his hands with leather, Striker glanced at the three gallows.
Then he looked around the room, his eyes resting on the witnesses.
He was swung suddenly to face them directly.
He glared.
Then he screamed, “Hile Hitler!” His voice echoed through the gymnasium.
The witnesses flinched.
Here in October 1946, 18 months after Hitler’s suicide, Julius Striker still proclaimed loyalty to the Furer.
An American officer asked if he had any last words.
When the interpreter translated, Striker shouted another phrase, “Purorumfest, 1946.
” This was a deliberate reference to the Jewish holiday of Purum, which celebrates the defeat of Hmon, an ancient Persian official who plotted to exterminate the Jews, but was himself hanged.
Striker was comparing himself to Hmon, suggesting that Jews had orchestrated his execution as they had orchestrated Hmon’s death.
Then Striker shouted one final phrase.
“The Bolsheviks will hang you one day.
” It was a prediction, a curse, a final attempt to inspire fear.
The black hood was pulled over his head.
Through the fabric, witnesses heard his muffled voice say, “Adele, Adele, my dear wife.
” The trap opened with a loud bang.
Striker dropped.
And then the sounds began.
Kicking, struggling, the ropes snapping taut with the body swinging wildly.
Groans could be heard from within the concealed interior of the scaffold.
The sounds went on and on.
Striker was taking an agonizingly long time to die.
After several minutes of listening to the horrible sounds, Sergeant Woods, the executioner, descended from the gallows platform, lifted the black canvas curtain, and went inside.
What happened behind that curtain has been debated for decades.
Some witnesses believed Woods grabbed Striker’s legs and pulled down hard, using his own body weight to accelerate the strangulation.
Others claimed Woods did nothing except check on the prisoner’s condition.
What’s certain is that Woods came out a few minutes later and informed the officer in charge that Striker was dead.
The room was given permission to smoke cigarettes.
They had been listening to a man gurgle and choke to death for approximately 20 minutes.
When a medic checked on Woods afterward, asking how he was handling the execution, Woods’s response was casual.
Wen’s cow.
At 3:20 a.
m.
, Fritz Saul climbed the gallows.
Sulle had been in charge of slave labor recruitment, forcibly deporting over 5 million people from occupied territories to work in German factories and farms.
Millions died from the brutal conditions.
Sulle’s last words showed a glimmer of recognition.
The abyss between the ideal of a social community, which I imagined, and the terrible happenings in the concentration camps has shaken me deeply.
I die innocent.
He died at 3:26 a.
m.
6 minutes after entering the chamb
er.
At 3:28 a.
m.
, Alfred Yodel walked to his death.
As chief of operations for the Bearemcked High Command, Yodel had signed orders for countless war crimes, including the execution of commandos and the implementation of the Commasar Order.
But Yodel maintained to the end that he was simply a soldier following orders.
His final words were defiant.
My greetings to you, my Germany.
He was pronounced dead at 3:45 a.
m.
17 minutes after entering.
Finally, at 3:50 a.
m.
, the last man approached the gallows.
Arthur Cai Sincquart had served as Reich Commissioner of the Netherlands from 1940 to 1945.
During his administration, over 100,000 Dutch Jews were deported to extermination camps.
Seace Inquart ordered the execution of hostages, authorized forced labor, and systematically looted Dutch resources.
He walked with a pronounced limp from an old injury.
His final words were brief.
I hope that this execution is the last act of the tragedy of the Second World War, and that the lesson taken from this world war will be that peace and understanding should exist between people.
He died at 4:00 a.
m.
By 4:00 in the morning, all of 10 condemned men were dead.
The bodies were photographed for official records, then placed in coffins.
Later that day, they were transported to a crematorium in Munich.
The bodies were cremated and the ashes were scattered in the Assar River.
No graves, no markers, nothing that could become a shrine for neo-Nazis.
The condemned simply ceased to exist.
But the controversy over the executions began immediately.
Journalists who witnessed the hangings, including Kingsbury Smith of the International News Service, reported that several executions appeared botched.
The drop seemed too short.
Some of the condemned took far too long to die.
Postexecution photographs showed that several of the men had suffered facial injuries.
Bloody marks on their faces suggesting they had hit the trap door or platform as they fell.
This should have been impossible with properly constructed gallows.
The trapoor opening should be wide enough that the condemned person dropped straight through without striking anything.
Either the trapoor was too small or the positioning was wrong.
In the days and weeks after the executions, questions mounted about Sergeant Woods’s competence.
Had he deliberately botched the executions to make the condemned men suffer, or was he simply incompetent? Woods himself seemed proud of his work.
In interviews afterward, he said, “I hang those 10 Nazis, and I am proud of it.
I wasn’t nervous.
A fellow can’t afford to have nerves in this business.
” 10 men in 103 minutes.
That’s fast work.
But Donald E.
Wils Jr.
, A law professor who studied the Nerburgg executions extensively concluded that many of the condemned fell with drops insufficient to snap their necks, resulting in death by strangulation that in some cases lasted several minutes or longer.
Woods used the standard drop method, but apparently calculated the drop distances incorrectly or deliberately made them too short.
The suffering was unnecessary.
A properly executed hanging causes instant unconsciousness and rapid death.
What happened at Nuremberg was closer to slow strangulation.
And here’s where the story gets even stranger.
In later years, rumors circulated that Woods had deliberately botched the hangings as revenge for Nazi atrocities.
Some claimed he had family members who died in the Holocaust.
Others said he was simply a sadist who enjoyed making people suffer.
But there’s no evidence for any of this.
Woods was almost certainly just incompetent.
He had lied about his experience.
He didn’t know how to properly calculate drop distances and the result was that 10 men died badly.
4 years after Nuremberg, on July 21st, 1950, John C.
Woods died in a bizarre accident.
He was electrocuted while repairing electrical wiring at a US military installation on the Marshall Islands.
He was 39 years old.
Some conspiracy theorists claim he was murdered by former Nazis seeking revenge, but the official investigation concluded it was an accident.
Woods, who had spent years executing people, died from his own carelessness with electrical equipment.
So, here’s the uncomfortable question at the heart of this story.
Should we care that Nazi war criminals died painfully? These men were responsible for starting a war that killed over 60 million people.
They orchestrated the Holocaust that murdered 6 million Jews.
They ordered countless war crimes, authorized slave labor, approved medical experiments on prisoners, and showed no remorse at their trials.
If anyone deserved to die, it was them.
Does it matter that they strangled slowly instead of dying instantly? Does it matter that some took 28 minutes to die when they could have died in seconds? The answer reveals something about us, not them.
If we believe in rule of law, if we believe in humane treatment even of criminals, then yes, it matters.
The Nuremberg trials were supposed to show that the Allies were better than the Nazis, that we believed in justice, not revenge, that we would treat even the worst criminals according to legal standards and international norms.
But the executions undermined that message.
They were bungled by an incompetent executioner who should never have been given the job.
Some of the condemned suffered unnecessarily.
And while nobody shed tears for Ribbonrop or Striker or Kito, the manner of their deaths raised questions about Allied justice.
But there’s another perspective.
These men spent years inflicting unimaginable suffering.
They ordered millions of people killed in gas chambers, shot in ditches, worked to death in camps, starved in ghettos.
Their victims died in agony, terror, and despair.
If the architects of the Holocaust strangled slowly on the gallows, if they experienced a fraction of the fear their victims felt, does that really constitute injustice or is it simply symmetry? The debate continues 78 years later.
The Nuremberg trials establish crucial precedents in international law.
They prove that individuals can be held accountable for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
They established that following orders saw orders is not a defense.
They created the legal framework for every war crimes tribunal since from Yugoslavia to Rwanda to the International Criminal Court.
But the executions remain controversial.
They were carried out by a liar who botched the hangings possibly deliberately.
They caused unnecessary suffering.
They violated the very principles of humane treatment that the allies claimed to uphold.
And they created a lingering question.
If we become like our enemies in the process of defeating them, have we really won? What other stories from history’s darkest chapters should we explore? What lessons should we learn from Nuremberg? Let us know in the comments and subscribe because these stories matter.
The victims of Nazi
atrocities matter.
The precedents established at Nuremberg matter.
And even the question of how we treat the worst criminals in history matters because it reveals who we are and what we believe.
10 men died in that gymnasium on October 16th, 1946.
They deserve to die for their crimes, but they didn’t deserve to strangle slowly while witnesses listened to them choke.
Justice demands precision.
Justice demands humanity.
Justice demands that we remain better than those we judge.
And that’s the legacy of Nuremberg.
Not just that monsters were punished, but that we tried, however imperfectly, to punish them according to law rather than simple revenge.
The 10 men who climbed those gallows, who heard the trap door open, who felt the noose titan, they got what they deserved.
But we, the ones who executed them, we should have done better.
That’s not sympathy for Nazis.
That’s commitment to the principle that even when executing monsters, we remain human.
Even when hanging war criminals, we follow our own standards.
The executions at Nerburgg were justice delivered, but they were also justice botched.
And we remember both truths.
Disclaimer: This story is a work of fiction created for entertainment purposes. Any resemblance to real persons, events, or places is coincidental.
