On this date in 1944, Berlin housewife Elisabeth “Lilo” Gloeden was beheaded with an axe in Plotzensee Prison, along with her husband and mother.
They had been sentenced — and intentionally made an example of — just three days before for hiding a fugitive from the July 20 Plot to assassinate Hitler.
As Martin Gilbert observes in The Second World War: A Complete History, the fury of Hitler’s domestic crackdown came in inverse proportion to Germany’s fortunes in war.
[The family’s] fate was then publicized, as a warning to anyone else who might try to shelter the enemies of the Third Reich.
The fate of that Reich could not, however, be seriously in doubt. On the day of Lilo Gloeden’s execution, American troops drove the Germans from Mackwiller, in the Saar, inside Germany’s pre-war frontier. In Hungary, the Red Army entered Eger, less than twenty-five miles from the central Slovak frontier.
Part of the Themed Set: Women Against Fascism.
On this day..
- 1903: Phil Davis, Walter Carter and Clint Thomas, multiracial lynching
- 1885: Robert Goodale, messily
- 2007: Leong Siew Chor, Kallang Body Parts Murderer
- 1759: William Andrew Horne, long-ago incest
- 1557: Galvarino, Mapuche warrior
- Feast Day of St. Andrew
- 2000: Kiyotaka Katsuta, Japan's "most evil" killer
- 1871: Gaston Cremieux, Marseilles Commune leader
- 1938: Corneliu Codreanu, Romanian fascist martyr
- 1539: Don Carlos Ometochtzin, Aztec heretic
- 1945: Heinz Eck, U-Boat commander
- Daily Double: Lesser War Criminals
- 1824: Henry Fauntleroy, choked on debt
Uma pena essa guerra ter matado um familiares meus
All civilian beheadings after 1937 were done by the “Fallbeil” which is the German version of a Guillotine. I doubt this one was with an axe.