1943: 186 prisoners at Plotzensee Prison
1 comment September 7th, 2008 Headsman
As dark fell on the evening of September 7, 1943, a mass execution of 186 death row prisoners — including six with unresolved clemency appeals — began at Berlin’s bomb-damaged Plotzensee Prison, continuing by candlelight until the following morning.
An Allied air raid the night of September 3-4 had struck the facility, allowing four prisoners to escape and damaging the guillotine and execution shed where sentences were normally carried out. Coincidentally, that had come hours after Hitler had (as was his wont, in common with many a politician to the present day) castigated the judiciary for the dilatory rigmarole that allowed the condemned to delay their fate with legal appeals.
Converging circumstances generated sensible elite consensus:
That is the last thing we need, that after the air raids a few hundred condemned to death would be let loose on the population in the Reich capital.
-Goebbels
Instead, at the order of Reich Minister of Justice Otto George Thierack, cases were quickly tied up for a night of mass hangings.
Protestant pastor Harold Poelchau described (pdf) what he witnessed.
As darkness fell on September 7 the mass murders began. The night was cold. Every now and then the darkness was lit up by exploding bombs. The beams of the searchlights danced across the sky. The men were assembled in several columns one behind the other. They stood there, at first uncertain about what was going to happen to them. Then they realized. Eight men at a time were called by name and led away. Those remaining hardly moved at all. Only an occasional whisper with my Catholic colleague and myself … Once the executioners interrupted their work because bombs thundered down nearby. The five rows of eight men already lined up had to be confined to their cells again for a while. Then the murdering continued. All these men were hanged. … The executions had to be carried out by candlelight because the electric light had failed. It was only in the early morning at about eight o’clock that the exhausted executioners paused in their work, only to continue with renewed strength in the evening.
And as Poelchau intimates, the fearful harvest of September 7-8 was not the end of the massacre. Dozens more followed over the ensuing days, for a total of more than 250 executions at Plotzensee September 7-12.
Notable among the victims was 27-year-old German-Dutch concert pianist Karlrobert Kreiten, memorialized at this German page. He’d been a little too loose with his distaste for Hitler and been arrested on the eve of a concert a few months before.
In 2003, Dutch composer Rudi Martinus van Dijk debuted his Kreiten’s Passion, an excerpt fo which can be enjoyed on the composer’s homepage.
On this day..
- 1833: Nils Narumseie, terror of Kanten - 2020
- 1619: Melchior Grodziecki, Istvan Pongracz and Marko Krizin, Jesuits - 2019
- 1952: Mustafa Khamis and Muhammad al-Baqri, Egyptian labor activists - 2018
- 1960: George Scott - 2017
- 1736: Captain John Porteous, riotously lynched - 2016
- 1732: Pompey, poisoner of James Madison's grandfather - 2015
- 1914: Seven retreating Frenchmen, with surprising results - 2014
- 1849: Elisha Reese, suitor - 2013
- 1929: Constantine Beaver, Alaskan native - 2012
- 1768: Isaac Frasier, three strikes offender - 2011
- 2000: Lu Cheng, possible wrongful Taiwanese execution - 2010
- 1984: Ernest Dobbert, child abuser - 2009
Entry Filed under: 20th Century,Activists,Artists,Capital Punishment,Common Criminals,Crime,Death Penalty,Disfavored Minorities,Entertainers,Execution,Germany,Hanged,History,Mass Executions,Murder,Notable Jurisprudence,Racial and Ethnic Minorities,Summary Executions,Theft,Treason,Wartime Executions,Wrongful Executions
Tags: 1943, air raids, berlin, fascism, harold poelchau, karlrobert kreiten, kreiten's passion, nazi, naziism, otto georg thierack, piano, Plotzensee Prison, rudi martinus van dijk, september 7, world war ii
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