On this date in 1946, officials of Soviet-occupied Poland publicly hanged eleven convicted war criminals of the Stutthof concentration camp.
Set up immediately upon Germany’s September 1, 1939 invasion of Poland and not liberated until after official German capitulation in 1945, Stutthoff handled over 100,000 prisoners during its long service.
This day’s condemned — camp commandant Johann Pauls, five male kapos, and five female guards — were the product of the first of four Stutthof trials held in 1946-1947. At a hill in Gdansk known as Biskupia Gorka (Bishop Hill), upon a specially-erected row of four T-shaped double gallows centered around a pi-shaped triple gallows, and before a crowd of thousands, the doomed eleven were noosed on the back of military trucks which then drove away to leave them strangling to death with a “short drop” hanging.
The following gut-twisting images are among a number to be found here.
Above: on one end of the gallows row, the truck has just pulled away from Jenny Wanda Barkmann — a modish Hamburg lass in her mid-20’s known to Stutthof prisoners as “the Beautiful Specter” for her cruelty. Down the row, one can see that some of the prisoners are already swinging, while others have not yet been dropped.
Upon hearing her sentence, Jenny Barkmann retorted, “Life is indeed a pleasure, and pleasures are usually short.” (More about Barkmann, including trial photos, here.) In this closer view of her, just as in the first photo, she is still alive and struggling. Next to her, Ewa Paradies, another guard, is prepared for the same fate.
The central triple gallows. Commandant Johann Pauls hangs in the middle with Gerda Steinhoff — one of the senior female guards — in the foreground. The line of five male kapos recedes behind them into the enormous crowd of onlookers.
On this date in 1962, the architect of the Final Solution received such justice as could be meted to him on earth at Israel’s Ramla Prison.
Adolf Eichmann, the vacuum cleaner salesman turned SS Obersturnbannfuhrer, remains the only person judicially executed in the history of modern Israel, whose intelligence services kidnapped him from Argentina where he had settled after the war.
Other Nazis had used the “only following orders” defense with little success in the Nuremberg Trials shortly after World War II. On trial years later (and at the hands a Jewish state) Eichmann — a bookish, unmenacing man who invoked Kant — posed the questions of individual responsibility and human psychology in starker terms.
To be sure, he was no anonymous functionary. Neither, however, had he dirtied his nails at the stomach-churning business end of the Holocaust: rather, he had engineered the stupendous logistical project of deporting Eastern Europe’s Jews for extermination, an (impressive) accomplishment worth exponentially more lives than any Einsatzgruppe could ever account for, yet simultaneously abstract from the upshot.
Eichmann said he did it without ill-will towards its subjects — simply to obey and to achieve.
The Banality of Evil
[I]f it was of small legal relevance, it was of great political interest to know how long it takes for an average person to overcome his innate repugnance of crime, and what exactly happens to him once he has reached that point. To this question, the case of Adolf Eichmann supplied an answer that could not have been clearer or more precise.
-Hannah Arendt
Hannah Arendt took him at his word* saw in Eichmann the abyss gazing back into us, into his judges — not a monster but a man unsettling in his normalcy, whose job was not TPS reports or quarterly sales results but turning humans into ash.
The company man. The career man. Every man, standing in for countless thousands more who pushed the papers that drove the trains to Auschwitz.
What for Eichmann was a job, with its daily routine, its ups and downs, was for the Jews quite literally the end of the world.
Not everyone accepts her conclusions, but Arendt’s characterization of “the banality of evil” has become the man’s epigraph. And Eichmann disturbs us precisely because we seem to be able to meet him on his terms, even sympathize with him when the horror of his crimes begs for a monster like Streicher or Goebbels we could safely consign to the Other.
Arendt’s turn of phrase has a certain breezy (hackneyed, even) life in the public discourse, but her analysis of Eichmann’s careerism remains a challenging and deeply relevant one for we heirs of the world that hanged him.
The complete transcript of Eichmann’s trial is available online here.
* Albeit with some reservations; others have argued that Eichmann was considerably more personally invested in his mass-murder project than his demeanor at trial admitted. Certainly he had an interest in showing the mellower Eichmann when he was on trial for his life.
On this date in 1947, former Vichy Secretary of State Comte Fernand de Brinon was shot in the Paris suburb of Montrouge for war crimes.
A lawyer and journalist who met future Nazi luminary Joachim von Ribbentrop in 1919, Brinon and his socialite wife Lisette were the toast of right-wing high society in the 1930’s. He even scored a scoop interview with the Fuhrer himself, shortly after Hitler became chancellor.
Germany’s rout of France in 1940 vindicated to many of the French right their critiques of France’s decadence; for Brinon, the natural step was support for collaboration, a career-enhancing philosophy that saw him to the third-ranking position of the Vichy government.
There he struck a post-partisan, consensus-oriented pose vis-a-vis picking sides between the new overlord and the erstwhile ally it was bombing:
To collaborate loyally with our opponents of yesterday in no way signifies in the mind of any man of good sense becoming the enemies of our allies of yesterday. (New York Times)
Men of good sense also knew the Bolsheviks were the real threat to world peace; hence, this Vichy-era newsreel of today’s victim reviewing French troops on the Eastern front:
[O]bsequious, indiscreet and an open admirer of Nazism … his collaboration was ideological, and it exceeded by far the agreements over food, prisoners of war, the demarcation line, and the mass of daily adjustments to the occupation sought by most Vichy officials … [Brinon represented] the Nazi end of the Vichy spectrum.
That made him an easy call for the sternest reprisal liberated France could exact, and he knew it himself: Fernand and Lisette tried to flee for Germany when the western allies began recapturing France in 1944.
What adds poignancy, if perhaps not sympathy, to his fate is the fact that Lisette — Jeanne Rachel Louise Franck, her name had been before he put a ring on her finger — was Jewish, and that fact was not a secret. She spent the occupation years as an official Honorary Aryan, safe from the deportations her husband helped arrange for others.
Lisette was also arrested by the Allies as she fled for Germany in 1944 — and how many Jews can say that? — but was released, and died in 1982. Four years ago, her aged son wrote a soul-searching book about his relationship with his mother and (for Brinon was Lisette’s second marriage) his stepfather, Lisette de Brinon, Ma Mere. There is also a recent biography of Brinon in French (review (also French)).
On this date in 1952, SS Gruppenfuhrer Jurgen Stroop was hanged in Poland near the site of the Warsaw Ghetto he had liquidated nine years before.
A World War I veteran, Stroop caught the Nazi star as it ascended and was carried to various wartime posts in occupied Poland. The experience he so garnered in countering partisans made him a hot ticket when the Warsaw Ghetto revolted. Dissatisfied with the slow suppression of the Jewish quarter, Heinrich Himmler put Stroop in charge in April 1943.
Stroop got results: unburdened by the slightest need to save the village or win hearts and minds, he simply put it to the sword. Wholesale slaughter followed vicious house-to-house urban warfare, with buildings torched or demolished to drive out defenders. By mid-May, the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw had not been pacified: it had been annihilated.
His “Stroop Report”, a masterpiece of oblivious horror in the clipped narrative of the military bureaucracy, helped to hang him* with entries like this:
Progress of large-scale operation on 16 May 1943, start 1000 hours.
180 Jews, bandits, and subhumans were destroyed. The former Jewish quarter of Warsaw is no longer in existence. The large-scale action was terminated at 2015 hours by blowing up the Warsaw Synagogue.
…
Total number of Jews dealt with 56,065, including both Jews caught and Jews whose extermination can be proved.
In one of those ironies history is so unnervingly fond of, Stroop was imprisoned in Communist-controlled Poland in the same cell with a resistance fighter from the anti-Communist Home Army.**
Kazimierz Moczarski, who survived a death sentence of his own, infiltrated this bizarre roommate scenario into the (nonfiction) literary canon with his Conversations with an Executioner — published in the 1970’s.
* Stroop was also condemned to death for war crimes by an American tribunal prior to being repatriated to Poland. He was separately convicted in Poland and hanged under that latter sentence.
On this date in 1902, two Australian officers were shot in virtual secrecy at Pretoria for atrocities they committed in service of the crown during the Second Boer War.
Harry “Breaker” Morant — he got the nickname from his aptitude with horses — was the famous one of the pair and the reason the date is so well-known to posterity as to merit its own cinematic treatment (review):
A colorful son of the Commonwealth’s hardscrabble strata, Breaker Morant led a life that has been improved into mythology, not least by his own efforts. Impoverished but educated, he migrated in 1883 from England to Australia where he carved out a larger-than-life profile as a bush poet, married the (subsequently) famous anthropologist Daisy Bates and eventually — fatefully — volunteered for service in South Africa.
The Second Boer War, Britain’s (ultimately successful) fight to corral the Dutch-descended Boer republics into the empire, started sunnily enough for the English, but as the Boers abandoned a conventional war they could not win and adopted guerrilla tactics, it descended into an exceedingly dirty conflict — notable for Britain’s pioneering use of concentration camps.
It was also notable for savagery between combatants. When Morant’s best friend in the unit was tortured and mutilated by Boer guerrillas, the poet went on a rampage, ordering a number of prisoners’ summary executions over a period of weeks. It was for this that he and his confederate were shot this day. The fact of his confinement was not communicated to the Australian government; Peter Handcock’s wife only learned of his execution weeks later, from press reports.
The defendants maintained that there was a standing order from the top to kill any Boer caught wearing British khaki, a tactic the Boers were known to employ, and that the order was frequently enforced. Though the prosecution strenuously maintained otherwise at trial, the existence of that (unwritten) directive has become accepted to posterity.
What remains murky is the matter of why — why these two, why now? And is Breaker Morant a hero or a villain? Those questions are also prisms for the many currents of Morant’s case so strikingly prescient for the century that lay ahead.*
Asymmetric warfare and the legal status of guerrillas. Human rights and war crimes. Corruption and plausible deniability. The moral culpability of subordinates for the orders of the brass. And certainly all the contradictory forces of empire and resistance entailed by an Australian adventurer shot by a Scottish detachment for killing Dutchmen in Africa at the behest of London.** It was an old-time colonial war in a world becoming, for we of the early 21st century, recognizably modern.
Hard-living to his dying breath, Morant stayed up the night before he was shot scribbling his last poem — piquantly titled “Butchered to Make a Dutchman’s Holiday”.
In prison cell I sadly sit,
A d__d crest-fallen chappie!
And own to you I feel a bit-
A little bit - unhappy!
It really ain’t the place nor time
To reel off rhyming diction -
But yet we’ll write a final rhyme
Whilst waiting cru-ci-fixion!
No matter what “end” they decide -
Quick-lime or “b’iling ile,” sir?
We’ll do our best when crucified
To finish off in style, sir!
But we bequeath a parting tip
For sound advice of such men,
Who come across in transport ship
To polish off the Dutchmen!
If you encounter any Boers
You really must not loot ‘em!
And if you wish to leave these shores,
For pity’s sake, DON’T SHOOT ‘EM!!
And if you’d earn a D.S.O.,
Why every British sinner
Should know the proper way to go
Is: “ASK THE BOER TO DINNER!”
Let’s toss a bumper down our throat, -
Before we pass to Heaven,
And toast: “The trim-set petticoat
We leave behind in Devon.”
His last words were hurled at his firing squad: “Shoot straight, you bastards! Don’t make a mess of it!”
* It is no coincidence that the Australian film excerpted in this post was released while the Vietnam War was still a fresh memory.
** Breaker Morant’s memory would develop into a point of Australian suspicion towards the British military, especially after Morant’s persecutor helped author World War I’s infamous hecatomb of Australian (and New Zealand) troops at Gallipoli. Morant and Handcock turned out to be the last Australians executed by the British military.
Update: Via Airminded, an Australian history program took a skeptical look at the Breaker Morant myth a few years ago.
(Welcome, Stumblers! You may enjoy the Public Hanging sequence this post is a part of. This is a relatively young blog, but it’s posting every single day … so if you like what you see, poke around the archives or just subscribe by RSS or email for a daily tour through death penalty history.)
On this date in 1862, 38 rebellious Sioux were hanged in Mankato, Minnesota, in the largest mass execution in U.S. history.
Fully 303 had been condemned to die in drumhead trials after the five-week Dakota War, one of the numerous native conflicts sparked by the march of European settlers across North America.
Abraham Lincoln — in a political risk — commuted all but 39 sentences* adjudged “to have participated in massacres, as distinguished from participation in battles,” essentially defining a special category for what today might be considered “war crimes.”
“[Bishop Henry Whipple] came here the other day and talked with me about the rascality of this Indian business until I felt it down to my boots. If we get through this war, and I live, this Indian system shall be reformed!”
Fateful “if” — but politicians say many things, after all, and it was long before Lincoln went to Ford’s Theater that the tribes had been forced out of Minnesota, scattered to wasteland reservations and subsequentclashes with the American army.
On this day, all that doleful future was prefigured in the 38 who hanged together in what is now Mankato’s Reconciliation Park, an event that after a century’s time has become a moment for commemoration.
Two academics’ pages on the Dakota War and its aftermath are here and here.
*One of those was subsequently spared over uncertainty of the evidence against him.
On this date in 1944, in the midst of a worldwide conflagration that would claim 70 million lives, one unknown crew member of an Allied bomber was shot by Nazi SS/SD troops in the woods around Enschede, Netherlands.
From late 1942, the Allies’ massive industrial capacity had sapped the vaunted Luftwaffe, bleeding down the German air force in desperate airborne combat in the Mediterranean and the Eastern front. Crippling losses in July and August 1943 lay Germany’s industrial heart open to devastating bombing and would within a year spell the end of the Luftwaffe as an effective fighting force.
The contest’s stakes were high. This hour-long compilation of contemporaneous U.S. propaganda footage celebrates the decisive effect of air supremacy in western Europe:
With hostile planes darkening Europe’s skies, the Germans called upon ruthlessness to stand in for materiel. Nazi SS chief Heinrich Himmler issued, according to Robin O’Neil, an August 1943 order to show no quarter to captured enemy pilots.
The young man shot this day suffered its effects:
The airman (estimated age 26 years), who was apparently unhurt, was taken by the SS to the cellar of the villa [serving as SS headquarters], where he was kept under guard while arrangements were made for his disposal. These arrangements consisted of the removal of his flying kit, and the substitution of a civilian light-coloured shirt, a pair of dark trousers, and a pair of socks.
In this dress he was put into a security vehicle, his hands handcuffed behind his back, and taken some distance in the grounds of the SS HQ to a spot within the compound where a grave had already been prepared. The airman was marched from the car by an escort of two SS men, one of whom dropped back and shot the airman in the back of the neck. He was buried and the grave was carefully camouflaged.
To this day, the airman’s identity has not been established. It was assumed that he was British or American, most probably American, as the trousers he was wearing were of a dark shade of khaki, and the fact that when he was informed in the car, in English, that he was to be executed, he made an indistinct reply in which the word “America” was uttered.
Countless such executions undoubtedly took place and were lost, forgotten or concealed in the charnel house of war. Thanks to the witness of Dutch prisoners who survived the war, this single act of routine brutality endured not only historically but juridically: little more than a year later, its author, Dr. Karl Eberhard Schongarth — an SS officer who participated in the Wannsee Conference and slaughtered thousands in occupied Poland and Holland — faced a war crimes prosecution for the execution of the anonymous airman.
His actions this date may have been small by the gauge of a bloodthirsty career, but since pre-war treaties explicitly regulated treatment of war prisoners, they also constituted a conveniently plain transgression of the far-from-bright line demarcating “war crimes.” For this one killing, Schongarth was himself hanged as a war criminal in Hamelin, Germany on May 16, 1946.
A World War I veteran, 
