Anti-fascist teacher Raymond Burgard was beheaded on the fallbeil on this date in 1944, in Cologne.
A literature instructor at Paris’s lycée Buffon, Burgard (English Wikipedia entry | French) was dangerously forthright about his resistance to the Nazi occupation. He wrote and published resistance newspapers and on one occasion publicly sang La Marseillaise at a march celebrating Joan of Arc.
Evidently he was an inspiring teacher, too.
Burgard was arrested over the Easter 1942 break, and as soon as school re-convened the pupils
organized a demonstration, involving children from other schools. Around a hundred school students took part, chanting Burgard’s name and throwing leaflets in the air. (Source)
Alas, Executed Today has already encountered these brave schoolchildren: the five youths who organized this protest were themselves executed in early 1943.
On this day..
- 1704: Anna Ericksdotter, the last witch executed in Sweden
- 1779: Manuel, burned for witchcraft in the USA?
- 1820: William Holmes, Edward Rosewaine, and Thomas Warrington, pirates
- 1967: Moustapha Lô, failed assassin
- 1899: John Headrick and Carroll Rice, Missourians
- Feast Day of St. Vitus
- 1920: Triple lynching in Duluth, Minnesota
- 1915: 20 Hunchakian gallows
- 1648: Margaret Jones, the first witch executed in Boston
- 2004: Benjamín Altamirano lynched
- 1389: Saint Tsar Lazar, after the Battle of Kosovo
- 1945: Anicento Martinez, an American rapist in England