Category Archives: Themed Sets

Themed Set: The Death Rattle of the Third Reich

Posted on by

On April 30, 1945, Adolf Hitler committed suicide, leaving his associates to face the music for World War II.

From the rich mine of Soviet wartime propaganda posters at Davno.ru (also see its Victory Day cards).

The days preceding Hitler’s demise had seen a fascist state that once stretched from the Atlantic to Moscow (almost to Moscow) hemmed into vanishing pockets, spiraling towards certain capitulation.

Resistance really was futile.

Nevertheless, resistance was as ferocious as Nazi Germany’s remaining resources could permit, and as cruel in its way as anything in those cruel years. Each dwindling day brought among its privations fresh executions, deaths without meaning or grandeur, vindictive and cynically apportioned deaths mopping up old enemies and settling old scores, most every one without the slightest effect upon the the war’s resolution.

On this day..

Daily Triple: 1880 and death

Posted on by

Around the world in 1880 crimes …

On this day..

Daily Double: The Path to Power in Pyongyang

Posted on by

With the death a few weeks ago of North Korea dictator Kim Jong-il, his son Kim Jong-un “inherits great comrade Kim Jong-il’s ideology, leadership, character, virtues, grit and courage” and, of course, power.

While North Korea is notoriously opaque when it comes to reading the political tea leaves, it’s at least arguable that Kim Jong-un’s path to power has been set up over the preceding months by a flurry of executions.

For our next two posts, we note two whose politics were wrong enough to die this time last year.

On this day..

Daily Double: Stalinism east to west

Posted on by

It’s a trivial observation that Russia is really big, but it does bear noticing that Russia is really big. Nine time zones big, after cutting back from eleven.

As a consequence, when the boss goes off the rails — as such characters have been wont to do — and given the transport and communications infrastructure of an industrial state, one man’s paranoia in Moscow can wreck lives from the Dnieper to the Pacific.

Two dates this weekend from the height of Stalin’s 1937 purges see a Mongolian and a Finn who each thought themselves good communists destroyed in Moscow by the system they supported.

On this day..

Themed Set: Vikings

Posted on by

“From the fury of the Norsemen, oh Lord, deliver us!”

-Medieval prayer

Deep in the reptile brain of western Christendom lies the ancestral memory of Norse longships, heavy with bearskin-clad berserkers and Wagner extras, cleaving the icy North Seas en route to a remote commune whose altar relics want relieving.

These semimythical encounters are a difficult topic for this here blog because although they undoubtedly featured violence, and even executions, the Viking Age is also the European “Dark Ages” precisely because they didn’t keep a lot of reliable almanacs of bloggable execution dates.

This weekend, we fill that gap with two executions from the misty past of England: two near-fabulous near-executions linked to one another by family ties, and to posterity by national mythology.

On this day..

Themed Set: Bushrangers

Posted on by

The romance of the road, the temporary autonomous zone — in Australia, the characteristic form of the social bandit is the bushranger.


Bushrangers, Victoria, Australia, 1852 by William Strutt.

Escaped convicts or other outlaws who could live rough on the remote frontiers of British imperial authority, rangers of the bush whether as gentleman outlaws or merely as robbers embodied the personal freedom so antithetical to the great penal colonies. Not uncommonly, they married that persona to a trenchant critique of the prisons state they escaped.

And no wonder.

The prisoners of all classes in Government are fed with the coarsest food; governed with the most rigid discipline; subjected to the stern, and frequently capricious and tyrannical will of an overseer; for the slightest offence (sometimes for none at all the victim of false accusation) brought before a magistrate, whom the Government has armed with the tremendous powers of a summary jurisdiction, and either flogged, or sentenced to solitary confinement, or retransported to an iron gang, where he must work in heavy irons, or to a penal settlement, where he will be ruled with a rod of iron.

–History of the Australian Bushrangers


Bailed Up, by Tom Roberts, depicts a Bushranger stagecoach robbery. (Details)

While they filled up the hangman’s docket in the 19th century and they weren’t all picturesque political refuseniks, Bushrangers by and large enjoy a positive posthumous image, celebratory songs and everything.

For the next three days, we’ll meet a few of them … culminating in the most famous bushranger of all.

On this day..

Themed Set: Illegitimate Power

Posted on by

Projecting political authority without a mandate from, or the consent of, a large part of the populace is a timeless recipe for violent state confrontation. It’s practically inherent in the system.

(This sort of unaccountable power also tends to help clear away red tape that might otherwise get in the way of killing inconvenient folks.)

From ancient Rome to revolutionary France to what’s hot off the presses,

For the next few days, we’ll focus on very different executions under authoritarian states of recent vintage, putting people to death who disputed the executioner’s very legitimacy.

On this day..

Themed Set: Americana

Posted on by

American executions, and those glimpses of the larger American story attainable through them, have been a prominent feature on this site, from the guy who came over on the Mayflower to the guy who’s about to be a 2012 campaign issue, and all the many martyrs, patriots, traitors, and legends in between.

For all that, these data points each in isolation have never quite given us pause to survey the grand sweep of the American story, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free and all their varied carols.

The posts in these next few days are scarcely that country’s most memorable executions, but they are every inch American, the rack and ruin of gangster deaths for quintessential homo Americani from the 13 colonies to the postwar empire.


(cc) image from Beverly & Pack

On this day..

Themed Set: Branded

Posted on by

Then there are those atrocities so striking that newsmen send them abroad under their own specially minted brand.

The Black Dahlia murder.

The Son of Sam.

The Babes in the Wood killings.

These will rarely be the trials we are drawn to because of celebrities who were famous before their brush with the law: the O.J. Simpson case needs no further qualifier; neither, the Lindbergh baby kidnapping.

No, these will generally be cases where the public meets the crime before it meets the criminal. As experts at evading detection, it’s no wonder so many serial killers — the Green River Killer; the Boston Strangler; Jack the Ripper — are far better known by their media alias than their Christian name.

But the queer phenomenon of this or that obscurity capturing by dint of some superlative malefaction a purchase on the public conscience — initiating a feedback cycle between performer, onlookers, and the hype men who hawk broadsides in the shadow of the gallows — is a venerable one. Our need to fix certain crimes as reference points in the firmament perhaps says a great deal more about we slack-jawed gawkers than than it does about the most atrocious manslayer.

One of the roles of brands is that they represent the world to us. They quite literally ‘label’ for us what might otherwise be an incredibly chaotic array of messages. Each brand does this job in basically the same way that a picture (a painting or a photograph) represents a particular part of the world to us.

-Thom Braun, Philosophy of Branding

For the remainder of this week, Executed Today remembers common crimes and criminals for whom such a brand stuck.

On this day..

Themed Set: The Contemporary Middle East

Posted on by

You might have noticed, it’s been in the news lately.

Despots and their retainers, nervously watching the news.

Conveniently for these pages, that region is also perennially among the busiest when it comes to the death penalty. Aside from China, and the inscrutable North Korea, no country regularly keeps up the official execution pace of Iran, Iraq, or Saudi Arabia. And that’s leaving aside the messy extrajudicial fare that the region’s intractable conflicts have fostered.

On this day..