Tag Archives: 1946

1946: Grigory Semenov, anti-Bolshevik

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At 11 p.m. this date in 1946, White general turned Japanese collaborator Grigory Semenov (or Semyonov) was hanged for a generation’s worth of anti-Soviet depredations in the Far East.

The tsarist officer Semenov joined the Russian Civil War as a notoriously vicious White commander with the grandiosely retro title of Ataman of the Baikal Cossacks.

According to G. Patrick March, Semenov’s “penchant for killing, torturing, and looting” extended to executing a captured socialist by tossing the man into his locomotive’s fuel chamber.

Although also a rival in the suicidally fractious White political jostle, Semenov was the designated successor of Aleksandr Kolchak when the latter was shot in 1920, but by that time there wasn’t much left to succeed.

Knocking around the interwar era in gloryless exile, Semenov was an easy recruit for the Japanese war machine, which was in the market by the late 1930’s for locals with command experience and a grudge against Moscow and put him on retainer in Manchuria. Like the Soviet-Japanese front in general after Khalkin Gol, nothing much came of that enterprise; the Ataman’s last great hurrah was but a footnote for Japan, and his death would be a footnote in the annals of postwar victors’ justice.

Having picked a loser two wars in a row, Semenov was captured during the short-lived Soviet invasion of Manchuria at the tail end of the war and packed off for the inevitable. Five co-defendants, including Semenov’s son Mikhail, suffered death as well — although they were simply shot, while Semenov was ignominiously hanged. (According to White Terror: Cossack Warlords of the Trans-Siberian, the hanging was either botched or engineered to be an ugly strangulation job.)

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1946: Karl Hermann Frank

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On this date in 1946, the Sudeten German whose fifth column had paved the way for the Nazi conquest of Czechoslovakia expiated his war crimes at Prague’s Pankrac Prison.

Karl Hermann Frank (English Wikipedia page | German) had been a prewar mover and shaker in the Sudeten German Party, increasingly the Reich’s stalking-horse as it bluffed European rivals into acceding to Czechoslovakia’s dismemberment.

The onetime Czechoslovakian MP did well by the Anschluss, gaining the rank of Obergruppenführer and becoming one of Bohemia and Moravia’s top evildoers.

Notably, he helped orchestrate (though the orders for it came from above) the notorious massacre of Lidice in revenge for the assassination of Reich Protector Reinhard Heydrich.

The Lidice operation formed a war crimes charge against Herr Frank after the war, and Frank’s own lasting badge of infamy: the systematic destruction of the entire male population of an arbitrarily chosen village remains the emblematic crime of the Nazi occupation to this day.

(Source of the video)

Thousands of spectators came to see the former “Protector of Bohemia and Moravia” executed in Prague’s Pankrac Prison by the Austro-Hungarian “pole hanging” method, as depicted in the film above.

Those of Lidice’s widows who were able to come — and widows of some of the 30,000 other Czechs for whose executions Frank had been adjudged indirectly responsible — occupied the second row of seats. …

Not the slightest gleam of compassion could be seen in that long row of unforgiving eyes as Frank, garbed in a ragged Nazi Elite Guard uniform, walked quietly between two guards. …

As the noose was adjusted about his neck, Frank muttered: “Deutschland wird leben auch wenn wir nicht leben” (“Germany will live even if we do not live.”)

The spectators, admitted by special cards, watched quietly in the bright sunshine. (New York Times)

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1946: Not Willie Francis, who survived the electric chair

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(Thanks to Gilbert King, author of The Execution of Willie Francis (book site), for the guest post, the first of two. Read the second here.)

Death, Delivered

The truck was a 1941 International Harvester K–3 two-ton cornbinder, from the manufacturer known at the time for its production of heavy-duty farm equipment. Painted red, it was mounted with a large, gray sheet-metal trailer, unmarked and nondescript. In fact, the only thing odd about this truck was the additional muffler and exhaust pipe that extended from the roof of the van. It would not have turned heads, at least not until it pulled up to park behind a Louisiana parish jail. Then, as photographs show, people would stop dead in their tracks and stare, as if some ancient beast of classical mythology was lurking behind the thick, metal doors. And when Captain Ephie Foster, the Angola prison guard who, on May 3, 1946 had arrived to execute Willie Francis emerged from the truck, they stared at him, too — their somber eyes carefully registering the face of a killer.

May 3rd was supposed to be Willie’s last day on earth. His head had been shaved and his pant leg had been torn so that current could cleanly surge through the body of the 17-year-old Louisiana youth as he sat strapped into the electric chair known as “Gruesome Gertie.” But things did not proceed as planned in the small town of St. Martinville. Foster and his assistant had been drinking and did not wire the chair properly on that hot morning, and when the switch was thrown, Willie convulsed and screamed for more than a minute, until it became obvious to everyone in the death room that something was wrong. “I am not dying,” Willie shouted, until finally, the sheriff ordered the electricity shut off.

Deputies put Willie back in his cell and Louisiana Governor Jimmie Davis was called as town officials were unsure what to do with the boy who walked away from the electric chair. About an hour later, Davis had made up his mind. Foster was to load the chair back into the truck and drive it home to Angola where it would be fixed. Then they’d send it back to St. Martinville a week later where Willie Francis was to be re-executed.

Gruesome Gertie had haunted the dreams of many a condemned man in Louisiana. Willie was the twenty-third person to take the deadly current, but the first to survive an electrocution. By the 1940s, executions were private affairs. They took place behind the walls of prison complexes, and the most anyone might see of them would be a hearse driving out with a coffin loaded in the back.

But Louisiana had a traveling electric chair that turned an execution into a bizarre, macabre road show.

A crowd would often gather to watch prison officials unload Gruesome Gertie and bring her into a parish jail. The chair would then be attached to two long, black, snake-like cables that would lead back to the truck, plugged into a powerful gasoline engine in the back that gave Gertie her juice. The engine was loud, and people were drawn to the noise from blocks away. On May 3rd, one of the people in the crowd in St. Martinville, Louisiana was Frederick Francis, Willie’s father. He’d arrived with a coffin and was seen pacing back and forth beneath a live oak tree, waiting to claim the body of his youngest son.

I’d been working on my book, The Execution of Willie Francis for nearly two years, but had never seen a picture of the truck that had delivered death to so many condemned men (and one woman, Tony Jo Henry) in Louisiana. I’d read about it in countless newspaper stories, as well as in Ernest Gaines’ book, A Lesson Before Dying, which was loosely based on Willie’s story. But it wasn’t until I had the opportunity to go through the legal files of Bertrand DeBlanc, the lawyer who took Willie’s case after the botched execution, that I ever got a glimpse of the truck. DeBlanc lived across the street from the St. Martinville jail, and when the truck parked in front of his house, he was just another curious onlooker who went outside with his Brownie camera to take pictures.

The photographs DeBlanc took on that fateful day not only provide a record of one of the most famous execution attempts in this country’s history, but they also serve to illustrate the inequity of the death penalty in the south at the time. Lynchings were becoming less common, but the implied bargain of swift justice pacified the vigilante cry for death. This innocuous looking truck rolled through small Louisiana towns to execute mostly black men at the hands of white law enforcement officials. But when townspeople gathered around, and the doors swung open and Gertie was taken up the back steps and fired up, the spectacle of this traveling show of death sent as strong a message to blacks as any public mob lynching.

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1946: The treacherous Theodore Schurch

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One day after William Joyce became the last Briton put to death for treason, 27-year-old Theodore Schurch hanged for treachery at London’s Pentonville Prison.

Like Joyce, Schurch had enrolled in the British Union of Fascists as a teenager in the 1930’s, and it was reputedly at the party’s direction that he joined the army as a driver.

During World War II, Schurch crossed and recrossed enemy lines, delivering operational intelligence to the Italians and Germans by helping to interrogate prisoners of war, or posing as a P.O.W. himself to gain the confidences of other captured Allied soldiers.

Scurch’s army buddies seemed to think he was alright, and there was probably more than a shred of truth to the defense’s contention, paraphrased by the London Times (September 18, 1945), that the lad

was a poor, uneducated fool who was caught young [by fascist ideology] when he knew no better and jockeyed into a position from which he could not recover.

But obviously, one makes this argument when one is in no position to contest factually the capital charges against oneself, and indeed has admitted much of it. Schurch was convicted on all nine counts of treachery, plus one of desertion. Not a big fish, maybe — but just the right size to become the last man hanged in Britain for a crime other than murder.

He’s actually listed as a war casualty, which in a way he was, on the Commonwealth War Graves Commission’s Brookwood Memorial outside of London.

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1946: William Joyce, Lord Haw-Haw

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On this date in 1946, fascist William Joyce, famous by the nickname “Lord Haw-Haw” for his English-language Nazi propaganda broadcasts, was hanged at Wandsworth Prison for treason.

As a pugilistic young anti-Semite with the unusual credential of being a Unionist Irish Catholic, Joyce had been a moving spirit in the interwar British fascist party. (Since audio broadcasts would define Joyce’s life, it seems appropriate to refer the reader for a fuller biography to this recent Oxford biography podcast.)

But because time loves a good laugh, it had the guy haranguing his countrymen for insufficient patriotism marked out for the last treason execution in British history, and unrepentant about it by the time he got there.

The Brooklyn-born Joyce (he never lost his American citizenship) who naturalized as a German in 1940 had a rather tenuous claim on the patriotic high horse to begin with, and after the war, that meant the treason charge proceeded on legally doubtful grounds: speaking the King’s English didn’t mean he owed allegiance to the king. Prosecutors ultimately hung him with a British passport he’d obtained fraudulently, and the legal principle has never since sat well with jurists.

It was just the tool at hand. The British government really hated the guy.*

However limited the resources at his disposal — sparse intelligence, paltry staff, and of course, after 1942, a disastrously collapsing war effort — he had fashioned them into broadcast spin to twist the British lion’s tail in countless British homes throughout the war.

Here’s one episode, with Joyce savaging Winston Churchill, selected from archive.org’s library of Joyce broadcasts (1-7, 8-16, 17-23).

[audio:William_Joyce_Churchill.mp3]

Joyce’s star shone brightest and his invective cut deepest early in the war. Once everything at the front stopped coming up Teutons, he descended into irrelevance and self-parody, albeit without professing the slightest doubt in his fascist convictions.

This last broadcast, prepared just a few days before Germany capitulated, has our day’s principal ramblingly drunkenly from the besieged Nazi capital.

[audio:William_Joyce_final_broadcast.mp3]

Content-wise, not much had changed eight months later, but at least he managed to make his gallows statement coherently.

In death as in life, I defy the Jews who caused this last war, and I defy the power of darkness which they represent. I warn the British people against the crushing imperialism of the Soviet Union. May Britain be great once again and the hour of the greatest danger in the West may the standard be raised from the dust, crowned with the words — you have conquered nevertheless. I am proud to die for my ideals and I am sorry for the sons of Britain who have died without knowing why.

There’s a thorough, and lavishly illustrated, history of Joyce here.

* Authorities passed on prosecuting his wife Margaret, who’d also appeared on some Lord Haw-Haw broadcasts. Under the circumstances, Joyce’s daughter (by his first marriage) Heather Iandolo turned out pretty balanced.

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1946: Amon Göth, Schindler’s List villain

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On this date in 1946, Plaszow concentration camp commandante Amon Göth was hanged near the camp site by Poland’s postwar Communist government.

Göth is most widely recognizable as Ralph Fiennes’ fiendish character in Schindler’s List, one of the American Film Institute’s top movie villains of all time. (And, naturally, a first-class bastard in real life, too.)

A short-drop strangulation is not the way you’d want to go. It turns out, though, that Steven Spielberg (ever the sentimentalist) seriously tidied up the proceedings.

As you watch the video of the real Amon Goeth’s exit below — and it’s a snuff film, so proceed advisedly — consider the following:

  • Amon Goeth does bear a passing fair resemblance to Ralph Fiennes.

  • To judge by their getup — dig the masks! — the executioners might have been Batman and Robin.
  • To judge by the discharge of their duties, the executioners might have been Larry, Moe and Curly. Goeth survived two drops (notice the executioner on the right gesticulating in frustration as the second try fails) before they finally got it right:

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1946: Eleven from the Stutthof concentration camp

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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.

There’s more about Stutthof’s history at the Holocaust Research Project, and at the current memorial facility’s home page.

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