Tag Archives: hameln

1946: Bruno Tesch and Karl Weinbacher, Zyklon-B manufacturers

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On this date in 1946, British hangman Albert Pierrepoint hanged seven German war criminals at Hameln Prison.

These seven comprised two distinct groups charged in two very different misdeeds:

Karl Eberhard Schöngarth and four others hanged for executing a downed Allied pilot in 1944.

Bruno Tesch and Karl Weinbacher were executed for a critical support role in the Holocust: they were principles of the chemical manufacturer Testa, which sold Zyklon-B to the Reich for use in the gas chambers.


Zyklon was just a brand hame (“Cyclone”)

Hydrogen cyanide had been employed as a legitimate pesticide and de-lousing agent for many years before World War II. Because of its danger, the odorless deadly gas was sold spiced with an odorant to alert humans accidentally exposed to it.

Tesch and Weinbacher had their necks stretched because they were shown to have knowingly sold this product sans odor, reflecting Testa’s complicity in its intended use upon humans. (A third Testa employee was acquitted, having inadequate knowledge of the firm’s operations.)

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Daily Double: Hameln after the war

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Famous for its Pied Piper, the Saxon town of Hameln (Hamelin) after World War II had the honor or burden of sending off 150+ of the war criminals whose volkische enchantments had so devastated Europe. (Plus a number of others for more ordinary crimes under military jurisdiction.)

Taking over a prison where the Nazis had murdered leftists, Jews, and homosexuals, the British made it Albert Pierrepoint‘s home away from home, the gallows-clearinghouse for war crimes trials throughout the western Reich. In Hameln the suave hangman noosed many of the World War II convicts that have featured on this here site down the years, including those of

Great Britain maintained a military presence in Hameln throughout the Cold War, which it is only now winding down. However, she handed the prison back to the West German government in 1950, and German authorities responded by controversially reburying 91 hanged war criminals in a consecrated cemetery.

The prison buildings still stand today, but they’ve been since converted into a four-star hotel which doesn’t advertise the many frightful ghosts who haunt its suites.

For the next two days, we’ll resurrect a few of them from consecutive mass hangings in 1946. For more about Hameln and a thorough roster of its postwar executions, see this page on the invaluable Capital Punishment UK site.

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1946: Ten at Hameln for killing Allied POWs

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On this date in 1946, the British hanged 10 convicted war criminals at Hameln Prison, notably including seven for the “Dreierwalde Airfield murders” of four Allied prisoners of war.

Picture from this book about RAF POWs in wartime Germany, which also supplies the unknown names: A.W. Armstrong and R.F. Gunn of the RAF; B.F. Greenwood and J.E. Paradise of the RAAF.

In that case, two British and three Australian airmen had been captured after bailing out during a March 21 raid. Taken to the nearby aerodrome between Dreierwalde and Hopsten in Westphalia, they were marched out the next day ostensibly for transport to a POW compound. Instead, they all ended up shot by their guards — although Australian Flight-Lieutenant Berick was able to escape, wounded, and survive the war.

The nub of the case was whether the guards cold-bloodedly murdered their prisoners (prosecutors’ version), or whether there was an escape attempt by the airmen that caused the guards to start shooting (defense version).

Berick’s affidavit to the effect that no escape had been attempted weighed very heavily here — that nothing was afoot until he suddenly perceived the guards cocking their weapons. Karl Amberger would testify on behalf of himself and his men that the five had been suspiciously taking their bearings as they marched and suddenly broke off running in different directions.

The defense counsel’s attempt to reconcile these accounts in the haze of war was not fantastical — “saying that the cocking of the action of a weapon by one guard was not unnatural given the fact that five prisoners had to be guarded in a lane in the growing dusk … [while] Berick and the other prisoners probably regarded it as likely that they were to be shot, as others in their position had been, and began to run when it was not necessary.” But it did not carry the day.

Three other Germans joined this bunch on the scaffold, for similar but unrelated POW abuses.

  • Erich Hoffmanm, condemned by a joint British-Norwegian court in Oslo for the murder of Allied POWs in occupied Norway.
  • Friedrich Uhrig, for murdering a downed Royal Air Force pilot at Langlingen.
  • Franz Kircher, for killing three airmen at Essen-West.

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1945: The Belsen war criminals

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On this date in 1945, British hangman Albert Pierrepoint executed eleven guards of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp and two other Nazis in occupied Hameln.

Liberated only eight months before these hangings, Belsen provided the to-us-familiar store of Nazi atrocity stories. Forty-five sat in the dock at the Belsen trial under British military authority, including the notorious camp commandante Josef Kramer — better known as the Beast of Belsen — and the “Angel of Death” Irma Grese.

Those two, and nine others less distinctively nicknamed, faced the gallows. (They were hanged together with two other war criminal convicts not connected to the Belsen trial, Georg Otto Sandrock and Ludwig Schweinberger, for a total of 13.)

On December 13, 1945, Pierrepoint hanged Grese; then, Elisabeth Volkenrath; and then, Juana Bormann, each individually. Finally, the men were then dispatched in pairs.

(Other than Kramer, the most notable was Nazi doctor Fritz Klein, who gave this reading of medical ethics when queried while the camps were still operating: “My Hippocratic oath tells me to cut a gangrenous appendix out of the human body. The Jews are the gangrenous appendix of mankind. That’s why I cut them out.”)

Of all this batch, Irma Grese, the “beautiful beast”, enjoys the liveliest afterlife.

If one finds her pretty, then she was a pretty young thing — only 16 when she hitched herself to the SS; turning 22 during her fatal postwar trial.

Stalking the camp with her whip, and (rather conveniently) cited with the ravenous sexual appetite a B-movie screenwriter would give such a character, part of her siren song is plainly the fetishistic magnetism of Nazi women.

But in the numerous discussion threads about Irma Grese, any number of her advocates will emerge.

Can we leave it at the fascination that female war criminals inspire? Certainly few 22-year-old Einsatzgruppen men have the mitigatory evidence of a coming-of-age in farming and retail so lovingly emphasized, the precise measure of complicity in genocide analyzed in such detail (pdf).

Grese, perhaps, strikes as impressionable, in the youthful sense of absorbing one’s place from the world one inhabits. Her hangman wrote that “[s]he seemed as bonny a girl as one could ever wish to meet.” As a camp guard, she wins promotions; to her interrogators, she accepts responsibility equal to Himmler’s; among those condemned at the Belsen trial, she alone is defiant.

In that guise — and whether or not it is rightly attributed to her — she presents back to her interlocutor those timeless questions of personal identity and moral responsibility: where does abnormal psychology leave off into perfectly conventional psychology that just happens to occupy an abnormal world?

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