The Nazi Hunters Read Online Free

life. He was entitled to a soldier’s death. He asked for that. I tried to get that for him. Just that. That he should die with some honor.”
    The widow of a hanged German general speaking to an American judge at Nuremberg, from the 2001 Broadway production of Judgment at Nuremberg written by Abby Mann
    O n October 16, 1946, ten of the twelve top Nazis whom the International Military Tribunal had condemned to death by hanging were sent to the gallows, which had been hastily constructed in the Nuremberg prison gym where American security guards had played a basketball game only three days earlier.
    Martin Bormann, Adolf Hitler’s right-hand man, who had escaped from his bunker in Berlin during the final days of the war and then seemingly vanished, was the only one of the twelve convicted and sentenced in absentia.
    As the highest ranking Nazi in Nuremberg, Hermann Göring—who had served Hitler in a variety of functions, including president of the Reichstag and commander in chief of the air force, and aspired to succeed der Führer —was due to be hanged first. The court’s verdict spelledout his unambiguous role: “There is nothing to be said in mitigation. For Göring was often, indeed almost always, the moving force, second only to his leader. He was the leading war aggressor, both as political and military leader; he was the director of the slave labor program and the creator of the oppressive program against the Jews and other races at home and abroad. All of these crimes he has frankly admitted.”
    But Göring eluded the hangman by biting into a cyanide pill shortly before the executions were to begin. Two weeks earlier he had returned to his cell after the verdicts were read, “his face pale and frozen, his eyes popping,” according to G. M. Gilbert, the prison psychiatrist who was there to meet the condemned men. “His hands were trembling in spite of his attempt to appear nonchalant,” Gilbert reported. “His eyes were moist and he was panting, fighting back an emotional breakdown.”
    What particularly incensed Göring and some of the others was the planned method of execution. Corporal Harold Burson, a twenty-four-year-old from Memphis who was given the assignment to report on the trial and write the daily scripts for the Armed Forces Network, recalled: “The one thing that Göring wanted to protect above everything else was his military honor. He made the statement more than once that they could take him out and shoot him, give him a soldier’s death, and he would have no problem with that. His problem was that he thought that hanging was the worst thing they could do to a soldier.”
    Fritz Sauckel, who had overseen the slave labor apparatus, shared those sentiments. “Death by hanging—that, at least, I did not deserve,” he protested. “The death part—all right—but that —That I did not deserve.”
    Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel and his deputy General Alfred Jodl pleaded to be spared the noose. Instead, they asked for a firing squad, which would offer them, in Keitel’s words, “a death which is granted to a soldier in all armies of the world should he incur the supreme penalty.” Admiral Erich Raeder had been sentenced to life imprisonment, but he requested the Allied Control Council “to commute this sentence to death by shooting, by way of mercy.” Emily Göring reportedly later claimed that her husband only planned to use the cyanide capsule if “his application to be shot was refused.”
    That left ten men to face the hangman, U.S. Army Master Sergeant John C. Woods.Herman Obermayer, a young Jewish GI who had worked with Woods at the end of the war, providing him with basic materials such as wood and rope for scaffolds for earlier hangings, recalled that the beefy thirty-five-year-old Kansan “defied all the rules, didn’t shine his shoes and didn’t get shaved.”
    There was nothing accidental about the way Woods looked. “His dress was always sloppy,” Obermayer added.