In the hours before dawn on October 16, 1946, ten of the most senior surviving figures of the Nazi regime were hanged inside the gymnasium of Nuremberg Prison. The executions were meant to be the final, solemn act of justice following the most important war crimes trials in modern history. Instead, they became a gruesome spectacle of botched hangings, broken equipment, and prolonged deaths that witnesses described as disgraceful. The man charged with carrying out the sentences, a United States Army master sergeant named John C.
Woods, was neither properly trained nor qualified for the task. His incompetence, combined with hastily built gallows and a rushed schedule, turned the executions into a fiasco that has haunted the legacy of the Nuremberg trials ever since. At the end of the Second World War, the Allied powers faced a momentous decision. The surviving leaders of the Nazi government had overseen crimes on a scale that defied comprehension, and their actions had cost millions of lives across Europe.
The question was not whether they should be punished, but how. Determined to demonstrate that justice, not vengeance, would guide the postwar order, the Allies convened the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. The trials, which began in November 1945 and ran for nearly a year, brought the surviving Nazi officials before the world. Of the major defendants, Hermann Göring was the highest-ranking figure to stand trial.
He had been Hitler’s designated successor, the head of the Luftwaffe, and one of the most powerful men in the Third Reich. But on the night before his execution was scheduled, Göring cheated the hangman. He swallowed a cyanide capsule smuggled into his cell, dying within hours of the moment he was supposed to mount the scaffold. His death deprived the Allies of seeing the most prominent Nazi face justice, but it also set the stage for what followed.
Eleven men had been sentenced to death. After Göring’s suicide, ten remained, and their executions were scheduled for the early hours of October 16, 1946. The condemned were Joachim von Ribbentrop, the former foreign minister; Wilhelm Keitel, chief of the Armed Forces High Command; Ernst Kaltenbrunner, one of the highest-ranking SS officers; Alfred Rosenberg, a leading Nazi ideologue; Hans Frank, the governor-general of occupied Poland; Wilhelm Frick, the former interior minister; Julius Streicher, the virulently antisemitic publisher of Der Stürmer; Fritz Sauckel, the director of forced labor; Alfred Jodl, a prominent general; and Arthur Seyss-Inquart, the former chancellor of Austria. Several of the men asked to be shot by a firing squad, but the Allies refused.
They were to be hanged as common criminals, a deliberate choice meant to strip them of any military honor. The hangman chosen for the task was John C. Woods, a thirty-five-year-old sergeant from Kansas. Woods claimed to have carried out executions in Texas and Oklahoma before the war, but those claims were false.
Both states had abandoned hanging in favor of the electric chair years before Woods claimed to have gained his experience there. Instead, he had learned the craft through his own military executions during and after the war, and his record was already marked by errors. When the American military requested a hangman, Woods lied about his background and was selected. The British, by contrast, employed professional executioners like Albert Pierrepoint, who had been trained through long apprenticeships.
But the Americans controlled Nuremberg Prison, and they entrusted one of the most high-profile executions of the century to an unqualified man. The gallows themselves were constructed within the prison gymnasium, a space that had been used for basketball games just days earlier. Three temporary scaffolds were built, and two were used in alternating fashion so that a body could be examined and removed while the next condemned man was being prepared. The setup was improvised and rushed, lacking the precision of a permanent execution chamber.
The drop system Woods employed was the standard American method, which involved a shorter fall than the carefully calculated long-drop technique preferred by British executioners. The proper method required taking into account the prisoner’s weight, build, and the length of the drop. If the drop was too long, the head could be torn from the body. If it was too short, the neck would not break, and the man would die slowly by strangulation.
According to eyewitness accounts, the drop distances used at Nuremberg were not sufficient to break the necks of any of the condemned men. Several of them continued to move or breathe for minutes after falling through the trapdoor. Witnesses reported that some of the executions took at least ten to fifteen minutes to complete, with the victims dying of slow strangulation rather than the quick, merciful death that a properly broken neck would have provided. Wilhelm Keitel’s death was particularly prolonged.
Reports claimed that he remained alive for more than twenty minutes after his fall before doctors could confirm his death. The design of the trapdoors themselves compounded the problem. The gallows openings were too small, and the hinged doors did not always close properly after a prisoner fell through. As the condemned men dropped, several struck their heads and faces against the sides of the opening, slowing their fall and reducing the force that should have broken their necks.
Photographs of the bodies taken afterward showed that Keitel and Frick were covered in blood, their faces badly injured from hitting the edges of the trapdoor. The collision with the hinged doors robbed the falling men of velocity, and without sufficient speed, the force directed toward their necks was dangerously diminished. The most appalling execution was that of Julius Streicher. The publisher of the fiercely antisemitic newspaper Der Stürmer had been a close associate of Hitler and a relentless propagandist for the regime’s racial policies.
He went to the gallows violently, resisting his guards, shouting insults, and crying out a final “Heil Hitler” before he was bound. When the trapdoor opened, he fell but did not die quietly. Eyewitnesses described hearing groans and moans from behind the black curtain that concealed the lower part of the scaffold. Streicher was kicking and thrashing violently, and the rope swung with the movement of his struggling body.
One witness wrote that the hinged door slammed open with a loud noise as Streicher dropped, and the sounds of his agony were clearly audible. Finally, Woods descended from the scaffold, lifted the black curtain, and stepped inside. Moments later, the groaning stopped, and the rope went still. The witnesses assumed that Woods had grabbed the dying man’s body and pulled downward to end his suffering.
It was widely believed that Streicher had been strangled to death. In the decades that followed, some claimed that Woods had deliberately sabotaged the executions, seeking to make the condemned Nazis suffer. Woods himself admitted that he hated the prisoners, but there is little evidence that he intentionally botched the hangings. The United States Army rejected such accusations and insisted that the executions had been carried out properly.
Military officials argued that the reports of Keitel remaining alive for twenty minutes did not prove that he was conscious or suffering during that time. Yet the facial injuries, the eyewitness accounts, and the prolonged deaths of multiple men made it difficult to accept that everything had gone according to plan. The pressure of the schedule may have made matters worse. Ten men had to be hanged in the early hours of the morning, with the first execution beginning shortly after 1:00 a.
m. and the last completed by around 3:00 a. m. The alternating gallows kept the process moving at an assembly-line pace, but it also placed enormous strain on the execution team.
The desire for speed, combined with the need for secrecy and security to prevent the bodies from becoming Nazi relics or the execution site from becoming a shrine, encouraged a rushed and careless procedure. In the end, the Nuremberg executions were botched for several intertwined reasons. The American military trusted the wrong man with the task, giving the duty to a hangman whose experience was fabricated and whose skills were inadequate. The equipment was unsuitable for providing the quick deaths that proper hanging techniques were designed to produce.
The execution team was under pressure to finish quickly, and the improvised nature of the entire operation made disaster more likely. There is no solid proof that any of this was deliberate. The evidence points not to malice, but to incompetence, negligence, and haste. Woods himself later claimed that he was very proud of having carried out the executions, a strange statement from a man who had turned the most important moments of his career into a public mess.
The justice that the Allies had sought to demonstrate at Nuremberg was ultimately delivered, but the manner of its delivery was a deep embarrassment to the very principles the trials were meant to uphold.