On October 16, 1946, shortly after 1:00 a.m., three wooden scaffolds stood in the gymnasium of the Nuremberg prison. Each had black stairs, black trap doors, and thirteen steps leading up to death. Waiting at the top was Master Sergeant John C. Woods, the official executioner of the United States Army.
Woods was a short, loud, messy man. He chewed gum, drank whiskey, and bragged about his job. That night he had what many considered the most important job in the world: hanging the leaders of the Third Reich.
The first man walked in. Joachim von Ribbentrop, Hitler's foreign minister, was pale and shaking. He climbed the thirteen steps, and Woods placed the black hood over his head and the noose around his neck. The trap door opened.
Ribbentrop fell, but he did not die instantly. The rope swung wildly, and there were sounds of choking. It took him nearly fifteen minutes to die.
Then the next man came, and the next. Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, General Alfred Jodl, and Ernst Kaltenbrunner followed. With each hanging, something went wrong.
The trap doors were too small. The ropes were too short. The prisoners hit their heads on the way down. Their necks did not break. They slowly strangled.
Was it a mistake? Was John C. Woods incompetent? Or did the American executioner decide to give the Nazis one final taste of pain?
When the night was over, Woods looked at the bodies. He smiled and said, "10 men in 103 minutes. That's fast work."
To understand the tension of that night, it is necessary to look at the days before. For eleven months, the International Military Tribunal had listened to the horrors of the Nazis: the Holocaust, the invasions, the slave labor.
On October 1, 1946, the judges delivered their verdict. Twelve men were sentenced to death by hanging. Among them was Hermann Göring, the Reich Marshal, head of the Luftwaffe, and the man who created the Gestapo. He was the highest-ranking Nazi alive.
When Göring heard the word "hanging," he was furious. He slammed his headphones down and demanded to be shot. "I am a soldier," he exclaimed. "I demand a firing squad. I should die like a man, not a common criminal."
He wrote letters to Eisenhower. He wrote to the Control Council. He begged not to be hanged. To a German officer, hanging was shameful. It was for thieves and traitors. But the Allies refused. The order came back: request denied. They wanted him to swing from a rope.
The date was set for October 16. The prisoners were not told the date. They sat in their cells, listening to the carpenters building the gallows in the gymnasium next door. The thud, thud, thud was the sound of their own death being built.
On October 15, two hours before the execution was supposed to begin, the guards were doing their rounds. Private First Class Herbert Lee Stivers looked into cell number five. Hermann Göring lay on his cot. He looked like he was sleeping, but his arm was hanging down in a strange way.
The guard shouted for the Corporal of the Guard. They rushed in. Göring was turning blue. There was foam on his lips, and on the floor lay a small glass capsule of cyanide.
Doctors rushed in and tried to revive him, but it was too late. Hermann Göring, the fat tyrant, had cheated the hangman. He had committed suicide.
The American colonel in charge, Burton C. Andrus, was devastated. He had promised the world he would hang Göring. Now the star of the show was dead. The press would call it a failure. Eisenhower would be furious.
They locked down the prison and searched everything. Where did Göring get the poison? Was it hidden in his pipe, his cream jar? Did an American guard give it to him? To this day, the question is still debated.
But there was no time for an investigation. Ten other men were waiting to die. Colonel Andrus made a decision: get the others ready, and start now.
The man chosen to kill the Nazis was a character straight out of a nightmare. Master Sergeant John C. Woods was not a professional executioner. Before the war, he had been discharged from the Navy for being unstable. He drifted around before joining the Army.
When the Army asked for volunteers to be executioners, Woods raised his hand. He lied and said he had experience. The Army believed him.
He was short, had yellow teeth, and loved attention. He told reporters, "I've hanged two Englishmen and a Frenchman, but I'm looking forward to the Germans." He designed the gallows himself and boasted that he had invented a new knot.
But on the night of October 16, his design had a fatal flaw. The trap door was too small, and the drop was not calculated correctly. Was it a mistake? Or did John Woods look at the men who killed millions of Jews and decide that they did not deserve a quick death?
The Nuremberg executions were supposed to be clean justice. Instead, they became a gruesome spectacle.
At 1:11 a.m., the first man was brought out. Joachim von Ribbentrop, the man who signed the pact with Stalin and planned the war, was dressed in a suit. He looked shrunken, his hands tied behind his back.
He walked the thirteen steps and looked at the American witnesses. He said, "God save Germany." Woods put the black hood over his head and tightened the heavy coiled rope. Then he pulled the lever.
Ribbentrop dropped, but his neck did not snap. The witnesses heard a sickening thud. His head had hit the side of the trap door on the way down because the opening was too narrow.
Then came the sounds of a man fighting for air from inside the wooden box below the scaffold. He was strangling slowly. The doctor looked at his watch. One minute, five minutes, ten minutes. He was still alive. Finally, after fourteen minutes, his heart stopped.
Justice had been served, but it was messy.
Next was Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, Hitler's Chief of Staff, the man who signed the Commando Order that led to the killing of prisoners. Keitel was a soldier. He marched into the gym like he was on parade, wearing his uniform minus the medals. He looked at the hangman with contempt and shouted, "Alles für Deutschland, everything for Germany."
The trap door opened. Again, the thud. Keitel hit his head on the wood. Again, the rope did not break his neck. Keitel was a strong man. He fought the rope. It took him twenty-four minutes to die.
Twenty-four minutes of hanging at the end of a rope, suffocating. The witnesses turned pale. Some of the journalists had to look away. They hated these men and knew they deserved to die, but watching a man strangle for twenty minutes was brutal.
The night went on. Ernst Kaltenbrunner, head of the SS security office and the man who ran the concentration camps, fell and his rope slipped. He bled from the head and died slowly.
Alfred Jodl, the general whom Eisenhower refused to see, went to his death stoically, but he too suffered.
Then came Julius Streicher, the most hated man in the group. He was the publisher of the anti-Semitic newspaper Der Stürmer. He was a pervert and a sadist. Even other Nazis hated him.
When Streicher walked in, he was screaming. He looked at the American witnesses and yelled, "Purimfest, 1946." He was referencing a Jewish holiday on which the enemies of the Jews were hanged. He screamed at the Americans, "The Bolsheviks will hang you one day."
Woods did not like Streicher. When he put the noose around Streicher's neck, some witnesses say Woods twisted it on purpose. He wanted it to hurt.
Streicher yelled, "Adele, my dear wife." The trap door opened. Streicher did not die. He was kicking and groaning loudly. The witnesses could hear him thrashing inside the box. Then the groaning stopped abruptly.
Rumor has it that John Woods, tired of the noise, walked under the scaffold, grabbed Streicher's legs, and pulled down hard until his neck snapped. He finished him with his bare hands.
By 3:00 a.m., it was over. Ten bodies lay on the floor of the gym, eleven if Göring was counted. Colonel Andrus ordered Göring's body to be brought in. They placed his body under the gallows. They wanted the press to see him. They wanted to prove he had not escaped to South America.
The photographers came in. Flash, flash, flash. They took photos of the dead men. The photos were gruesome. Ribbentrop's face was purple. Keitel's face was covered in blood from hitting the trap door. Their necks were elongated.
These photos were published in magazines like Time and Life. They were the proof the world needed. The monsters were dead.
The final act of the drama happened in secret. The Americans did not want a shrine. They did not want neo-Nazis visiting the graves of these men. So they loaded the bodies into trucks and drove them to a crematorium in Munich, the crematorium at Dachau.
The same ovens that had burned thousands of Jews now burned the men who ordered the Holocaust. It was poetic justice.
The ashes were collected and taken to a small river nearby, the river Isar. In the middle of the night, the ashes were poured into the water, washed away, gone. No grave, no marker, nothing.
Where was General Patton while this was happening? He was in Germany, but he was not celebrating. Patton hated the Nuremberg trials. He called them a kangaroo court. He believed that soldiers should not be tried for fighting a war.
He wrote to his wife, "I am frankly opposed to this war criminal stuff. It is not cricket." Patton believed that you kill the enemy on the battlefield. You do not hang them in a gym years later. He thought it was vindictive.
But Eisenhower disagreed. Eisenhower believed that the world had to see justice done legally. He refused to intervene. He let the hangman do his work.
The execution of the Nuremberg Nazis was messy. It was brutal. It was botched. John C. Woods, the hangman, never apologized.
He said later, "I hanged those 10 Nazis, and I am proud of it. I wasn't nervous. A fellow can't afford to have nerves in this business."
Some say he did a bad job because he was incompetent. Others say he did a perfect job. He made sure that the men who caused so much suffering suffered a little bit themselves before they died.
Was it cruel? Yes. Was it justice? The millions of ghosts from the concentration camps probably thought it was too quick.
The hangman, John Woods, died in an accident just a few years later. Some say it was karma.