t1703 BUDAPEST — Two of the most notorious architects of the Holocaust in Hungary, Laszlo Baky and Laszlo Endre, were executed by public pole hanging before a massive crowd in the courtyard of the Marko Street Prison on the morning of March 29, 1946, bringing a dramatic close to one of the darkest chapters in the … Read more
BUDAPEST — Two of the most notorious architects of the Holocaust in Hungary, Laszlo Baky and Laszlo Endre, were executed by public pole hanging before a massive crowd in the courtyard of the Marko Street Prison on the morning of March 29, 1946, bringing a dramatic close to one of the darkest chapters in the … Read more
Meine Schwiegertochter Jasmin hat mir an diesem Abend direkt ins Gesicht gelacht. Wir saßen in ihrem neuen Wohnzimmer, das sie mit dem Geld eingerichtet hatten, das ich vierzig Jahre lang mühsam zusammengekratzt hatte. Sie lachte, weil ich in meinem einfachen braunen Kleid gekommen war, und sie sagte laut genug, dass alle es hören konnten, dass … Read more
LONDON — The woman the prisoners of Auschwitz called “the Hyena of Auschwitz” walked to the gallows without a tremor, and Albert Pierrepoint, Britain’s most seasoned executioner, would later set down in his memoirs that Irma Grese was among the calmest people he had ever hanged. She was twenty-two years old. The date was December … Read more
The commanders of the Einsatzgruppen, the mobile killing squads responsible for the mass murder of over a million Jews, Communists, Roma, and other targeted groups across Eastern Europe, faced a reckoning that was as incomplete as it was delayed, with only a fraction of the perpetrators ever answering for crimes that reshaped the moral landscape … Read more
The commanders of the Einsatzgruppen, the mobile killing squads responsible for the mass murder of over a million Jews, Communists, Roma, and other targeted groups across Eastern Europe, faced a reckoning that was as incomplete as it was delayed, with only a fraction of the perpetrators ever answering for crimes that reshaped the moral landscape … Read more
LUNEBURG, Germany — The British hangman worked in silence, methodically carrying out the sentences that a military court had handed down, and by midday on December 13, 1945, eleven former guards and officials of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp were dead, their bodies buried in unmarked graves so that no sympathizer could ever turn their resting … Read more
The wives of Nazi Germany’s most powerful leaders, women who stood at the pinnacle of the Third Reich’s elite circles, faced a brutal reckoning in the war’s aftermath that ranged from murder-suicide to imprisonment, poverty, and lifelong infamy. Their stories, long overshadowed by the crimes of their husbands, reveal a complex tapestry of blind loyalty, … Read more
A convicted fascist executioner who hunted partisans and ordered the killings of civilians across northern Italy met his end in a stone-walled courtyard on a cold morning in 1945, refusing a blindfold and asking only for a cigarette before the bullets struck him down. Italo Palesse, a former Blackshirt and collaborator with German security forces, … Read more
ROME — Pietro Caruso, the notorious police chief of Rome under Benito Mussolini’s fascist regime, was executed by firing squad at dawn on 22 September 1944 in the courtyard of the Forte Bravetta prison, paying with his life for his role in one of the most horrific atrocities committed on Italian soil during the Nazi … Read more