t1703

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

One of the most sadistic guards ever to serve inside the Nazi extermination machine at Auschwitz-Birkenau was hanged on May 25, 1946, at Landsberg prison, bringing an end to a life that investigators and survivors alike believed had been responsible for the deaths of roughly twenty thousand innocent people. Otto Moll, known to prisoners and … Read more