On January 5, 1946, a public execution took place in our city. The only one on the Neva banks for the entire XX century. On the current Kalinin Square, not far from the place where the Gigant cinema stood, and now the Giant Hall concert hall is located, eight German war criminals were hanged, who committed their atrocities mainly on the territory of the Pskov region.
The Germans were brave
On the morning of that day, almost the entire square was filled with people. Here is how one of the eyewitnesses describes what he saw: “The cars, in the backs of which the Germans were standing, drove in reverse under the gallows. Our escort soldiers deftly, but without haste, put nooses around their necks. The cars moved slowly forward. The Nazis swayed in the air. The people began to disperse, and a sentry was placed at the gallows.
The newspapers didn’t write about where and when the execution would take place, and they didn’t talk about it on the radio, ”the People’s Artist of Russia Ivan Krasko recalled in a conversation with Komsomolskaya Pravda correspondents. - But thanks to rumors, Leningraders knew everything. I was then fifteen years old, and this sight attracted me. They brought the criminals, the people who had gathered on the square shouted curses at them - the Nazis killed their loved ones for many of them. I was amazed that the Germans held out courageously. Only one before the execution began to scream heart-rendingly. Another tried to calm him down, and the third looked at them with undisguised contempt.
But when the support was knocked out from under the feet of the executed, the mood of the crowd changed, - continues Ivan Ivanovich. - Someone seemed to be numb, someone lowered his head, some fainted. I also felt unwell, I quickly left the square and went home. What I saw then, I remember for the rest of my life. And even now, when some movie shows an execution, I turn off the TV.
And here is what the blockade survivor Nina Yarovtseva, who in 1946 lived near Kalinin Square, recalls:
On the day this happened, my mother had a shift at the factory. But Aunt Tanya, our neighbor, went to watch the execution and took me with her. I was then eleven years old. We arrived early, but there were a lot of people. I remember the crowd making a strange noise, as if everyone was agitated for some reason. When the truck with the gallows drove off, the Germans hung and fluttered, for some reason I suddenly got scared and hid behind Aunt Tanya. Although she hated the Nazis terribly and wanted them all to be killed throughout the war. Having found out where we were, my mother attacked Aunt Tanya: “Why did you drag the child there ?! You like it - see for yourself! Then for several nights in a row I hardly slept: I had nightmares, I woke up. A few years later, my mother admitted that in the evenings she dripped valerian into my tea.
An interesting detail. According to one of the eyewitnesses, when the sentry was removed from the square, unknown persons removed the boots from the hanged men.
An eye for an eye?
April 19, 1943, when during the Great Patriotic War a turning point was outlined, a decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR appeared with the long title "On punishment measures for the Nazi villains guilty of killing and torturing the Soviet civilian population and captured Red Army soldiers, for spies, traitors to the motherland from among Soviet citizens and for their accomplices." According to the decree, "fascist villains convicted of murdering and torturing the civilian population and captured Red Army soldiers, as well as spies and traitors to the motherland from among Soviet citizens, are punished death penalty through hanging." And further: “The execution of sentences should be carried out publicly, in front of the people, and the bodies of the hanged should be left on the gallows for several days, so that everyone knows how they are punished and what retribution will befall anyone who commits violence and reprisals against the civilian population and who betrays his homeland. ".
The essence of the decree is to treat the fascists the way they treat our people, - says a professor at the Institute of History of the St. Petersburg state university Viktor Ivanov. - It was reminiscent of revenge, but in the harsh conditions of wartime, such a position of the Soviet authorities was completely justified.
Although there are some nuances here. According to the professor, the German invaders publicly executed the partisans and those who helped them. However, from the point of view of international law, partisans, in modern terms, are illegal armed formations. As for the captured Red Army soldiers, they were usually not killed, although many died of starvation, disease, and unbearable working conditions. German command believed that they did not seem to exist, because, unlike Germany, the Soviet Union did not sign the Geneva Convention of 1929, which regulates how prisoners of war should be treated. Joseph Stalin is credited with the following phrase: "We have no prisoners, but there are traitors and traitors to the motherland." Therefore, the Nazis treated the captured British, Americans and French more humanely than with Soviet citizens.
Understanding all this, the Soviet authorities sought to ensure that people who did not commit serious crimes did not fall under the decree: enemy soldiers and officers who only performed military duty, says Viktor Ivanov. - Investigators, prosecutors, judges were instructed to prepare these trials very carefully.
After the decree was issued, Smersh investigators began to work in the liberated territories. They tried to identify the perpetrators of terrible crimes. Then this information was sent to the camps where the German prisoners of war were. The suspects were arrested.
During the preparation of the Leningrad trial, more than a hundred witnesses from among Soviet citizens were interrogated, but only eighteen were called to court, the professor emphasizes. - Only those whose testimony did not raise any doubts.
And why did the process take place in Leningrad, although from a legal point of view it should have been held in Pskov? Indeed, on the territory of this region, the defendants mainly repaired their atrocities.
Apparently, the goal was to show the people of Leningrad who was the cause of their incredible suffering during the years of the blockade, - Viktor Ivanov believes.
Among the defendants was Major General
Petersburgers are well acquainted with the Vyborg Palace of Culture, located not far from the Finland Station, where, in particular, performances are shown by theater troupes touring our city. This building was built in 1927, on the tenth anniversary of October revolution. It was here at the end of December 1945 that the trial of eleven German war criminals began.
The process was widely covered in the newspapers. For example, in Leningradskaya Pravda every day, including January 1, large articles appeared. There was an interpreter in the hall, a German by nationality. He gave a receipt that he would translate very accurately from Russian into German and vice versa.
The most notable figure among them was Major General Heinrich Remlinger, who was 63 at the time of his execution. His military career began in 1902. He was the military commandant of Pskov and at the same time led the district commandant's offices subordinate to him, as well as "units special purpose". In February 1945 he was taken prisoner.
The materials of the trial proved that Remlinger organized fourteen punitive expeditions, during which several villages and villages were burned, about eight thousand people, mostly women and children, were killed, says Nikita Lomagin, Doctor of Historical Sciences.
During the court hearings, the major general tried to justify himself by saying that he was only following the orders of his superiors.
Among the defendants was 26-year-old Corporal Erwin Skotky. A native of the city of Koenigsberg, now Kaliningrad, the son of a policeman, since 1935 a member of the Hitler Youth League.
On the initial stage During the Great Patriotic War, Skotki was engaged in issuing uniforms to servicemen of one of the Wehrmacht units, - says Viktor Ivanov. - However, he was not satisfied with the small salary: not everyone knows this, but during the war German soldiers received a salary. And then he was offered a promotion and a higher salary, but in a punitive detachment. Scotty agreed without hesitation. At the trial, he pretended to be a fool: they say, he did not know that he would have to burn villages and shoot people. Allegedly, he thought that he would only protect cargo and prisoners of war. Skotki identified several witnesses at once.
Note that the three defendants managed to escape the gallows. Their guilt was not so great, but because they received various terms of hard labor.
The death penalty has been abolished
In 1945-1946, the trials of war criminals with subsequent public executions took place in various regions of the country - in the Crimea, Krasnodar Territory, Ukraine, Belarus. 88 people were hanged, eighteen of them were generals. Work to identify such criminals continued in the future, but the execution of the convicts soon ceased.
The fact is that in May 1947, a decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR “On the abolition of the death penalty” was published. Paragraph 2 read: “for crimes punishable by the death penalty under existing laws, apply in Peaceful time imprisonment in forced labor camps for a period of 25 years.
An interesting fact: after the end of the Great Patriotic War, there were 66,000 German prisoners of war on the territory of our city and region. Almost 59 thousand of them subsequently returned to their homeland.
BY THE WAY
Apart from fascist invaders, terrible atrocities in Leningrad region repaired by traitors who had gone over to their side. In the forties, fifties and even sixties, trials of these people took place in various cities of the region. As a rule, they were sentenced to long terms of imprisonment. There were no cases of public executions.
In June 1970, in Leningrad, if not the very first, then one of the first attempts to hijack an aircraft abroad was made. She was not successful. One of those convicted in this case, Eduard Kuznetsov, subsequently wrote the book Step Left, Step Right. The author recalls that in the camps he met people who were serving sentences for collaborating with the invaders. According to Kuznetsov, they all unanimously denied that they had participated in terrible actions against the civilian population.
PSYCHOLOGIST'S OPINION
Dangerous sight
Such an instinct of the crowd is a kind of atavism, a relic deeply rooted in our nature, says psychologist Yevgeny Krainev. - But if, after such a spectacle, a survey is conducted among the "spectators", then very few will say that they experienced positive emotions. Most simply tickle their nerves, people try in such a strange way to suppress the fear of death in their souls. In any case, it does not bring anything positive either for a single person or for the crowd. Such spectacles are especially dangerous for children and teenagers. Even in the case when a just punishment overtakes the obviously guilty.
HOW ARE THEM?
The world still executes in public
In the twentieth century, more and more countries began to abandon the death penalty. Today, this measure of punishment is not applied in 130 states. However, there are 68 countries in the world that retain the death penalty. In some of them, people are still publicly deprived of their lives. This, in particular, Saudi Arabia, Iran , China , North Korea , Somalia.
Execution of German war criminals in Leningrad in 1946.
In October 1946, an end was put in the Nuremberg trials over the highest state and military figures of the Third Reich.
The rapid cooling of relations between yesterday's allies in the anti-Hitler coalition gave rise to the hope among the defendants that the process would fall apart, and they themselves would be released.
But the victorious powers, in spite of everything, had enough political will to complete what they started.
On October 1, 1946, the operative part of the verdict was announced in the courtroom of the tribunal: the penalties for each defendant.
For the announcement of the verdict, the defendants were brought one by one to the chief judge. Geoffrey Lawrence. They were sentenced to death by hanging Hermann Göring, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Wilhelm Keitel, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Alfred Rosenberg, Hans Frank, Wilhelm Frick, Julius Streicher, Fritz Sauckel, Arthur Seyss-Inquart, Alfred Jodl and Martin Borman(in absentia).
The Tribunal set a four-day time limit within which petitions for clemency could be filed. Of the "suicide bombers" this right was not used only by Kaltenbrunner, who considered this request meaningless. Even the lawyer representing Bormann (whose whereabouts remained unknown) asked for leniency.
Göring, Jodl and Keitel also accompanied their petitions with a request that the hanging be replaced by execution in the event that they were denied pardon.
On October 9-10, 1946, the Control Council for Germany, which consisted of representatives of the Allied Powers, considered the petitions of the sentenced and decided to reject them.
Scaffold in the gym
On the evening of October 15, 8 journalists were admitted to the territory of the Nuremberg prison, two each from the four allied powers: Soviet Union, United States, England and France.
Eight journalists and an official photographer were to witness the executions.
In addition to two correspondents, from each of four countries an interpreter, a doctor and a military representative were also present. In addition, security officers, the executioner and his assistants, medical experts, and a priest were involved in the procedure. There were about 40 people in total.
The venue for the execution was the prison gym, which was refurbished in just a couple of days.
Three gallows were installed in the hall: two were supposed to be involved in the execution, one served as a spare. To speed up the procedure, it was supposed to use the gallows in turn: while the corpse of the executed was removed from one, another "suicide bomber" was being prepared for the second.
Thirteen steps led to the scaffold. The base of the scaffold, more than two meters high, was covered with a tarpaulin. Under each gallows there is a hatch with two wings that open by pressing a lever. The executed fell into the hole to a depth of 2 meters 65 centimeters.
Before the execution, manila ropes were tested using cast iron pigs, which were to play a major role in the execution. Experience has shown that the ropes successfully withstand a load of 200 kilograms.
The right corner of the room was fenced off with a tarpaulin. The bodies of the hanged were to be piled there.
Goering's "Escape"
While preparations were going on, the head of the prison, an American Colonel Burton Andrews visited each convict and reported on the rejection of applications for clemency.
From that moment on, the guards had to watch those sentenced to death with particular care. But this did not help: at about 22:45, Hermann Goering committed suicide with an ampoule of poison. Thus, Goering confirmed the correctness of his own words: "Field marshals are not hanged." Until now, there are several versions of who exactly helped Goering to avoid the loop. Be that as it may, none of the Nazis succeeded in repeating such a trick.
At 23:45 on October 15, the condemned were awakened. They were offered the last supper: sausages with potato salad or pancakes with fruit salad to choose from.
The procedure began at about one in the morning on October 16. The condemned were read out the verdict again, after which, handcuffed, they were led into the gym. Here they were at the disposal of two executioners: the Americans John Woods and Joseph Malta. The eldest was Woods, a professional executioner who, even before the war, carried out about 350 sentences in the United States.
Before the condemned was lifted to the scaffold, his face was illuminated to verify his identity.
Nuremberg prison. Photo: www.globallookpress.com
"The Bolsheviks will hang you someday"
The former Foreign Minister of the Third Reich, Joachim von Ribbentrop, was the first to overcome the 13 steps. The executioner threw on and tightened the noose around his neck. After that, Ribbetrop was asked to say the last word. “God save Germany! Spare my soul!” shouted the former minister. John Woods put a cap on his head, the priest said a prayer, and after turning the lever, Ribbentrop fell down.
The executioners and guards worked quickly and confidently. The Nazis disappeared one by one into the gaping abyss of the gallows hatch.
Writer Boris Polevoy, who was present at the execution, recalled: “The hanged man fell into the inside of the gallows, the bottom of which was hung with dark curtains on one side, and was lined with wood on three sides so that no one would see the death throes of the hanged.”
The body remained hanging until medical experts pronounced him dead.
Most of the suicide bombers, according to the recollections of witnesses, kept their presence of mind. This does not apply to one of the Nazi ideologues, Julius Streicher. He is the only one who kept shouting "Heil Hitler!" even with a bag over his head.
Julius Streicher. Photo: www.globallookpress.com
By the way, Streicher is also the only one for whom the trial in Nuremberg was already the second. Known for his promiscuity and love of pornography, the Nazi was once accused of child molestation, but managed to justify himself.
“Now to God! The Bolsheviks will hang you one day. Adele, my unfortunate wife. Heil Hitler!” Streicher shouted before his execution.
The last to be hanged was Arthur Seyss-Inquart, former head of Austria and Reich Minister of the Netherlands.
Standing on the scaffold, he said: “I hope that this execution will be the last tragedy of the Second World War and that what happened will serve as a lesson: peace and mutual understanding must exist between peoples. I believe in Germany."
Arthur Seyss-Inquart. Photo: www.globallookpress.com
"Their ashes are secretly scattered to the wind..."
After that, a stretcher with the corpse of Goering was brought into the hall, which was symbolically placed under the gallows.
Then representatives of all the allied powers examined them and signed their death certificates. Photographs were taken of every body, dressed and naked. Then each corpse was wrapped in a mattress, along with the last clothes that he was wearing and the rope on which he was hung, and placed in a coffin. All coffins were sealed.
At 4 am on October 16, new stage operations. The coffins were loaded into specially prepared trucks and, accompanied by an armed convoy, were sent to Munich.
At dawn, the column arrived at the crematorium located on the outskirts of the city. His leadership was alerted to the planned cremation of "fourteen American soldiers". This information was reported in order to prevent a possible leak of information about who was actually brought to be burned.
The crematorium was cordoned off by the military, tanks were stationed nearby. Everyone who entered the building was forced to stay there until the end of the day.
Each coffin was opened in the presence of four officers: one from the USA, England and France and the USSR. After making sure that the body had not been replaced, the corpse was sent for cremation.
The procedure went on all day. When it was over, a car was driven up to the building, into which the ashes were loaded.
The official communiqué, signed by the allies, read: "The bodies of Hermann Goering, together with the bodies of criminals executed by the International Military Tribunal on October 16 in Nuremberg, were burned, and their ashes were secretly scattered to the wind ..."
The place of the last procedure was carefully hidden in order to prevent like-minded people of the executed from turning it into a "sanctuary".
According to one version, the ashes were taken from the crematorium to a building that belonged to the American troops and was listed in the documents under the name "Mortuary No. 1".
On the evening of October 18, American soldiers cordoned off the area around the Marienklausen Bridge over the Isar River and the Isar Canal. Around midnight, a car arrived at the bridge, from which a box of mixed Nazi ashes was unloaded. It was slowly poured from the bridge into the canal.
However, it may have happened somewhere else. One way or another, the history of the leaders of the Third Reich was over.
On the night of October 16, 1946, the execution of the former leaders of the Third Reich, condemned to death by the International Nuremberg Tribunal, took place in Germany. On the gallows, hastily put together in the gym of the Nuremberg prison, were the Minister of Foreign Affairs Joachim von Ribbentrop; Head of the SS Reich Security Headquarters Ernst Kaltenbrunner; Chief of Staff of the Operational Command of the Wehrmacht High Command Colonel General Alfred Jodl, Reich Minister for the Eastern Occupied Territories Alfred Rosenberg; Chief of Staff of the High Command of the Wehrmacht Wilhelm Keitel; governor general of occupied Poland Hans Frank; Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia Wilhelm Frick; labor commissioner Fritz Sauckel; Gauleiter of Franconia Julius Streicher; Reichskommissar of the Netherlands Arthur Seyss-Inquart.
In total, there were 12 names on the list of those sentenced to hanging, but Martin Bormann, who managed to escape, was sentenced in absentia. Shortly before his execution, Hermann Goering committed suicide. Hearing the verdict in the courtroom, Goering said through his teeth: "They don't hang Reichsmarshals." Two days before the execution, “Nazi number two” filed a petition to replace the shameful hanging with a firing squad, but it was not granted.
The remaining 10 sentenced were awakened at midnight, after which the head of the prison, Colonel Andrews, in the presence of a priest, read the sentence to everyone, and the execution began. The prison was in the US occupation zone, so the executioners were chosen from among the US military. They were professional executioner John Woods and volunteer Joseph Malta. Three gallows were built, but two were used - while one was hung, the second was removed.
Accompanied by a convoy, everyone climbed the 13 steps of the scaffold with their hands tied behind their backs. Woods threw a bag and his famous 13-knot noose over the convict's head, the priest read a prayer, and the criminal was asked to say the last word. The first was Ribbentrop: “God save Germany! Spare my soul!" The defendants behaved with dignity. True, according to the former personal bodyguard of Roman Rudenko (chief prosecutor from the USSR) Joseph Hoffmann, everyone except Streicher, who had to be forcibly dragged to the scaffold.
“Two million of my soldiers went to their deaths for their fatherland. I follow my sons. Thanks to!" Keitel said. “Now to God! The Bolsheviks will hang you one day. Adele, my unfortunate wife,” said Streicher.
Either the executioners made a mistake, or they did it on purpose, but the length of the ropes was incorrectly calculated. Falling into a cell blocked on all sides under a scaffold with a noose around their neck, the convicts died not from a fracture of the cervical vertebrae, but from suffocation. In addition, the hole through which the gallows fell was made too narrow. This explains the wounds on Keitel's face, which can be seen in post-mortem photographs - falling, he badly hurt his head. There is evidence that Ribbentrop died for 10 minutes, Jodl - 18, Keitel - 24, and the executioners had to strangle Streicher - he died too long.
Front row, left to right: Goering, Hess, Ribbentrop, Keitel. Second row: Doenitz, Raeder, Schirach and Sauckel. Photo: wikipedia.org
The execution was followed by 42 people: priests, soldiers, doctors, journalists. The wives of the convicts were ordered to leave Nuremberg on 29 September. When it was all over, a stretcher with Goering's body was brought into the hall. The hanged were examined by representatives of the allied countries, then they were photographed and placed in coffins - with a rope and a prison mattress. The secret cargo was transported for cremation to the East Cemetery in Munich. According to other sources, the coffins were burned in the ovens of the Dachau concentration camp. On October 18, the ashes were scattered from the plane.
Woods carried out many more executions at the Nuremberg trials and later in Japan. He returned to America as a hero and loved to talk about his work in Germany. In 1950, he died of electric shock while fixing the wiring in his house.
“I thought that the executioner was a fierce, evil person,” Hoffman said in an interview with the Ukrainian Facts portal. “And Woodd seemed kind to me. He is healthy, his hands are strong, like those of a peasant. He said that he did not have nerves, when he was working, one could not have them. At home in San Antonio, carried out 347 death sentences against murderers and rapists. John Woodd really liked my red star on the cap. I gave it to him as a keepsake. Suddenly I see: he takes off his Swiss watch! I was stunned, I began to refuse. John in any: take it, otherwise I will be offended. They are still in my possession."
During World War II, Nuremberg, which housed German military factories, was heavily bombed by British and American troops. During the most massive attack on January 2, 1945, 6,000 explosive and a million incendiary bombs were dropped on the city. 2000 people died and Old city was virtually destroyed. Nuremberg was occupied by American troops from April 1945 until 1949.
mass psychosis
You ask, what happened to the rest of the criminals? International tribunal sentences 'Nazi number three' to life imprisonment Rudolf Hess, Minister of Economy of Germany Walter Funk and Grand Admiral Erich Raeder, by the age of 20 - Gauleiter of Vienna Baldur von Schirach and Reich Minister for Armaments and Military Production Albert Speer. Diplomat and former foreign minister sentenced to 15 years Constantin von Neurath, and the Commander-in-Chief of the Navy, who took the place of the president after the death of Hitler, Karl Doenitz- to 10 years in prison. Goebbels Ministry of Public Education and Propaganda official Hans Fritsche, diplomat Franz von Papen and economist Hjalmar Shacht were acquitted despite protest Soviet side, but were soon condemned by the denazification commission.
Since the Nuremberg Trials, there have been 12 more minor trials of Nazis, including a trial of doctors, in which cases were considered Hertha Oberheuser and Carl Gerbhardt. Many high-ranking officials of the Third Reich chose to commit suicide, taking their wives and children to the next world.
Among them was Adolf Gitler, committed suicide in a bunker under the Reich Chancellery along with Eva Braun on April 30, 1945. Most of all, the Fuhrer was afraid that he would be put to sleep with the help of gas shells and taken to Moscow. Hitler ordered that the corpses should then be taken out into the street, doused with gasoline and burned.
Nuremberg prison and Spandau prison, where Hess served time.
On May 1, six children of the Reich Minister of Public Education and Propaganda of Germany were killed Joseph Goebbels: Heidrun, Hedwig, Holdin, Hildegard, Helga and Helmut. At that time they were from 5 to 13 years old. A little later, the parents also committed suicide. It happened in the same "fuhrerbunker".
Leader of the German Labor Front Robert Lay committed suicide in Nuremberg prison before trial. In conversations with a prison psychologist, he admitted that he did not know about the crimes of which he was accused, and could no longer bear the feeling of shame. After this incident, surveillance of the prisoner became around the clock (which, however, did not prevent Goering from dying).
The fate of the Fuhrer's personal secretary Martin Bormann not known for certain. It is believed that shortly after Hitler's death, he followed suit. Bormann's remains were found in 1972.
Committed suicide and the Reichsfuehrer SS Heinrich Himmler, who tried to escape with other people's documents, but was arrested by two Russian soldiers - Vasily Gubarev and Ivan Sidorov. In May 1945, the head of the Office of the Head of the NSDAP committed suicide. Philip Bowler and his wife.
Kukryniksy. Process. 1946
After the defeat of the Third Reich became apparent, a wave of suicides swept across the country - and not only among the highest echelons. The most massive in the history of the country was the suicide of the inhabitants of the town of Demmin in northeastern Germany, bordered by the rivers Pene and Tollensee. The madness started after Soviet troops approached the city. The German authorities ordered the bridges to be blown up, and the inhabitants were trapped. According to various sources, from 700 to 1,500 people committed suicide in a few days. Cleaning the city of corpses continued from May to July 1945.
“Corpses were everywhere,” recalls Karl Schlesser, an eyewitness to the events, in an interview. Deutsche Welle. “We, hungry kids, snooped around everywhere to steal something to eat, and saw bodies floating along the river.”
Accurate statistics on such cases have not been preserved, Germany was not up to it. It is believed that in 1945 there were 7,000 such deaths in Berlin alone, and between 10,000 and 100,000 throughout the country.
What happened to Muller, Mengele and others
But even now not all the "big" names have been named. What happened to Gestapo chief Heinrich Müller, the sadist "Doctor" Mengele, SS Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann and his colleague Alois Brunner?
Adolf Eichmann , who today is almost blamed for the extermination of the Jews, fled to Argentina in 1950, and in 1952 he returned to Europe under a false name, married his own wife and took his family to Buenos Aires. However, in 1960, Adolf Eichmann was kidnapped by Israeli intelligence, the operation to track down and capture was personally led by the head of the Mossad, Isser Harel. Nicholas Eichmann did a disservice to his father, who boasted to the girl that his father had succeeded in the service of the Third Reich. The girl told her father about this, who realized what kind of Eichmann it could be, and reported it to the right place. Adolf Eichmann was taken to Israel, found guilty on 15 counts, and sentenced to death. On the night of June 1, 1962, he was hanged. Eichmann's ashes were scattered over mediterranean sea outside the territorial waters of Israel.
Eichmann's colleague was hiding in Syria until the end of his days. After the war, the former head of the SS special detachments responsible for the deportation of Jews from Vienna, Berlin, Greece, France and Slovakia to the death camps hid under a false name. In 1954, he fled to Syria, where he collaborated with the Syrian secret services and, according to some reports, was engaged in the preparation of armed units of the Kurdistan Workers' Party. The Mossad tried more than once to destroy Brunner - when receiving booby-trapped packages, he lost an eye and four fingers. In 1985, in an interview with a German newspaper, Brunner stated that he was ready to appear before a tribunal, but not before an Israeli court. "I don't want to become a second Eichmann," he said. The Syrian government has never confirmed the presence of a fugitive Nazi criminal in the country. There is no reliable information about when and where he died. According to some reports, this happened in 1996, according to others - in 2010.
The mysterious fate of the chief of the Gestapo Heinrich Müller . The circumstances of his life after April 29, 1945, when he interrogated SS Gruppenführer Hermann Fegelein in the "Hitler bunker", are not exactly known. In August of the 45th, a corpse in a general's uniform was found on the territory of the German Ministry of Aviation, with an identity card and a photograph of Muller. Of course, it was not him, as scientists later proved. There is a version according to which Muller was recruited by the NKVD and lived in Russia until his death in 1948. According to another version, the former head of the secret police was recruited by the CIA, and he died in the United States. It was assumed that he was hiding in Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Chile, Bolivia.
In 2013, Johannes Tuchel, professor at the University of Berlin and head of the German Resistance memorial, told the newspaper Bild about his investigation, the results of which coincide with the official version of the CIA. According to Tuchel, Müller died in the building of the Reich Chancellery in Berlin in 1945 and was buried in a mass grave in the Jewish cemetery.
Boss foreign intelligence security services (at the end of the war - head of military intelligence of the Third Reich) Walter Schellenberg from May 3, 45, he lived in Sweden, but the allied countries achieved his extradition. Schellenberg appeared before the court as part of the last, 12th trial that followed the Nuremberg Tribunal. It was the case of the Wilhelmstrasse, the case of major officials, heads of ministries and departments in Germany. Schellenberg was acquitted on all counts, except for membership in criminal organizations. On April 11, 1949, he was sentenced to six years in prison, but already in 1950 he was released due to poor health. After that, Walter Schellenberg lived in Switzerland and Italy, died at the age of 43 in a Turin hospital from an illness.
It's amazing, but the person who personified inhuman experiments on concentration camp prisoners - Josef Mengele - lived quietly to old age and died at sea from a heart attack. After the surrender of Germany, Mengele played into the hands of his disgust. At one time, the “Angel of Death” (as the prisoners of Auschwitz called him) did not make himself a tattoo of the SS, which helped him hide in the country until 1949. Then he fled to Argentina, lived in Brazil and Paraguay. The doctor was not afraid in vain - the Mossad really hunted him, but they could not find the criminal. Mengele ended his days in the Brazilian town of Candido Godoi and died in 1979 while swimming in the sea, leaving behind a mystery. According to some researchers, the Nazi carried out experiments on artificial insemination among Brazilian women, which is associated with a surprisingly frequent birth of twins.
It should be noted that after the Second World War, such a phenomenon as “Nazi hunters” appeared in the world. These people were engaged in the search for figures of the Third Reich who escaped punishment and actively cooperated with the Mossad, as a result of this cooperation, Adolf Eichmann was captured.
Maria Al-Salkhani
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With the rise of the Nazis to power in Germany, their new fascist ideology was reinforced by official legislation. The criminal law was constantly changing in the direction of strengthening repression, expanding the compositions punishable by death, especially on racial, political and religious grounds.
So the atrocities of the Nazis during the Second World War were put on the ideological and legislative basis. And organized by them concentration camps became real factories of death. For example, on some days in Auschwitz, from 10 to 12 thousand people were exterminated. They were shot, killed with the poison gas "Cyclone-5" in gas chambers and destroyed in other ways. The corpses were burnt in crematoria that were open day and night. The Nazis did not spare even children. Former prisoner Yanov Gerron at the Nuremberg trials said: “In July 1943, 164 boys were selected in the Birkenau camp, taken to the hospital, where, with the help of injections in the heart carboxylic acid they were all killed!"
In the occupied territories, the Nazis used a technique popular in ancient world when the conquerors ensured their immunity with the lives of the hostages. And if this did not help, then in retaliation for the attack, a massacre of local residents was simply arranged. At times, entire settlements were subjected to reprisals.
For example, on October 21, 1941, 2,300 residents of Kragujevits were executed by the Nazis for attacks by Yugoslav partisans.
On May 27, 1942, the chief of the SS, the "imperial protector" of Bohemia and Moravia, Reinhard Heydrich, nicknamed "The Hangman", was killed. In retaliation, on Hitler's personal order, hundreds of members of the Czechoslovak resistance were shot and two settlements– Lidice and Ležáky, where all the inhabitants were killed.
But the Nazis were especially atrocious in the occupied territories of the USSR. In the village of Pochinok, the Germans drove all the old people and children into the premises of the collective farm administration, closed the doors and burned everyone. On August 29, 1941, about 11 thousand people were executed by the Nazis in Kamenetz-Podolsky. On October 27, 1941, in the Lithuanian city of Kovno, fascists executed 9,000 people, including more than 4,000 children. They carried out a terrible massacre on the population of captured Kyiv, where they killed 52,000 people.
For the mass extermination of people in fascist camps and prisons, the Nazis used both wild medieval executions and torture, as well as the latest inventions for killing people.
Here are just a few examples of their recreation of medieval executions:
Welding alive. In 1943, in the Treblinka concentration camp, the Nazis threw two bound girls accused of participating in the Resistance into barrels filled with water and lit fires around them.
Burning alive. In the village of Donets, Oryol region, the Nazis, having tied 17-year-old Nadezhda Maltseva, ordered her mother, Maria Maltseva, to cover her daughter with straw and set her on fire. The mother fainted. Then the Nazis themselves overlaid the girl with straw and set it on fire. The mother, awakened from a faint, threw herself into the fire and pulled her daughter out of it. The Nazis killed the mother with a blow from the butt, and the daughter was shot dead and thrown into the fire.
Tearing apart. If in France the killers of kings were torn to pieces with the help of horses, then the Nazis did this with prisoners Soviet soldiers with tanks.
Dousing with cold water in the cold. That's how the Nazis were executed Soviet general Karbyshev.
Guillotine. Although in the rest of Europe the guillotine was already a thing of the past, in Nazi Germany it was experiencing its second youth. About 40,000 people were beheaded in Germany and Austria between 1933 and 1945.
Especially often the guillotine was used in the Plötzensee prison in Berlin. There, she beheaded the Czech writer Julius Fucik, the author of Reportage with a noose around her neck, the Russian princess, the heroine of the resistance movement in France, Vera Obolenskaya, and the Tatar Soviet poet, underground fighter Moussa Jalil.
The massacre, blatant in its medieval cruelty, took place in the small Hungarian village of Vereba. The Nazis occupied the village, captured the inhabitants, brought them to the forge and began to torture them - they pulled out their nails with tongs, broke their ribs, and burned them with a red-hot iron. And then they were alternately dragged to the anvil, put the head of their victim on it and smashed the skull with a sledgehammer.
The documents available at the Nuremberg Tribunal featured the fact that Nazi punishers were sawing 918 people in the occupied territories of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus.
However, individual executions required time and effort. The Nazis, considering themselves the highest race, constantly tried to create new types of mass executions.
For the disabled and the mentally ill, they created a whole euthanasia program "T-4" ("Action Tiergartenstrasse 4") to kill them. It was enough for a person to be ill for more than five years, and he already became an object for this death program. But the Nazis considered gas chambers to be the most effective murder weapon, and therefore they were widely used. For example, only on October 25, 1943, about two thousand Greek women were executed by the Nazis in the Auschwitz gas chamber.
The German Nazis also searched for new colors in old executions. The good old hanging seemed too "insipid" to them. Unlike traditional hanging, when the convict fell in a loop under the influence of his own weight, the Nazis pulled the condemned up, doing work against the direction of gravity. Instead of a quick fracture of the cervical vertebrae and larynx, they were slowly broken out of the spine. This is how 31 members of the intelligence network, acting in the interests of the Soviet Union and known as the Red Chapel, were executed.
Subsequently, the Nazis further improved the method of hanging. Instead of ropes, they started using thick metal piano strings. This added to the suffering of their victims. So eight were executed German officers who tried to kill Adolf Hitler in 1944.
In the end, retribution overtook the leaders Nazi Germany. By the verdict of the Nuremberg Tribunal, they were also hanged. True, on the ropes and in the traditional "humane" way.