On September 30 and October 1 In 1946, the main Nazi criminals were sentenced: 12 of them (Bormann was convicted in absentia) were sentenced to death by hanging.
Half a month later - on the night of October 16 - they were executed: 11 people hung on the gallows. The twelfth convict - Hermann Göring - committed suicide just three hours before the execution of the sentence, swallowing a cyanpotassium capsule.
To this day, it is not clear who exactly managed to bring the poison into the heavily guarded prison. The remaining 11 condemned to death were executed in the former sports hall of the prison in Nuremberg, specially converted for the occasion. First of all, the former Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop hangs on the rope.
At 1:00 a.m. on October 16, the warden of the prison, American Colonel Andrews, entered Ribbentrop's cell and read out the death sentence once more, after which Ribbentrop was led with his hands tied behind his back to the scaffold. There they also tied the condemned man's feet, after which he was asked if he wanted to say anything. Ribbentrop uttered a high-spirited tirade for the salvation of his soul and for world peace. Then Senior Sergeant John Woods slipped a sack over the criminal's head and tightened the rope around his neck. After which the mechanism was activated – the cover under the convict's feet opened and he hung on the rope.
Agonizing death
The professional executioner of the American army - the Texan John Woods had so far carried out more than 300 death sentences. Nevertheless, the executions of the main Nazi war criminals were too poorly prepared: the opening in the scaffold was too narrow and many of the condemned, falling into it, hit the walls and the cover of the opening. Photos taken after the execution clearly show that the entire head of the former commander-in-chief of the Wehrmacht - General Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel - is covered in blood.
The length of the rope and the depth of the hole under the scaffold were also badly calculated, because the death of the condemned did not occur immediately - as a result of the fracture of the cervical vertebrae - but from suffocation. For example, Ribbentrop struggled for 15 minutes before death occurred. A total of 40 witnesses were present at the executions, including 8 journalists (two each from the victorious countries in the war - USSR, USA, France and Great Britain), but they were spared the death agonies of the condemned, because there was between them and the scaffold stretched dark tarpaulin.
Due to the fact that the executions were taking longer than expected, and it was planned that they would all be carried out on the night in question, the executioner and his assistants began to hurry: they took down the lifeless body of one hanged man, and at the same time they were already bringing in the next condemned of death. After the last execution was carried out, the body of the suicided Göring was placed on a stretcher under the gallows - as a symbolic execution.
Their dust was scattered over the river Isar
The corpses of Göring and the other hanged were photographed - first with clothes on, then without - after which they were wrapped in sheets and placed in sealed coffins. Accompanied by armed guards, the coffins were taken to a crematorium outside Munich. The workers there did not know who they were cremating - they were told that it was dead American soldiers. Each coffin was opened before cremation - to ensure that the corpse had not been tampered with.
The cremation itself lasted several hours, and then the ashes were collected in a box and taken to an unknown direction. Two days later - at night - the ashes were scattered over the river Isar from a bridge in Munich. Thus, no opportunity was left for a place of worship to appear before the memory of the main Nazi criminals.
Source: www.dw.com