LEST WE FORGET
RITUAL MURDER 1946
RITUAL MURDER 1946
Sixty-four years ago, on 16 October, 10 men were sadistically lynched
following the spectacle of a sham trial that made a mockery of every
principle of decency and justice known to civilized man. Their crime?
They had lost a war, and now they were called to pay the price of
a victors' justice. Here is the horrifying account of the slow, grisly
torture-death of just one of the Nuremberg lynch victims, as told by
someone with no sympathy for National Socialism::
"Ribbentrop does not feel any guilt. Stonily, with no visible movement,
he lets the accusations of the state prosecutor flow over him. No
description, no document, no film footage appears to arouse in this
once-powerful man any feelings of guilt or compassion.
"Guilty—of what? asks Ribbentrop. Total defeat? It is not a burden on
his shoulders. Is it his fault if the generals failed? Had he not forged
alliances which strengthened the Reich? And what had he, a diplomat,
to do with all the [alleged] crimes with which the court repeatedly
confronts Hitler's henchmen?
"'Woe to the vanquished,' says Ribbentrop: it is the justice of the
victors. Yet to the last moment he remains an ardent supporter
of Hitler.
"For this he receives his just deserts: on 16 October 1946 at 1:19 a.m.
the door to his cell in a Nuremberg high school opens. He is the first
to be executed that morning. Flanked by two American GIs he takes
his takes his final walk towards the school gymnasium. Awaiting him
there is Joseph Malta, the 'Nuremberg Hangman,' beside one of the
three scaffolds. He leads the condemned man up seven steps to the
platform.
"Then the one-time foreign minister of the Third Reich has to stand on
a trapdoor and a noose is placed around his neck. But first he wants
to address the German people one last time: 'It is my wish that
Germany should fulfill her destiny and that an understanding should
be reached between East and West. I wish peace for the world.'
The trap door opens.
"In the minutes that follow, the few witnesses to the execution
are exposed to a gruesome spectacle: Ribbentrop does not die
immediately. He writhes in his death-throes. He twitches. His head
thuds against the wooden wall of the scaffold. The next man to face
his death—Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel—is already being led in while
Ribbentrop is still fighting for his life.
"It will take ten minutes before Malta receives the order to pull down
on the dangling body in order finally to break the victim's neck with
his weight. The Nuremberg Hangman recalls in lurid detail: 'Then I
pressed with my right hand behind his left ear—it went ping, and he
was dead.'
"This macabre performance is repeated nine times. Later the
"This macabre performance is repeated nine times. Later the
photographs of the executed Nazi leaders brought severe reproaches
down on the Nuremberg Hangman. He had, it was claimed,
deliberately prolonged the death-agony. Such an abomination was
described as unworthy of an international tribunal of the victorious
powers in the Second World War. The explanation offered was a rather
banal one: in the long weeks of the trial the condemned men had lost
a great deal of weight; and this fact had been overlooked in calculating
the length of the rope."
From "Hitler's Hitmen" by Guido Knopp, Stroud UK, Sutton Publishing, 2002
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