![]() “Well, we have come together, and this same Colonel Andrus met us in court, in a special room where we had not been allowed before. It was Temin with whose words Polevoy described the execution, reproducing his remarks literally and excluding “only a few naturalistic details and cleaning the language from figurative, too salty epithets”. By our common consent, these slots were given to TASS correspondent Boris Afanasyev, a serious and educated journalist, who had been in the ‘Nuremberg seat’ all nine months without leave, and to Pravda photographer Viktor Temin, who could not be refused because he would have died of a heart attack,” Polevoy said. “We, the Soviet press, were allotted only two seats: for a chronicler and a photojournalist. That was eight, two from each of the Allied powers. Because the place was small, only a limited number of journalists were allowed in. Now the gymnasium in the courtyard of Nuremberg Prison was to be the scene of the execution of “the greatest heroes of the Millennium Reich”. Just three days earlier, American guards had been playing basketball here. The curious thing was that Woods was advised by “one of the locals”, his German colleague Johann Baptist Reichhart, who had previously been a successful professional in the Reich and had executed hundreds, if not thousands, of people sentenced to death by the Nazi regime. However, Woods did not intend to apply this merciful trick to the defendants of the Nuremberg trials. The rumour had it that he was not cruel and that he usually used some special techniques to ease the last moments of his victims – immediately after the footing collapsed from under the hanged man, he pulled him by the legs with his weight so that the cervical vertebrae would break swiftly. By 1946, he had carried out a total of 347 executions in his 15 years on the job. A master of his craft, he’d spent his life carrying out executions in San Antonio, Texas. Despite his purely civilian experience, Woods was probably the most experienced professional of his kind in the United States. Wood, 43, was not in the military – he enlisted at short notice, was rapidly promoted to the rank of master sergeant, and sent on a special flight to Nuremberg. And given the specifics of what was going to happen, a military man, too. Since Nuremberg was in the American occupation zone, the executioner had to be an American. The job he has undertaken is a necessary and useful one.” The man boldly signs autographs and gives interviews, smiling and posing for the cameras, and one crafty reporter, who knows how, even managed to get a picture of him with a roll of twisted rope. Hangman’s Finest HourĪccording to Polevoy, Master Sergeant Woods, an American army sergeant who volunteered to carry out the Nuremberg tribunal sentence, became “the new celebrity of the press camp”: “I’ve seen Woods – a short, massive guy with a long, fleshy, hooked nose and a triple chin. The cocktail list in red shows David's new creation, called John Woods,” the Soviet writer Boris Polevoy recalled in his book “The Final Reckoning: Nuremberg Diaries”. All the rooms in the press camp are occupied, there are not enough seats in the dining hall, the bar counter is jammed. We journalists have nothing more to do here. However, in the end, it was decided to carry out the execution there, in Nuremberg, both for security reasons and to ensure that the place of death of the Nazi leaders never became a place for cult worship afterwards. Initially, they discussed the possibility of carrying out the execution in Berlin. However, since the Soviet and British representatives opposed the symbolic gesture towards Jodl, the verdict remained in force in this part as well. The French and American representatives on the council agreed to shoot Jodl, but not Göring or Keitel. The Allied Control Council rejected all these motions, giving Bormann the right to submit another one within four days of his arrest. Göring, Wilhelm Keitel, and Alfred Jodl also requested that if refused clemency, the gallows be replaced by a “noble execution” – a firing squad. The others asked for a pardon the legal counsels for Hermann Göring, Julius Streicher and Hans Frank did so without the consent of their clients and Martin Bormann's counsel did so in the absence of his “principal”. Of those sentenced to death, only Ernst Kaltenbrunner did not plead for leniency, although at the trial he was the only one who claimed to have fought Nazism to the best of his ability and dared to disobey Hitler’s orders. On 9-10 October, the Allied Control Council, at an emergency meeting in Berlin, considered the appeals of the defendants.
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