He is called the most famous executioner of the twentieth century - on account of the American John Wood 347 murdered convicts sentenced to death by the courts. But worldwide fame for this "rake" was brought by the Nuremberg trials of high-ranking Nazi criminals in 1946, ten of whom were hanged up on the gallows by John Wood.
Who he was before the war
Lance Sergeant John Wood was not a professional military man. All his adult life, he killed - he served as an executioner in the Texas town of San Antonio. At the time of the end of the International Tribunal in Nuremberg in America, perhaps, there was no more experienced official murderer of those sentenced to death - by 1946, Wood had strangled over 300 people by court sentences.
They said about John Wood that during the performance he was "good-natured" - as soon as the support disappeared from under the feet of the gallows, the executioner grabbed his victim by the limbs and thus made the load on the rope heavier - so that the hanged man would break his cervical vertebrae faster, and with less torment death has come.
Nuremberg, where high-ranking Nazi criminals were held in prison, was part of the American zone of influence. Therefore, accordingly, the executioner for those sentenced to death had to be a representative of the United States. John Wood was urgently called up for military service, promoted to junior sergeant and posted to Nuremberg.
Who should have been executed in Nuremberg
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Initially, it was supposed to hang 11 high-ranking scoundrels of the Third Reich that had sunk into oblivion. But one of them, Hermann Goering, was ahead of this inevitable event - on the eve of the execution, he was poisoned with cyanide potassium.
They were waiting for their fate: Minister of Foreign Affairs of Hitlerite Germany Joachim Ribbentrop, Chief of Staff of the High Command of the Wehrmacht Wilhelm Keitel, Chief of the SS Imperial Security Chief Ernst Kaltenbruner, Chief of Staff of the Operational Command of the High Command of the Wehrmacht Alfred Jodl, one of the main organizers of forced labor in Nazi Germany's Obruppa Nazi Germany Sauckel, Gauleiter of Franconia and fierce racist Julius Streicher, Reich Commissioner of the Netherlands Arthur Seyss-Inquart, Governor-General of occupied Poland Hans Frank, Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia Wilhelm Frick and Reich Minister of the Eastern Occupied Territories Alfred Rosenberg.
How the hanging of the Nazis took place
The execution of the Nazis took place on October 16, 1946 in the gym of the Nuremberg Palace of Justice, specially equipped for this case. The gallows stood on a high platform covered with wood on three sides. The fourth side was covered with black cloth so that the death convulsions of the executed were not visible from the side.
Goering's unforeseen initiative somewhat delayed the time of the hanging and changed his script. At first, the Nazis sentenced to death were going to be brought to the scaffold with their hands untied, but the excess with the Gruppenfuehrer's suicide forced this decision to change. The commandant of the prison received an order to lead the suicide bombers out of the cells, having previously handcuffed them, in the position of "hands behind the back." Immediately in front of the gallows, the handcuffs were replaced by a strong braid, which, in turn, was removed only after the doomed was put on a noose around his neck.
This time John Wood was not a "good man", and he did not hang on the feet of those who were hanged to relieve their torment. On the contrary, according to the idea of the American executioner for the Nazis, they erected a special structure for the gallows, using the "long loop" method - a stool or any other stand used in such cases replaced the opening hatch where the hanged man fell through. This method of execution was more painful than the usual one.
The Nazis were hanged "on a first come, first served basis," by the conveyor method - while the corpse of one condemned was removed from the gallows, a noose on the second suicide bomber was tightened with another device. On average, each hanged person took 10 minutes, which the executioner John Wood later bragged to interviewers, calling this intensity quick work.
Own ridiculous death
The execution of Nazi criminals was John Wood's finest hour (if, of course, I can say so). The execution of seven Japanese war criminals whom Wood hanged in Tokyo's Sugamo prison in December 1948 also added to his fame.
Pictures of the executioner with his "trademark" thirteen-knot rope noose adorned the front pages of almost all US newspapers, Wood was happy to talk to journalists. Skeptics, however, argue that sailors invented such a nodal structure long before Wood. Nevertheless, the executioner is said to have done good business with the "ropes from Nuremberg", selling them piece by piece. As a result, the total length of the realized "hanging" rope would be enough to pull up the entire top of the Third Reich on it.
The death of John Wood himself, who overtook the executioner a year and a half after the last significant execution he carried out in Tokyo, still remains a mystery. There are even two versions of it, which are united by one circumstance - Wood died from an electric shock. According to one of the assumptions - while repairing the electrical wiring in his house, according to another version - testing the electric chair with which the executioner was supposedly going to replace the gallows in his work. Presumably John Wood sat down on this death chair and "jokingly" asked the assistant to turn on the switch. The assistant did not understand the joke and turned it on.