Pierrepoint (22 page)

Again the hangman’s conduct was questioned, this time due to his lack of dexterity and speed. An official reply was penned to the governor in response to this.

On 29 August 1943, Albert married Anne Fletcher at St Wilfred’s Church, Newton Heath, Manchester. They had become closer following the death of first his sister Ivy, who had worked as a nurse at Winwick Hospital, Warrington, before she collapsed and died of exhaustion, and then his mother, who passed away suddenly a year later. Returning from their honeymoon in Blackpool, they settled into the house at East Street, a few blocks from his previous house on Mill Street.

Tom carried out four executions in a fortnight in December. On 14 December he was at Shepton Mallet; on the following day he carried out an execution at Pentonville; and a week later he pulled the lever at Wandsworth for the last time. The final execution was at Liverpool, where Thomas James, a ship’s fireman, paid with his life for the murder of a prostitute. On 17 August, the body of Geraldine Sweeney was found in the cellar of a bombed house in Liverpool. She had been viciously assaulted with a bottle and a broom handle, but the cause of death was strangulation. James had confessed to a friend that he had killed her, and his friend’s wife subsequently told the police. James denied killing the woman, adding that if he was to kill someone he would he would stab and not strangle them. His defence claimed that James had drunk 22 pints on the day of the murder and could not remember anything, but this did not prevent him from being sentenced to death by Mr Justice Wrottesley at Liverpool Assizes.

James was scheduled to hang alongside Joseph Gibbons, who had been convicted at the same assizes for a murder in Chester. The prison doctor at Walton was concerned about the conduct of Thomas James, however, and in a confidential memo he asked for more staff to be sent to the prison as James knew he had no chance of being reprieved and was determined to cause as much trouble as possible in the condemned cell and at his execution. It was also decided to employ four executioners, but as it turned out Gibbons was reprieved and James went to the gallows alone.

In early January 1944, Albert received a telegram summoning him to London. Arriving at the Home Office, he discovered his services were required to hang two young saboteurs in
Gibraltar. Albert, who had never spoken to his wife about his work as an executioner, had to wire Anne to say he would be away from home for three days. Later that afternoon, along with Harry Kirk who was to be his assistant, they travelled to an aerodrome near Bristol, from where their flight was to depart. The route via Lisbon meant crossing over the Channel and so was carefully worked out as dog-fighting and air raids were still a regular occurrence. Arriving at Lisbon airport, the hangmen were astonished to find many planes sporting the swastika livery. As a neutral airport, aircraft of all nationalities were welcomed and as such it was a popular departure and arrival port for spies and enemy agents. From Lisbon the two flew along the Spanish coast before reaching Gibraltar. The double execution of 22-year-old Louis Cordon-Cuenca and 19-year-old Jose Martin Munez took place at the Moorish Castle, with both men being given identical drops of 6 feet 10 inches.

On his return he discussed the journey with his new wife and also talked frankly of his ‘other career’. Although she had obviously known about it for many years, the name Pierrepoint is not an easy one to hide behind; she had refused to question him on it, waiting for Albert to be the one to broach the subject.

The year 1944 was to be the last in which Tom Pierrepoint held the mantle of senior executioner, being appointed number one at all executions carried out in Great Britain and Ireland, with the exception of five in London at which his nephew officiated. On 11 August, Tom carried out a double execution at Shepton Mallet, when two Americans, serving with a Quartermaster Service Company, became the first to be executed for rape for almost a hundred years. On the evening of 4 March, Dorothy Holmes had left a Gloucestershire dance hall with her American soldier
boyfriend. Eliga Brinson and Willie Smith, two black soldiers, followed them and as Dorothy and her boyfriend kissed goodnight, they were attacked. The white soldier was hit in the face with a bottle as Dorothy was dragged into woods. He ran to get help but by the time he returned both men had raped the terrified woman. They were court-martialled at Cheltenham in April, accused of rape of a civilian – which carried a capital sentence during wartime. It was the fourth of five visits Tom made to Shepton Mallet that year.

On 1 December, Tom and Albert made another journey to Dublin for an execution. Charles Kerins, a native of Tralee, had been sentenced to death by the Special Criminal Court for the murder of Detective Sergeant Denis O’Brien in September 1942. O’Brien had been ambushed and shot dead by a gang of men wearing dark glasses and carrying Tommy guns as he left home to go on duty at Dublin Castle. Kerins, a member of the IRA, stated he didn’t recognise the court and refused to put forward any defence or to make any further statements. After carrying out the sentence, the IRA was alleged to have passed a death sentence on the hangmen.

In February 1945, Albert was contacted by the Irish authorities and asked if he would be willing to train an Irish executioner. Having received permission from the Home Office, he travelled into Manchester city centre, where he met Thomas Johnstone, who had travelled over for two days’ training at Manchester’s Strangeways Gaol. Albert could tell at once that the man was not really a suitable candidate, describing him as old, short and timid, but nevertheless he trained him for two days and when a few days later he was engaged to carry out an execution at Dublin, Johnstone was to be his assistant. Despite concerns for the Irishman’s safety,
the execution of Montreal-born James Lehman passed off without incident.

Tom had a busy few months carrying out a dozen executions, including that of Aniceto Martinez at Shepton Mallet on 15 June. Martinez, an Hispanic, had broken into the house of a 75-year-old woman and savagely raped her. When the frail old lady staggered to the police station she told police she thought her attacker was an American and investigations soon pointed the finger at Private Martinez. He admitted the crime but claimed that he had been drunk and had entered the house thinking it was a brothel. The execution was significant in that it was the last time Albert acted as an assistant hangman, and the last time he worked with his Uncle Tom.

In October, Albert was asked to officiate at the execution of five German soldiers who had been convicted of murder in a Scottish army camp. Sergeant Major Rosterg had been a prisoner of war since September 1944. He was a regular soldier in the German army, not a Nazi like the majority of the prisoners. Sent to a camp near Devizes, his high standard of education soon earmarked him for the role of camp interpreter. In the winter of 1944 a number of fellow prisoners planned a mass breakout and when word reached the British guards the ringleaders were removed to the high security Comrie Camp in Perthshire, Scotland.

Unfortunately for Rosterg, he too was transferred to Comrie, and although word of the planned escape had not come from him, he was suspected, tried by kangaroo court, sentenced to death and in the early hours of 23 December, mercilessly beaten and kicked before being hanged in the hut latrine. Five men – Joachim Goltz, Heinz Brueling, Josef Mertens, Kurt Zuehlsdorff and Erich Pallme Koenig – were convicted of the murder and sentenced to death. Brueling and
Mertens were 21 years old, the rest a year younger. It was alleged that under the guidance of Koenig, Zuehlsdorff had put the rope around the man’s neck and hanged him; the others had all beaten and kicked Rosterg before he died.

Arriving at Pentonville, for what would turn out to be the largest mass execution in modern penal history, Albert was met by assistant Steve Wade, and also Harry Allen, who had been invited back onto the list of assistant executioners following a period away, on what the official list recorded as ‘circumstances due to war’. It was decided that they would be hanged in five single executions, as this would lessen any chance of a struggle or scene on the scaffold. None made any attempt to struggle and only Koenig, the last to go to the gallows, made any kind of statement, shouting, ‘Long live the Fatherland!’ as the rope was placed around his neck.

They were the first Germans to be executed for non-espionage crimes and it had been good practice having to deal with multiple executions on one day, as this was to form the bulk of the work Albert was engaged to carry out over the next four years. In all he was to stand face to face with over two hundred more convicted Germans, as retribution and the war crimes trials were to keep him busy over the next few years while Europe settled back into peacetime.

S
ix weeks after the multiple executions at Pentonville, Albert was back at the north London gaol to carry out the double hanging of another two German prisoners of war, Arnim Kuelne and Emil Schmittendorf, whose crimes had been remarkably similar to those of their five compatriots. A month or so before the war ended, inmates at a German POW camp on the outskirts of Sheffield were enraged when a tunnel they had long been working on was uncovered just days from completion. Believing an informer was at work they found a suspect – incorrect, as it turned out – in the form of Gerhardt Rettig, who had been seen near the tunnel entrance chatting to guards. Unlike the majority of prisoners, Rettig wasn't a National Socialist and when it was learned that threats had been made, it was decided to remove him to another camp. But while plans were being drawn up for his transfer, an angry mob attacked the suspect and kicked him to death. Four men were identified as ringleaders: two were later acquitted and two were hanged side by side on 16 November.

Following the Allied victory in the Second World War, Nazi
leaders were charged with war crimes and convicted at the Nuremberg trials, which were overseen by the American military. Taking place at the same time were a number of other war-crime trials, the first which concerned the British being that of those Nazis charged with crimes committed at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

Its name usually shortened to ‘Belsen', the camp was situated near the city of Celle, and set up in October 1942 as a transit centre. Later turned into a concentration camp by its second commandant, 39-year-old SS-Hauptsturmführer Josef Kramer, it housed prisoners who had become too weak to work as forced labour in German factories, and who were put to death in the gas chambers. The camp was liberated by the British army in April 1945; soldiers found over ten thousand unburied corpses and a further forty thousand sick and dying prisoners, of whom over twenty-eight thousand would subsequently die. As a result of these atrocities former members of staff from Belsen, including inmates who had taken part in acts of brutality against other prisoners, were charged with either being responsible for the murder of Allied nationals or the suffering of those in Belsen.

The Belsen trial was conducted by a British military tribunal in the converted gymnasium of a cavalry barracks at No. 30 Lindentrasse, Lünburg, Germany and began on 17 September 1945. It was to run for 53 days. President Major-General HMP Berney-Ficklin headed the panel, and four military lawyers handled the case for the prosecution. The accused comprised sixteen men including Josef Kramer, sixteen women, plus twelve former prisoners (seven men and five women). All were tried together and sat in the large dock, each with a number fixed to their chest.

There were two charges. The first was that a number of named members of staff, in violation of the law and usages of
war, caused the death of persons interned at Belsen between 1 October 1942 and 30 April 1945, when responsible for the well-being of the persons interned there. The second count concerned atrocities carried out at the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland. The two were heard together, as some defendants were charged with both counts.

On the afternoon of 16 November, the verdicts were delivered. Thirty-one prisoners were convicted on one or both counts and fourteen acquitted of all charges. On the following day the sentences were read out to the prisoners. Eleven were sentenced to death by hanging; nineteen others were sentenced to various terms of imprisonment.

Josef Kramer, Fritz Klein, Peter Weingartner, Franz Hoessler, Karl Francioh, Ansgar Pichen, Franz Stofel, Wilhelm Dorr, Juana Bormann, Elisabeth Volkenrath and Irma Grese were sentenced to death by hanging. The sentence was translated for them into German as ‘Tode durch den strang', meaning literally ‘death by the rope'.

Kramer was the Belsen camp commandant, Klein officiated as the camp doctor and Hoessler was both compound commandant and also in charge of No. 2 Camp. The remainder of the men were mostly conscripts, holding subordinate positions, with duties that included supervising working parties, kitchens and ration stores. Only Kramer, Klein and Hoessler were officers, the remainder being mostly NCOs.

Irma Grese, a compound commander at Belsen, was perhaps the most notorious of the female Nazi war criminals. Born in October 1923, she left school in 1938 at the age of 15 and, following a short stint working in a hospital, she was sent to work at the Ravensbrück Women's Concentration Camp near Berlin in 1940, becoming a guard at the age of 19. In March 1943, she was transferred to Auschwitz, later rising to the rank of Senior SS Supervisor, the second highest rank
that SS female concentration camp personnel could attain. In January 1945, she returned to Ravensbrück before being transferred to Belsen in March. At her trial survivors gave details of the murder, torture and cruelty that she engaged in during her time at Auschwitz and Ravensbrück, and later at Belsen. The court heard testimonies of acts of sadism, beatings, arbitrary shootings, and the savaging of prisoners by her trained dogs. She also selected prisoners for the gas chambers. She chose to dress in jackboots, habitually carried a whip and pistol and was said to enjoy shooting prisoners in cold blood. In her hut, following the camp liberation, soldiers found a lampshade that had been made from the skins of a number of inmates.