Pierrepoint (23 page)

Forty-two-year-old Juana Bormann had said at her trial that she had joined the SS auxiliary in the summer of 1938 to earn more money. She first served at the Lichtenburg concentration camp in Saxony and, in 1939, she was assigned to oversee a work crew at the new Ravensbrück women's camp. In March 1942 she was one of a handful of women selected for guard duty at Auschwitz No. 1 Camp in Poland. Standing a little over five feet tall, she was notorious for her cruelty and was known in the camp as the ‘Weisel' and ‘the woman with the dogs'. She had a habit of unleashing her German shepherd dog, ‘the big bad wolfhound' as she called it, on helpless prisoners. Later that year she moved to Auschwitz Birkenau as an Aufseherin (supervisor). She came under the command of Irma Grese, moving to Hindenburg in 1944, before arriving at Belsen in March 1945.

Twenty-six-year-old Elisabeth Volkenrath had claimed she did not volunteer into the SS, and that the role of Oberaufseherin (senior supervisor) she held at Belsen was not an important one; she had no administrative control in the camp, and the job mainly consisted of detailing other
overseers to particular jobs. She was responsible for the actions of those under her as well as for allocating their duties. The allegations against her for her crimes at Auschwitz were so numerous that the authorities stopped collecting any more evidence at a very early stage of their enquiries. At the trial it was testified that during 1942 Volkenrath had made selections and given orders that prisoners be loaded onto lorries and transported to the gas chamber. In her testimony, she denied having made gas chamber selections herself, but claimed that she had attended selections because she had to be present as she was in charge of the women's camp. She maintained that her role was merely to see that the prisoners were kept quiet and orderly.

The eleven sentenced to death all lodged an appeal to the convening officer, which was in turn forwarded to Field Marshal Montgomery. All appeals for clemency were rejected.

After a number of messy executions by firing squad, the British authorities at Lunburg were keen that the executions they sanctioned should be carried out efficiently. It was agreed that Albert should officiate at Hameln and so, shortly after lunch on Tuesday, 11 December, he caught a plane from Northolt aerodrome for a flight to Buckeburg in Germany.

The plane landed in the early evening and was met by an officer and his driver, who escorted Albert on a windswept 40-minute drive through war-torn Germany to the fairy-tale setting of Hameln. Arriving at the jail in Westphalia, Albert was ushered into a meeting with a number of senior dignitaries seconded from the prison service back home, who were discussing the scheduled executions that had become their responsibility.

Albert was to hang thirteen people, eleven from Belsen along with two others – Georg Otto Sandrock and Ludwig Schweinberger, convicted at Luneburg by the War Crimes
Commission for the murder of Pilot Officer Gerald Hood, a British prisoner of war at Almelo, Holland, on 21 March 1945. The arrangements were left to the hangman's discretion and were scheduled to take place on Thursday morning. Albert was billeted outside the prison and after a good night's sleep, at a little before 9 a.m. on Wednesday, he reported at the gaol to prepare for his duty. He knocked at the gate and was immediately greeted by a surly, gruff, German prisoner officer who enquired as to his business. Unable to explain to the non-English-speaking guard why he was there, he was rescued by Regimental Sergeant Major Richard O'Neill, a member of the Control Commission, seconded to be his assistant for the duration of the visit.

That afternoon each prisoner was weighed and measured so that the correct drops could be calculated. The multiple executions were to take place in a purpose-built execution room at the end of one of the prison's wings, on a gallows specially constructed by the Royal Engineers to a Home Office blueprint. Armed with the prisoners' personal details Albert retired to his quarters, where he worked out the drops and the order in which the prisoners would be put to death. It was decided to hang the three women in three single executions followed by double executions for the men. This was done in a chivalrous attempt to spare the women prisoners from hearing the repeated drops, as the tiny cells they were held in were just along the corridor from the drop room. With the calculations and death list completed, Albert and his new assistant filled a sandbag and carried out a test drop, leaving the rope to stretch.

On the following morning, under the guidance of Brigadier Paton-Walsh and Deputy Governor Wilson of Wandsworth and Strangeways prisons respectively, the official party assembled. Satisfied that all was ready, Albert walked into the
corridor and called for Elisabeth Volkenrath. She exited her tiny cell and walked down the corridor escorted by two German guards. Out in the corridor, Albert pinioned her arms and as she was led onto the scaffold, O'Neill swiftly strapped her ankles as the rope was secured around her slim neck. Seeing all was ready Albert pulled the lever, giving her a drop of 7 feet 5 inches. The doctor followed the hangman into the pit and recorded that death had been instant. The time of execution was given as 9.34 a.m. The body was left to hang for just 20 minutes before being removed from the rope and placed in a coffin. The drop was reset and prepared for Irma Grese. Her last word was ‘Schnell!' as she took her place on the trapdoor. She went to her death at 10.03 a.m. and Juana Bormann followed her onto the drop at 10.38 a.m.

Another rope was fixed to the beam and, following a break for refreshment, all was made ready for Josef Kramer and 57-year-old Doctor Fritz Klein. At 205 pounds and standing 6 feet 2 inches, 39-year-old Kramer was the very image of his press nickname, ‘the Beast of Belsen'. He towered over the doctor and was given a drop of 6 feet, which was 17 inches shorter than the older man. The double execution took place 11 minutes after noon, and was timed at 25 seconds. Franzich and Weingartner were hanged at 12.46 p.m. Following a break for lunch, Sandrock and Schweinsburger were executed at 1.59 p.m., Pineken and Hohsler at 2.37 p.m., and finally Stakel and Dorr at 4.16 p.m.

With his duties complete, Albert left the gaol and returned to his billet. After resting and a wash and change he was entertained at a mess party that night before returning to England, where he had a forthcoming appointment at Wandsworth with the first man to be executed for treason in England following the end of hostilities.

John Amery was the Harrow-educated son of Leopold
Amery, the Secretary of State for India and a leading figure in Churchill's wartime cabinet. Amery had left England in 1935 and worked as a film producer in Spain. In 1940, while living in France, he became caught up in the invasion. Amery approached the head of the ‘English Service' in Germany and offered to broadcast propaganda messages. He then made regular visits to prisoner-of-war camps in France, trying to persuade captured soldiers to change sides.

Arrested in northern Italy in April 1945, he was charged with treason at the Old Bailey in November. Amery's defence put forward the claim that he had taken Spanish nationality and there were lengthy discussions as to whether he should stand trial for treason. On hearing there would have to be an inquiry, Amery chose to spare his family further embarrassment and opted to plead guilty. His trial lasted just eight minutes.

He was hanged on 19 December, and as Albert and assistant Harry Critchell entered the cell and led the traitor to the drop, Amery found the courage to speak to the hangman: ‘I've always wanted to meet you, Mr Pierrepoint. But not, of course, under these circumstances!'

Two days later he travelled back across to Pentonville for a double execution before rounding off the year with his fifth visit to Wandsworth, where he dispatched 24-year-old Robert Blaine, who had murdered a Canadian soldier on leave in London.

Tom's engagement diary was beginning to get much thinner: apart from the executions allocated to him by the American authorities at Shepton Mallet, entries for 1945 contained just two dates at Leeds and trips to Norwich, Cardiff and a last visit to Pentonville, where he hanged American deserter Karl Hulten for the murder of a London taxi driver. Albert was due to execute Hulten's partner in
crime, 21-year-old Elizabeth Jones, at Holloway, but she was granted a reprieve a few days before she was due to hang, much to the anger of Winston Churchill, who believed she was equally as guilty and deserved the full penalty of the law.

The year 1946 marked the fortieth anniversary of Tom's appointment as a hangman and it was also to be his final year. The first execution of the new year, carried out by Albert, was to be one of the most controversial during the aftermath of the war. William Joyce was born in New York of Irish-American parents. Raised in Ireland, in 1922 his family moved to England, where he was educated at a London university. In 1933 he joined the British Union of Fascists, and secured a British passport by falsely claiming to have been born in Galway. In 1937, after being expelled from Oswald Mosley's Fascist party, Joyce started his own British Nazi party and shortly before the war broke out he fled to Germany. Between September 1939 and April 1945, Joyce found lasting notoriety when he earned the nickname ‘Lord Haw Haw' for his ‘Germany Calling.…' radio broadcasts, a stream of anti-British messages and falsehoods recorded in and broadcast from Hamburg. They were designed to undermine morale on the home front, but soon became treated as nothing more than a joke and his upper-crust voice was the source of mocking and ridicule by music-hall and radio comedians of the day.

As hostilities drew to a close Joyce was wounded and captured by British troops as he tried to flee Germany via the Danish border, trapped by his instantly recognisable voice. At his three-day trial, held at the Old Bailey in September, his defence drew on the issue of nationality: they claimed that as he was born in America he could not be a traitor, as he did
not hold allegiance to the crown. Two of the three counts on which he was to have been tried were dismissed, but he was convicted of treason because of the passport he had lied to obtain. As the British passport he held did not expire until July 1940, technically, from the moment war was declared until his British passport expired – a period of some nine months – he was a British citizen. Therefore, as he had been working for the enemy during this time, he had been committing treason and for this he was convicted. Given a drop of 7 feet 4 inches he went to the gallows without a struggle and died instantly.

Later that morning, Albert and assistant Alex Riley travelled across London to Pentonville, where they had another appointment with a traitor. This time it was to hang Theodore John William Schurch, a 27-year-old private in the RASC, court-martialled at Chelsea in September on nine charges of treachery and one of desertion with intent to join the enemy.

Schurch was a former member of the British Union of Fascists, born in London of Swiss parents, who joined the British Army in 1936. While serving in Tobruk he volunteered to join a front-line unit in order to desert, and when he was taken prisoner he asked his Italian guards to put him in touch with intelligence officers. Schurch told them he was a Swiss subject and that, although born in London, his father had registered him as Swiss. He then gave them information he had gathered from British prisoners of war in Italy. His defence claimed he was a poor uneducated fool, but Schurch was found guilty on all ten charges. He was the last person executed for treachery in Great Britain.

On 8 February, Tom carried out the first execution to take place in Glasgow for almost 20 years. Twenty-one-year-old John Lyon was convicted before Lord Mackay at Glasgow
High Court, in December 1945, of the murder of 19-year-old John Thomas Brady, a recently demobbed Royal Navy sailor. On the night of 20 October 1945, Lyon was one of a crowd of eight youths who ventured into Glasgow's Argyle Street looking for trouble. Coming across members of a rival gang they set upon one youth who managed to outrun them before attacking Brady, an innocent bystander, unconnected to any gang, who was stabbed to death with a bayonet and a wood chisel. During the ferocious attack he received 40 stab wounds. Although five of the gang were arrested, only four were brought to trial; three of these were found guilty and sentenced to death. The youngest of those convicted was liable for the death penalty, as his 18th birthday had fallen on the final day of the trial. He and another man were reprieved and Lyon was left to face the hangman alone, becoming the first man executed at Barlinnie Prison. Tom carried out the execution, assisted, it is believed, by Steve Wade.

A month later Tom carried out his last execution at Durham, when he hanged former soldier Charles Prescott who had shot dead his girlfriend's sister following the break-up of his relationship. The victim was not the one he had intended, and at his trial he claimed the gun had gone off accidentally when he had been startled by a horse.

While his uncle went to work at Durham, Albert made his second visit to Germany, where on the afternoon of 8 March he hanged eight men convicted by the War Crimes Commission. In four double executions he hanged Renoth Hans and August Buhning at 2.40 p.m., Friedrich Konig and Otto Franke at 3.10 p.m., Alfred Butner and Willy Mackensen at 3.45 p.m. and finally Erich Heyer and Johann Braschoss at 4.10 p.m.

Three weeks after Charles Prescott met his end on the scaffold at Durham, South African seaman Arthur Charles
followed in his footsteps. This execution marked the debut of Stephen Wade as number one. The promotion of Wade was another sign that the career of the aged Tom Pierrepoint was drawing to a close, but the end of the road hadn't quite been reached. On 6 April he was back at Glasgow, where he was engaged to hang hard-man and habitual criminal Patrick Carraher.

The 39-year-old Carraher, ‘the fiend of the Gorbals', had been sentenced to death at what was his third murder trial. In 1938 he had been jailed for three years after his trial for murder ended with a conviction for culpable homicide. Carraher had slit the throat of a man who had attempted to break up an argument he had been involved in. Following his release, Carraher continued to earn his living from theft and housebreaking, often using violence. In 1943, he faced a second murder trial, and this time he was sent to prison for the attempted murder of a man with a razor. As before, he served a meagre sentence, earning his freedom in the autumn of 1945. However, he was to be at liberty for just a few weeks. On 23 November, upon hearing that his brother-in-law was involved in a street fight, Carraher rushed to help. Watching the fight was John Gordon, a recently demobbed former prisoner of war who had seen more than twenty years' service with the Seaforth Highlanders. Carraher mistakenly assumed Gordon was connected with the fight and plunged a carving knife deep into his neck; Gordon died in hospital. Carraher was asleep in bed when detectives came to arrest him. Although he initially denied the attack, several former friends testified against him. His defence was that the knife he carried had a short blade and could therefore not have caused the fatal deep wound. This was dismissed when medical evidence showed that with force his knife could easily have penetrated to the depth of the wound.