{∅, {∅}, {∅, {∅}}} : Rage Against the Meat Grinder

In 1937, three State- appointed men carried out the executioner’s trade. Six years later, the list of executioners appointed by the Reich Ministry of Justice included ten names: Gottlob Bordt, Friedrich Hehr, Karl Henschke, August Köster, Johann Mühl, Ernst Reindel, Wilhelm Röttger, Alois Weiss, Fritz Witzka, and, finally, Johann Reichhart. Alfred Roselieb was added to the list in 1944.

On 17 January 1945, new guidelines were once again announced.
Paragraph six was extended by one point: “The German salute is to be avoided at the place of execution.” In addition, scheduling issues can now be resolved by either shooting or hanging the accused. Death by shooting was now possible “if execution by beheading causes difficulties or delays”.

In early 1945 the special courts in Germany continued to pass death sentences, while the executioners and their assistants carried them out. Until the bitter end. As the country sank into ash and rubble, the downfall of the “Thousand Year Reich” was imminent, but the Nazi executioners carried on their bloody work, as instructed.

In the end they carried out more than 16,000 death sentences, of which 11,881 were completed by the three executioners Johann Reichhart, Wilhelm Röttger and Ernst Reindel. It was Reindel who, as the merciless “Butcher of Berlin”, on Hitler’s orders hanged the co- conspirators of 20 July Plot from meat hooks. At Hitler’s request, his cruel actions were filmed by a camera team commissioned by of Reich Film Director Hans Hinkel.

On 16 April 1945, even as Berlin was already being heavily fought over, executions were still taking place at Plötzensee.

Röttger, Reindel, Reinhart and their colleagues were killing to the end – their executioner work had by now become a barbaric routine.

Did they have any scruples? Any morals? Any pity for what they were doing? Surely everyone was only carrying out their national “duty”, whether at the guillotine, in the courtroom or in the Ministry of Justice: executioners, justice secretaries, prosecutors, judges, prison guards, medical professors, doctors, cameramen – they were all carrying out their duties fanatically and conscientiously for the Führer, the people and the Fatherland.

Until the last day, until the last hour, until the end of the war.
Until the downfall.

Then the war was over. Lost, said the Germans. The madness had ended and with it the barbarism. Now the collective cleansing began. No one wanted to be a perpetrator, a follower, a visionary anymore. And Johann Reichhart? Did he now blame himself for what he had done? Can something be wrong now, he wondered, what had been right just a few weeks ago? Had he not always maintained law and order? Had he not exercised his craft to the best of his ability, just as the gentlemen at the Ministry of Justice had stipulated and ordered in their guidelines? Had he not, as was his duty and role as an executioner, duly carried out all the sentences the prosecutors had demanded and the judges had pronounced? Was he not reliable, law- abiding, consistent – just as he had been instructed to be in his employment contract?

American forces liberated Munich on 30 April 1945, and the victors passed judgement on the vanquished. Now more death sentences were to be enforced. In mid- May, US soldiers drove to Johann Reichhart’s house in Gleißental, where he had withdrawn to for fear of arrest. The Americans had received information that the “ Damned Nazi Murderer” was staying there, so they picked him up, tied his hands and drove him in a Jeep to Stadelheim Prison, in Munich. This was where he had carried out many of his more than 1,200 death sentences before the end of the war, including those of numerous, innocent resistance fighters such as the Scholl siblings. Should he, who had beheaded so many people with the guillotine, now also be executed as a war criminal?

The executioner’s imprisonment was short- lived. After just one week, the prison gates were opened for him. American officers took him to the prison at the nearby Landsberg am Lech, where Adolf Hitler had once been imprisoned after his attempted putsch, and now where Nazi war criminals filled the cells. Reichhart suspected what the Americans wanted from him: they needed him for the same role the state of Bavaria had needed him for during the Weimar Republic and the previous years under the National Socialists. And so, Johann Reichhart found himself an executioner once again, just a few weeks after the end of the war, but this time for the American military government.

Two new gallows were built in the Landsberg prison yard. Reichhart knew what to do. In 1942 he had constructed a gallows himself based on the English model, but this had been rejected by the Reich Ministry of Justice because the Nazi lawyers had preferred the more agonizing variant of strangulation for hanging delinquents, which was reintroduced that same year as a particularly dishonorable punishment alongside the guillotine.

Two assistants lifted the person to be executed up, while at the same time the executioner placed a rope around their neck. On command, the assistants pushed the shoulders of the bound body towards the floor. Death occurred after a few seconds. Reichhart and his men accomplished this form of killing in Landsberg with quick precision.

In return for his expertise, Reichhart enjoyed certain privileges.

When death sentences were to be carried out, he was collected from his home in Gleißental by a military Jeep and chauffeured to Landsberg Prison. Instead of money he received canned food, alcohol and cigarettes: an attractive form of currency in the post- war period. Reichhart tied the noose 165 times to bring Nazi Party celebrities, concentration camp henchmen and SS bigwigs to their deaths. The American military judiciary was so convinced of its executioner’s services that it even considered appointing him as the executioner for those Nazi greats who were condemned to death at the Nuremberg Trials. However, the military government changed its mind, and Reichhart’s role was reduced to instructing US Sergeant Hazel Woods in the
“art of hanging from the gallows”. On 16 October 1946, it was Woods who finally put the noose around the necks of the death row inmates, including Frank, Frick, Jodl, Kaltenbrunner, Keitel, Ribbentrop, Rosenberg and Streicher.

A few months earlier, in August 1945, the Munich city administration had received an advertisement addressed to the then Lord Mayor Karl Scharnagl, in which, with reference to Reichhart’s privileged living arrangements, a prosecution for his activities during the Nazi regime and his expropriation were demanded. The complaint was forwarded to the relevant public prosecutor’s office, although it showed little interest in taking criminal action against the former Nazi executioner. As long as he was still providing his services to the American military government, they were obviously unwilling to take action. After all, Reichhart was still a Bavarian civil servant. On 6 April 1946, and later on 7 February 1947, the Bavarian State Ministry of Justice concluded a new employment contract with him, which was now also the basis for his work as an executioner for the US military government.

But Reichhart’s situation became precarious. A few months later, in May 1947, the military police took Reichhart from his apartment to an internment camp, albeit a very special camp, of course, at Moosburg an der Isar. The camp was reserved for “special officials of the NSDAP” and for senior SA and SS members. Here the former executioner met Hitler’s former Vice Chancellor Franz von Papen, Feldmarschall Sperrle, as well as Emmy Göring, the wife of Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring. It was most likely Emmy who had smuggled the cyanide capsule into her husband’s prison cell, who had otherwise been sentenced to death by hanging.

So, Reichhart was in good company, but the prominent inmates avoided him when they found out who he was. In December 1948, when he had to answer to a Munich tribunal for his work as a Nazi executioner, he used his closing remarks to express his bitter disappointment at how the judiciary, in particular, had treated him:

I have carried out death sentences in the firm conviction that I serve the State with my work and that I comply with the legitimate laws.
Only now have I become fully aware of how much I was exploited, even abused, by the State and its superiors in my blind faith and obedience.

I beheaded and hanged murderers, violent criminals, traitors and those harmful to others because I did not doubt the legality of the death sentences. However, I will do everything I can to ensure that I was the last Reichhart to push himself into the office of messenger. In the future, may the judges carry out the death sentences themselves.

In total, Reichhart carried out 3,126 death sentences – 250 of them against women – from 1924 to 1945. He executed murderers and violent criminals, but also resistance fighters and alleged opponents of the Nazi regime. On the orders of the American military powers, he hanged a further 156 people. His 23- year career as an executioner made him wealthy; in 1943 alone he earned the enormous sum of 41,748 Reichsmarks.

In the end, however, he was an isolated old man who received a modest disability and military pension of just 220 marks per month. He ran a dog breeding center in Deisendorf, near Munich, and only came into the public eye again when it was revealed that he had been made an honorary member of the “Verein zur Wiederein einführung der Todesstrafe” (Association for the Reintroduction of the Death Penalty).

In 1974, shortly before his seventy- ninth birthday, Johann Reichhart died in a hospital near Munich.