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On this date in 1915, “the sentences of the court-martial on a batch of 45 mutineers of the 5th Light Infantry were promulgated in public” — as the Straits Times reported — “and, in the case of 22 who were condemned to death, the sentences were executed on the spot.” A crowd of fifteen thousand watched the spirited Indian sepoys shot dead for revolting the previous month. This demoralized 800-strong garrison of Punjabi Muslims — who had, it need hardly be added, a noble history of insurrection to think upon — was already deployed far from home to look after...

On this date in 1944, Nazi troops occupying Italy avenged a partisan attack by executing 335 Italian hostages in the Ardeatine caves outside Rome. It was six months since Germany had invaded her onetime ally, eliminating those fascists who had deposed Mussolini. Now an occupied country — an increasingly tenuous occupation as the Allied war effort bore down on Germany — Italy’s partisans multiplied. On March 23, some of them bombed a German army column, killing 33. The Germans ordered an immediate reprisal, although there were administrative debates over how many hostages to shoot for each casualty. Hitler initially ordered...

On this date in 1540, the legendary outlaw Hans Kohlhase — a crime victim turned revengeful crime lord — executed* in Berlin. It’s a classic case of stubborn cusses escalating a minor property dispute. En route to the Leipzig fair in 1532, Kohlhase (English Wikipedia entry | German) was stopped by a Saxon nobleman who confiscated some of his horses. In dueling publications years later, Kohlhase would charge that Guenther von Zaschwitz accused him of stealing the horses; von Zaschwitz countered that Kohlhase looked suspicious and got uppity with his retainers when questioned. Proceeding to Leipzig in a huff, Kohlhase...

On this date in 1963, hardened killer Frederick Charles Wood, 51, became the next-to-last prisoner to be executed at Sing Sing Prison in New York. Although he came from a respectable, law-abiding family, Wood had a terrible temper and was very experienced at homicide. The man’s murderous career makes him the perfect poster child for the death penalty. He committed his first murder while he was in his mid-teens, poisoning a girlfriend. He was out in only a few years, however, and fell back into crime: in 1933, he committed another horrific slaying. This time his victim, also female, was...

Akshay Thakur, 31, Pawan Gupta, 25, Vinay Sharma, 26, and Mukesh Singh, 32, were hanged at Delhi’s Tihar Jail today — four of the six* widely hated perpetrators of in infamous 2012 gang rape. On December 16, 2012, a 23-year-old physiotherapy student and call center worker named Jyoti Singh was returning from the cinema with a male friend on a private bus in a South Delhi neighborhood when the five other passengers plus the driver sealed the doors and assaulted them. After the man was knocked out with an iron rod, the five passengers turned on Singh and horrifically gang-raped...

On this date* in 1945, Friedrich Fromm found out that you have to pick a side. The cunning career army officer had been serving as the head of the Replacement Army. This position provided access to the Fuhrer for Fromm — and for his chief of staff, Col. Claus von Stauffenberg. And it gave his office the authority to issue the “Valkyrie” orders for quelling civil unrest that Stauffenberg’s circle would use to attempt to seize Berlin. Fromm realized that his underling was involved in a plot against the Nazi dictator, but neither joined it nor smashed it. This play-it-safe...

On this date in 1871, the Paris Commune was born, with the execution of Generals Lecomte and Thomas. Paris had come to the brink of revolution by dint of the country’s humiliating defeat in the Franco-Prussian War. After a monthslong Prussian siege of the capital, Paris had become thoroughly radicalized and stood at tense loggerheads with the newly elected conservative national government of Adolphe Thiers. A militant National Guard swelled by the city’s large proletariat had defended Paris during its late privations, only to see a government of national humiliation accept punishing peace terms from Bismarck and submit to a...

On this date in 1834, one day after overrunning the Alava village of Gamarra, Carlist General Tomás de Zumalacárregui had 118 of its defenders shot. Zumalacárregui was the outstanding Carlist (read: conservative, absolute-monarchist) officer of the day. (Here‘s a public-domain memoir of his campaigns.) We meet him on the march in 1834, adroitly reversing the grim royalist position in the First Carlist War — a liberal-vs.-conservative civil war that also mapped onto ethnicity, geography, and royal succession. On this occasion, he overwhelmed a contingent of liberals and Basques fighting for the child-queen Isabella II. The survivors were taken prisoner and...

On this date in 2005, Iran “desert vampire” was flogged to the point of collapse and hanged before a bloodthirsty throng in Pakdasht. Bijeh confessed to raping and murdering 16 boys age 8 to 15 over a yearlong spree. His modus operandi? Lure them into the desert on the pretext of hunting animals. Unsurprisingly a figure of intense public hatred, Bijeh stolidly endured his own death before a jeering mob. Riot police held back the angry crowd, but at one point a brother of one of the victims managed to break through and stab Bijeh in the back.....

On this date in 1718,* the vengeful tsar Peter the Great staged a horrible execution on Moscow’s Red Square. Stepan Glebov was the collateral damage of Peter’s ferocious conflict with his ill-favored crown prince Tsarevich Alexei — the whelp who had only recently been repatriated to his glowering father after fleeing Russia altogether, to cap a lifetime of letting dad down. Alexei was back in Peter’s clutches, and a few months from the events in this post would be shockingly knouted to death at Peter’s orders. This Freudian clash also mapped sharply onto Russia’s political schisms (and many of the...

On this date in 1908, the octogenarian Haitian president Pierre Nord Alexis had a number of political opponents arrested and, that very night, summarily executed. Nord Alexis, a career officer risen to the post of Minister of War in a provisional 1902 government* when the previous president Tiresias Simon Sam* resigned to avert a constitutional crisis. That was a strange affair: a misreading of the constitution had Sam set to rule until 1903, until someone caught the mistake. Sam’s diligently on-time resignation proved not the Rule of Law victory he might have hoped when the resulting power vacuum brought civil...

March 11, 222 marked the downfall of the Roman emperor Elagabalus (or Heliogabalus, in the Greek rendering).* Notorious to posterity for lapping the field in outrageous sensuality, he was the 14-year-old cousin of the deposed brute Caracalla and stepped into the purple because his crafty grandma won the civil war that ensued Caracalla’s assassination. By family heredity he was by that time already the high priest of the Syrian sun-god Elagabalus,** in the city of Emesa (present-day Homs, Syria). History has flattered the youth with the name of his novel god, although in life the former was simply Marcus Aurelius...

This date in 1777 saw the public execution of “John the Painter” — a Scotsman who had been christened “James Aitken” at his birth less than 25 years before, but who had run through countless aliases in his adult life as a (mostly) petty thief. But this man was not a hapless victim of England’s Bloody Code, although he often enough offended the capital statutes against petty property crime. Rather, the scraggly redhead with the thick Scottish brogue was the author of a stunning act of domestic terrorism, in England, in freelance support of the rebellious American colonies an ocean...

We have the rare privilege this date* to salute 1,000 years since the martyrdom of St. Bruno of Querfurt. St. Bruno — also Brun or Boniface — had his head chopped off, and 18 companions were allegedly simultaneously hung or hacked to pieces, by a chieftain who did not appreciate the bishop’s efforts to Christianize the Baltics. The wherefores, and even the wheres (different sources locate it in Prussia, Rus’, or Lithuania) of this missionary’s end are permanently obscure to us. But this relatively forgotten saint has something to tell us about the fluid area of contact between the Latin...

This date in 1782 marks one of the more appalling single atrocities in the United States’s long destruction of indigenous Native Americans — the Gnadenhutten Massacre. This incident during the American Revolution took place in the Ohio River basin, a vast and fertile flashpoint whose part in not only the revolution but the antecedent French and Indian War perhaps entitles it to claim the midwifery of the coming American empire. After victory in the French and Indian War, the British closed the area west of the Appalachian mountains to European settlement. This proclamation: Made good a wartime pact Britain had...

Two centuries ago today, two men were hanged at Newgate Prison for buggery as a result of one of 19th century England’s most notorious anti-gay police raids. Brits whose sexual palate ran beyond the stiff upper lip braved the force of the law to frequent molly houses, private clubs catering to homosexuality, cross-dressing, and the like. In 1810, bobbies* busted mollies at one such establishment at the White Swan in London’s Vere Street. A press which evidently preferred its nicknames as vanilla as its coition dubbed these apprehended sodomites the Vere Street Coterie. According to Phoenix of Sodom, a lasciviously...

Soviet spy Helene (“Leen”) Kullman was shot by the Germans on this date in 1943 … or was she? Kullman (English Wikipedia entry | the much more detailed Estonian) was just out of teaching school when the Germans occupied Estonia. She joined the Red Army and was eventually trained as an intelligence agent, infiltrated by parachute behind German lines in September 1942, and arrested by the Gestapo in January 1943. This is where things get interesting. According to the Soviet hagiography that resulted in her decoration as a Hero of the Soviet Union in 1965, Kullman defied her torturers and...

On this date in 1644, Italian satirist Ferrante Pallavicino was beheaded by the papacy at Avignon for apostasy for his witty attacks on the Roman curia. Pallavicino, himself a cleric, was a notable producer of pasquinades, the politically-charged mockeries named for one of the “talking statues” in Rome to which they were often affixed.* Pallavicino’s expertise at this art found something affixed to him: a bounty, which a Frenchman earned by luring him from the safety of Venice to papal territory in France and betraying him. The pontiff upon whom Pallavicino poured his execrations, Urban VIII, only survived the beheaded...

On this date in 1957, Algerian revolutionary Larbi Ben M’Hidi — more familiarly referred to as Si Larbi or Ben M’Hidi — was extrajudicially executed in French custody. He was one of the founders of the militant nationalist National Liberation Front (FLN) and was a critical commander in the guerrilla war against French occupation, the Battle of Algiers. Small wonder he also features prominently in the cinematic masterpiece of the same name, where he and his opposite number, the French Col. Mathieu, are bracingly clear-eyed as to their respective sides’ necessary forms of terror. In this scene,* for instance, the...

The last man — so far — to die in the gas chamber, Walter LaGrand, was executed by the state of Arizona on March 3rd, 1999. He was one of just 11 prisoners gassed among the 1,099 executions to date since the U.S. death penalty was reinstated in 1976. The United States introduced the gas chamber as an execution method in the beginning of the last century. The first death row inmate ever executed with poisoned air was Chinese migrant Gee Jon, who died at the Nevada State Prison in 1924. Relative to the other methods in use at the...