1945: The Belsen war criminals

ExecutedToday.com ^ | December 13, 2008 | Headsman

[CheshireTheCat]

On this date in 1945, British hangman Albert Pierrepoint executed eleven guards of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp and two other Nazis in occupied Hameln.

Liberated only eight months before these hangings, Belsen provided the to-us-familiar store of Nazi atrocity stories. Forty-five sat in the dock at the Belsen trial under British military authority, including the notorious camp commandante Josef Kramer — better known as the Beast of Belsen — and the “Angel of Death” Irma Grese.

Those two, and nine others less distinctively nicknamed, faced the gallows. (They were hanged together with two other war criminal convicts not connected to the Belsen trial, Georg Otto Sandrock and Ludwig Schweinberger, for a total of 13.)

On December 13, 1945, Pierrepoint hanged Grese; then, Elisabeth Volkenrath; and then, Juana Bormann, each individually. Finally, the men were then dispatched in pairs.

(Other than Kramer, the most notable was Nazi doctor Fritz Klein, who gave this reading of medical ethics when queried while the camps were still operating: “My Hippocratic oath tells me to cut a gangrenous appendix out of the human body. The Jews are the gangrenous appendix of mankind. That’s why I cut them out.”)

Of all this batch, Irma Grese, the “beautiful beast”, enjoys the liveliest afterlife.

If one finds her pretty, then she was a pretty young thing — only 16 when she hitched herself to the SS; turning 22 during her fatal postwar trial...

[Seruzawa]

If these Nazis had been rocket engineers they would have been brought to the USA and turned into “good Germans”. Like Werner von Braun. A stain on the honor of the USA.

[GingisK]

It is not the same, and you know it. Those who were hung were directly involved in the mass murder. Von Braun was not. He had no control whatsoever over the SS operated camps.

Von Braun was arrested by the Gestapo and held for four weeks under the potential charges of treason for merely stating the "The moon should be our target, not England". It took intervention from Albert Speer to get him returned to his work.

[Combat_Liberalism]

Right. Von Braun was not a Nazi. He had plenty of knowledge and experience to help the good old USA, and he did.

[JerryBlackwell]

Irma Grese, the “beautiful beast”

I checked and she looks like that crazy mean global warming girl Great.....not beautiful in the least

[GingisK]

Von Braun WAS a NAZI. He joined early on because it kept his money flow going and the goons from bothering him. Himmler later forced him to join the SS during Himmler's push to take control of the rocket research from the army. Von Braun got an offer he couldn't refuse.

Von Braun was not in the chain of command that controlled the factory labor. Anyone who failed to mind his own business was usually shot. Von Braun stuck to rocket development.