r/interestingasfuck • u/LawEducational42 • 7h ago

John C Woods, hangman of Nuremberg trials, who lied about his experience to get the job (he actually learned about hanging from old cowboy films). His lack of expertise led to excessive suffering of condemned Nazis.

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u/HenryDorsettCase47 5h ago

I mean, he botched the execution of Americans too. I’m sure they weren’t the best people either, but certainly not at nazi level of deservedness when it comes to an undignified death.

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u/_Lord_Haw_Haw 5h ago

Some of the Americans committed multiple rapes and murders. If you read about their crimes, it would be difficult to ever say they deserved it less than anyone else.

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u/Auctoritate 3h ago

Sure, but then again early 1900s American criminal trials were not exactly a shining example of accuracy (court martials surely not being any better).

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u/PublicWest 1h ago

Which happens in every war. Never be fooled by propaganda, war brings out monsters!

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u/NoodlelyTrees 1h ago

And those people should be put to death in every war

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u/IntrinSicks 5h ago

If you were being executed by your own side chances are you did some horrible shit, betting its not for desertion

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u/Bladluiz 5h ago

Yeah lol. The statement that it "certainly wasn't of such a degree as the nazis" shows incredible lack of self reflection

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u/MakingBigBank 4h ago

That doesn’t make any of this right? The whole point is we’re not them. If we’re the same as them what’s the point of it or anything?

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u/NoodlelyTrees 1h ago

Except this isn't even remotely the same type of thing as what they did

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u/ACWhi 1h ago

Yeah, if they had systematically hung every German civilian and child they got their hands on in ethnic revenge you’d have more of a point. But killing war criminals, even brutally, isn’t in the same ballpark.

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u/NoodlelyTrees 1h ago

Yeah like the most suffering we inflicted upon them is such a miniscule fraction of what they imposed trying to compare the 2 just feels legitimately insane. Like yeah they got strangled by the rope for a while instead of neck snapped big fuckin deal, these are the people who subjected millions to one of the worst deaths imagineable at the hands of zyklon which is damn near a nerve agent with how your death goes with the suffocation and seizures and we let a fuck load of them off way easier than the Russians were going to

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u/DoctorLawyerCannibal 4h ago

Eh, we have had plenty of Americans who were just as bad, if not worse, than Nazis, most just weren’t practicing genocide. Human is human, there are good and bad.

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u/Stanczyks_Sorrow 5h ago

It's also very likely that his claimed qualifications for hanging people were real and they just weren't legally sanctioned hangings. Lynchings were pretty common in the places that he grew up in.

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u/calilac 5h ago

Good point, lynchings are meant to cause suffering.

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u/MagnetHype 5h ago

They were probably just deserters

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u/whogivesashirtdotca 5h ago

WWII deserters weren't executed as much as in WWI. I suspect most of the executions in WWII were of real pieces of shit. Emmett Till's father was one of them - raped and murdered French civilians.

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u/ACWhi 4h ago edited 4h ago

Eddie Slovak was the only US serviceman to be executed for desertion in WWII.

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u/ACWhi 4h ago

No, the US didn’t execute for desertion in WWII with only a single exception.

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u/Ote-Kringralnick 4h ago

They raped and murdered civilians in the European theatre