The Hangman’s Revenge: Inside the Brutal and Botched Executions of the Nuremberg Nazi Generals

What really happened in the shadows of the Nuremberg prison gymnasium during the dead of night? While the world slept, the leaders of the Nazi regime were being led to the gallows, but one of them had already cheated the hangman.

Hermann Goring, the highest-ranking Nazi alive, lay dead in his cell from a smuggled cyanide capsule, leaving the American Colonel in charge devastated.

The spotlight then fell on Master Sergeant John C. Woods, a short, whiskey-drinking man who claimed to be a professional but designed gallows with a fatal flaw.

One by one, the generals dropped, but instead of snapping necks, they found themselves fighting for air in a agonizing display of slow death.

From Julius Streicher screaming “Purimfest 1946” to the rumored physical intervention of the hangman under the scaffold, the night was a descent into a nightmare of poetic justice and potential incompetence.

Even General Patton was disgusted by the spectacle, calling it a kangaroo court. We dive deep into the mystery of whether these botched executions were an accident or a cold-blooded choice. You won’t believe the chilling conclusion to this dark chapter of World War II. Read the full story in the comments section.

The clock struck 1:00 AM on October 16, 1946. In the gymnasium of the Nuremberg prison, the air was thick with tension and the smell of fresh wood. Three wooden scaffolds stood as looming shadows in the center of the room, each featuring thirteen black steps leading to a trapdoor of death.

For eleven months, the International Military Tribunal had meticulously documented the horrors of the Nazi regime—the systematic genocide, the aggressive invasions, and the brutal enslavement of millions. Now, the time for words had passed. The time for the rope had arrived.

Waiting at the top of the gallows was Master Sergeant John C. Woods, the official executioner of the United States Army. Woods was an unlikely figure for such a momentous historical role.

He was a short, disheveled man known for his love of whiskey and his boisterous boasting. He had been discharged from the Navy years earlier for being mentally unstable, yet he had lied his way into the role of army hangman, claiming years of experience he simply did not have. On this night, he was tasked with hanging the remaining leadership of the Third Reich, and he intended to do it with his own unique brand of flair.

The Tyrant Who Cheated the Noose

The evening was supposed to be the final triumph of international justice, headlined by the execution of Hermann Goring. Goring, the Reich Marshal and head of the Luftwaffe, was the most significant Nazi capture. When he heard he was to be hanged like a “common criminal,” he was incensed. To a German officer of his stature, hanging was a shameful death reserved for thieves and traitors; he demanded the “honor” of a firing squad. When the Allies refused, Goring took matters into his own hands.

Just two hours before the execution was to begin, Goring was found in his cell, foam at his lips and a glass capsule of cyanide nearby. He had successfully cheated the hangman, leaving the American Colonel in charge, Burton C. Andress, in a state of panic. The star of the show was dead by his own hand, and an immediate lockdown followed.

To this day, the mystery of how Goring obtained the poison—whether it was hidden in a pipe, a cream jar, or delivered by a sympathetic American guard—remains a subject of intense debate. But with ten other men still scheduled to die, the order was given: “Get the others ready. We start now.”

A Night of Agony and Error

The first to walk the thirteen steps was Joachim von Ribbentrop, Hitler’s foreign minister. Shrunken and pale, he met the noose with the words, “God save Germany.” When Woods pulled the lever, the trapdoor opened with a clang, but there was no sound of a snapping neck. Instead, there was a sickening thud.

The trapdoor opening was too narrow, and Ribbentrop’s head hit the side as he fell. For fourteen agonizing minutes, the witnesses—including journalists and Allied officers—listened as the former minister fought for air, strangling slowly in the dark box beneath the scaffold.

This pattern continued throughout the night. Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, marching to the gallows with the stoicism of a career soldier, suffered for twenty-four minutes after the rope failed to break his neck. The gallows, designed by Woods himself, appeared to have a fatal flaw: the drop wasn’t calculated correctly for the weight of the men, and the trapdoors were too small. Ernst Kaltenbrunner, the head of SS security, bled from the head as he hit the woodwork during his fall.

The question that has haunted historians ever since is whether these “mistakes” were truly the result of incompetence or a calculated choice by John C. Woods. Was the messy, protracted death of these men a deliberate act of revenge for the millions they had murdered? Woods himself later told reporters, “I hanged those 10 Nazis and I am proud of it… 10 men in 103 minutes, that’s fast work.” His lack of remorse and his pride in the efficiency of the night suggests a man who felt he was providing a different, perhaps more visceral, kind of justice.

The Screams of Julius Streicher

Perhaps the most disturbing execution of the night was that of Julius Streicher, the virulently anti-Semitic publisher of Der Stürmer. Streicher was hated even by his fellow Nazis for his sadistic and perverted nature. He walked into the gymnasium screaming at the American witnesses, “Purimfest 1946!”—a reference to the Jewish holiday celebrating the hanging of Haman.

When the trapdoor opened for Streicher, he didn’t die. He could be heard thrashing and groaning loudly inside the execution box. Witnesses reported that the groaning stopped abruptly only after Woods stepped behind the curtain. Rumors have persisted for decades that the hangman, tired of the noise and the man, simply grabbed Streicher’s legs and pulled down with his full weight until the neck finally snapped. It was a brutal, hands-on conclusion to a night of carnage.

Poetic Justice and Secret Ashes

By 3:00 AM, the gymnasium floor held ten bodies. To prove to the world that Goring had not escaped, his body was brought in and placed under the gallows for a final series of photographs. The images that emerged—published in magazines like Time and Life—were gruesome, showing purpled faces and elongated necks. They were the undeniable proof the world needed: the monsters were gone.

The Americans, fearing that any burial site would become a shrine for future neo-Nazis, took the bodies to a crematorium in Munich—ironically, the same one at the Dachau concentration camp. The men who had ordered the burning of millions were themselves reduced to ash in the very ovens they had authorized. In the dead of night, their remains were poured into the River Isar, washed away into the water with no grave, no marker, and no memory of where they lay.

The Divided Verdict of History

Not everyone saw the night as a triumph. General George S. Patton was famously opposed to the Nuremberg trials, calling them a “kangaroo court.” He believed that soldiers should not be tried for fighting a war, writing to his wife that the proceedings were “not cricket.” However, General Dwight D. Eisenhower disagreed, believing the world needed a legal and public demonstration of justice. He allowed the hangman to do his work, messy as it was.

John C. Woods died in an accident only a few years after the executions, a fact some attributed to “karma” for the botched proceedings. Whether the night of October 16 was a failure of engineering or a success of vengeance, it remains one of the most significant and controversial moments of the post-war era. It was the messy, brutal, and unceremonious end of a regime that had promised a thousand years of glory but ended at the end of a poorly measured rope.