Behind the Bastards - The Bastard Who Executed The Top Nazis

Episode Date: January 7, 2020

Robert is joined by Courtney Kocak to discuss John C. Woods, the American tasked with executing the Nazi High Command.FOOTNOTES: MEET THE LOUSY KANSAS HANGMAN WHO EXECUTED NAZIS Nazi executioner from Wichita found fame, but died his own mysterious death Sunday Express ARMED FORCES: Hangman's End JUDGEMENT AT NUREMBERG WAR CRIMES: Night without Dawn Left Hanging: John C. Woods and the botching of the Nuremberg Executions John C. Woods Purim Fest 1946: The tale of Julius Streicher The Hangmen  The Murder of Allied Airmen The Nuremberg Ten Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut?

That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know, because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space. With no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world.

Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. We'll be my guests today. Courtney Kozak, co-host of the Private Parts Unknown Podcast, which is also co-hosted by Sophia Alexandria, our frequent guest. Courtney, how are you feeling today? I'm excited to be here, Robert. Thank you for having me indulging my... How do you feel about my new... My bastard worship?

Now, what bastards do you mostly worship? You know, I got into it, I think I got into it through the standard gateway of a good old Hitler worship. Oh, good old Hitler, yeah. We all love us at Hitler, yeah. And then I mostly worship through your show, that's my... Aw. Yeah. Well, who's been your favorite bastard we've covered recently?

You know, I am so freaked out about climate change, so what was... Oh, Lumborg. Yes. Yeah, that was... He's a real piece of shit. He is. He's ruining us. Well, today we have a lighthearted episode, because I think things are getting real serious, and I think we all need to relax.

So today we're going to talk about a hangman, who was a terrible hangman. But the people he was hanging were all Nazis. So even though he definitely qualifies as kind of a bastard, the victims are Nazis, so we're okay. Like, this is going to be a fun one for everybody. He's like a dexter. Yeah. Totally. Yeah, if dexter was known by his incompetence rather than his hyper-competence.

Totally. Yeah. I don't think this guy meant to do most of... Well, I don't know. It's debatable. We'll see how you feel. I was going to ask you, what do you think is the most common thread between all the bastards? Is it psychopathy?

Bad upbringing? No, I think it's relentless self-confidence. Yeah, that makes sense. I think all of the worst people in history, that's the driving factor, is they really believe in themselves. Damn it. We're really fostering that in our current system. Like everybody gets a first place medal. I, you know...

Yeah, maybe. I don't know. I do think that that is one of the consequences of focusing on people's self-esteem, is that all of the worst people in history had great self-esteem. You know, Hitler was a guy who really believed in himself and his ability to change the world. It's like if you look at all of those new age memes that get spread on Twitter about visualizing your future and making it happen and how you can accomplish anything if you set your mind to it. And it's like, that's great when you're thinking about your friend who wants to open up her own

like a garment shop or whatever. Yoga studio. Yeah, totally. Yoga studio, who wants to start a bar. But there's also Hitler's out there. Yeah. And they have great follow through. But, you know, our story today starts when the follow through stops following through.

On May 7th, 1945, when General Alfred Yodel, representing the German High Command, presented the Allies with the unconditional surrender of his nation and its armed forces. So we are starting at the end of Nazism today, which is a nice little change of pace. Hmm. Yeah. What year is it? Yeah. Welcome back.

45. May 7th. That was the end of the war in Europe. Yeah. Officially. So in the wake of Germany's defeat, many of its top Nazis were of course well beyond the reach of justice. Adolf Hitler had of course shot himself.

Joseph Goebbels had blown himself and his wife up with a grenade. Heinrich Himmler had been captured but had chosen to eat poison rather than face up to his crimes. But a lot of high ranking Nazis had been caught. There was Hermann Göring, who was the head of the Luftwaffe and the former second in command to Adolf Hitler. He got taken alive. Also taken was Julius Streicher, editor of Der Stürmer and the man most responsible for shaping the party's early propaganda efforts.

We don't talk about Streicher a lot because Goebbels became a big name. But Streicher was kind of the Steve Bannon of the Third Reich. He was the first propaganda head who really got their messaging and shit on point. And they kind of dumped him once they got into power because he was a huge asshole. But he was a real critical figure in the night of long knives and helping to ignite a lot of anti-Jewish hatred. So people wanted him, it's good that he got captured even though he was kind of out of the picture for most of the 40s in a real way.

So you still pay the price if you're a bastard early on and you get out of there. Yeah, I think so. Would you want a guy? If someone in 1945 was like, hey man, I stopped being a Nazi in 1940, you wouldn't be like, well, all right, you missed the worst years. You get a pass. I would love to give people a pass. You know what I mean?

If you'll just stop being an asshole, we'll let you go. I mean, there's a point at which that's okay. If you're a guy who marches around with a Nazi organization for a while, a couple of years, but you don't participate in any attacks, you don't sell anybody any guns, you don't kill anybody, and you're like, ah, this is fucked up and you leave, fine. I don't want you to be murdered or anything. But at the point at which the Holocaust happens, I feel like the guys who weren't as active later in the Reich still fuck you, dude.

You can still pay with your life. There was an element of this that was, they let a lot of top Nazis off, actually. Even of the Nazis that we caught or who survived the war, the prosecution wasn't particularly thorough. Famously Adolf Eichmann, who was the main logistical mind behind the Holocaust, fled to South America. He was eventually caught and tried, but not for years later. Mengele, the infamous Dr. Death, escaped.

Also, those are more famous cases. Have you ever heard of the Einsatzgruppen? No. I just read about some guy, though, that had escaped and was living in Ohio. Did you read about this? It was a news story a couple of weeks ago. But he had just been living a regular life in Ohio for years. Wasn't he a Nazi?

Yeah. He was a concentration camp guard. Usually when you hear about those guys who made it to a super old age, they were either concentration camp guards or Einsatzgruppen dudes. And those were like mobile German military units during the invasion of Russia who just shot tens of thousands of people in single actions to death. They were the first stage of the Holocaust. And the vast majority, we captured those guys, we had documentation on what they did, and

we just let most of them go. And a lot of them were able to immigrate later. There's some really crazy stories. There were even one or two SS members who later joined the US military. One of them died fighting in Vietnam. We didn't prosecute most of these guys. That's hilarious. Yeah.

So when you get a guy like Striker arrested and tried, you can say, well, he wasn't really a part of the later party's efforts, but also like, fuck him, you got to get rid of all these people. You got to punish him when you can. And it was kind of random. They chose not to arrest and punish more of the Einsatzgruppen because they only had so many chairs in the courtroom in Nuremberg, and they didn't want to get more chairs. They're like, we need a stadium for all these guys.

Yeah, it was a little, it wasn't just like they didn't want to drag in more chairs. It was like the court was only made to hold so many defendants, so they limited the number of people they tried. But it's ridiculous. Like build a bigger court, it's World War II. So also captured was Field Marshal William Kytel, Hitler's yes man general. During the invasion of Poland, Kytel had issued criminal orders that had allowed the arrest and execution of Jews and other civilian noncombatants.

While Kytel was not an enthusiastic backer of the Holocaust, he gave orders that required the Wehrmacht, the German military, to aid in the extermination of Jews captured in the Eastern Front and send them to death camps. So he's like a perfect example of the fundamental moral cowardice at the heart of the German military. He was not a guy who would have been a Nazi if he hadn't have had to been, but he was a Nazi because it was good for his career. And he didn't want to have his soldiers wipe out innocent people, but he also didn't care enough about it to stop it from happening.

And he gave them orders to do so because that was his job. He thought it was justified by that. So he's a piece of shit, but in a different way than like one of the Nazis who's like rabidly champing at the bit to kill, you know, Jewish people. Like in some ways he's even worse because at least that Nazi like believes in something, right? And Kytel's like, I'm just not gonna, I'm not gonna fight this because I think my job as a German general is more important.

I don't know. It's a complicated moral issue, but he's a piece of shit for sure. But our guy, our main guy is the Steve Bannon comparison, right? Well, he's one of them. He's definitely the one I think is most culpable of the guys who get, the two who are most culpable in genocide of the people who are tried at Nuremberg are Julius Stryker and Hermann Gehring. When you're talking about like the guys at the top level of the party who are responsible.

Now, there were other guys too. Like one of the people captured was Ernst Kaltenbrunner. He's the man who had succeeded Reinhardt Heidrich, who was the architect of the Holocaust. Heidrich was assassinated in like 42, but he planned the Holocaust. And Kaltenbrunner was the guy who took his job afterwards as head of the Reich Security Main Office. So he was a major architect of the Holocaust. Another was Hans Frank, an OG Nazi, a former member of the Tula Colt Society and the governor

of Poland under the Nazi regime. Frank had been basically like the guy who had helped to organize the execution of Poland's Jewish population because he was in charge of Poland once the Nazis took over. So he's a big bad guy too. And then you've got Wachim von Ribbentrop, who was Hitler's diplomatic emissary and like the guy in charge of his like plan to kind of try to navigate international diplomacy to get what the Nazis wanted before the war started. So like a lot of bad guys in short.

They get a lot of really shitty dudes who need to be punished. And you know, you miss most of the heavy hitters, but like it's still a pretty solid docket of people who need to be punished. Right? Yeah. Yeah. Let's hope. Yeah.

Wasn't there a lot of, you said some, one of the guys fled to South America? Didn't a lot of them go to like Brazil and stuff? Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of them went to Brazil, to Argentina, Bolivia. And in fact, interestingly enough, Ernst Rome, who was the head of the brown shirts before the Nazis came to power, he was executed by Hitler shortly after they came to power

because he was like seen as kind of an unstable guy, but he was a big part of the Nazis coming to power. He like organized their street fighting movement and stuff in the years when they were rising. At one point he had like a falling out with Hitler and he moved to Bolivia for a couple of years to train the Bolivian military. And like there's still echoes of that in the Bolivian like government and stuff today, the fact that this like Nazi was a major architect of like the security state over there. It's wild.

That's so funny. It's like they're a band and he's like, okay, I'm going to go do my own thing in Bolivia, man. Yeah. This isn't working out for me in Germany. And in fact, Ernst Rome is often called the John Lennon of Nazism. That's hilarious. And he was shot early.

Yeah. It really actually does check out quite a lot. So where we are at the start of this, 1945, we've arrested a bunch of top Nazis and no one's really sure what to do with them, right? So like it's clear that the Germans have committed war crimes on a historical scale, but like what does that mean in terms of what kind of actions you take? Like people thought that there should be a trial, but how do you try them? Who's laws do you try these people under?

There's no international legal system in a meaningful sense of the word at this point. Certainly not one that presents like the underpinnings of how you would try people. Do they have rules about war crimes at this time? Yeah, but they weren't really enforced and it was never really clear what you were supposed to do in a lot of cases. Like they had rules against, we talk about this in a recent episode, they had rules against using chemical weapons, but then Italy used chemical weapons on Ethiopia and no one did anything.

It's kind of like when Obama made his red line on Syria, it's like we're clear we don't want people doing this, but what do we do when they do it? Which has kind of always been the problem with this sort of thing. So like you've got these guys, you can't try them under German laws obviously because they were not breaking German law because it was the Nazis. But then do you try them under American law? How do you justify that? They're not in the United States, they're not in Britain, maybe some of them did some

stuff in France, but like even that's kind of wonky. Do you try them under the laws of the individual nations where they occupied and committed their crimes? It's like it's a really complicated question. You can't just do whatever you want, right? Because the problem with the Nazis is they did whatever the fuck they wanted and like at the end of this war, the Sainer heads are trying to be like we should establish some sort of system to stop this and if you're going to not fuck that up, the system itself

has to be as legitimate as you can make it, which means you can't like half-ass it and just be like we'll just try them under US law or whatever, like you can't do that, right? So it's like, it's kind of a really messy question and it's sort of try to solve it. The four great powers at the end of the war, the Soviet Union, the United States, Great Britain and France, met together in London in June of 1945 to hammer out the framework that would establish an international tribunal to try these men. Now some of the jurisprudence they sketched out during this is kind of wonky. For example, it's well-established in most nations that you can't write a law and then

punish people who broke it before it was a law. This is called ex-post facto justice and it's illegal in most nations. But it kind of had to be ex-post facto justice because like nobody had written laws about some of the shit the Nazis did, but you can't just let them get off for the Holocaust because nobody was like don't murder people in gas chambers. Totally. It's complicated. So they put together a charter for this tribunal to try these guys and it specifically outlines

that individuals can be punished for their membership in what are called criminal organizations even if the criminal nature of that organization was established after their period of membership in it, which is what gets guys like Striker and stuff. The charter also establishes that individuals could be punished for crimes against humanity even if those crimes had not actually been illegal in the nation they were committed in at the time. So this is kind of like pretty groundbreaking stuff and it's not something we ever really returned to as a species, which is kind of a bummer.

I mean a little bit after the Bosnian genocides and stuff. Was everybody on board like internationally with like this is how it should go down? Yeah. I think for World War II, I think pretty much everybody was on, this is one of those rare instances where like, I mean there are some disagreements, but we're like Russia and the US and Great Britain are all kind of like, there's got to be like a big thing that we all do for this. We can't just be one country executing its prisoners or whatever.

That's not enough. And yeah, so this is like the one time most of the world agrees on like the execution of international justice and that's kind of cool. Now since the people being prosecuted here are Nazis, it's not easy to care about like the fact that some of the things they did would be considered illegal in like US courts, like charging people for crimes that weren't crimes when they committed them. But it is worth noting that some of the precedent behind the Nuremberg trial is really unsettling. Charles Weissanski, a federal judge in the US, initially led the charge against the

Nuremberg trials. He didn't want there to be trials because he worried about the precedent they might state and what could be done in the future as a result. So like if we're declaring that you can make something illegal and punish people who did it when it wasn't illegal, if we're doing that now for the Nazis, sure, fuck the Nazis, but how does that, you could do that for anything in the future. And like that could end in a really dark place. And he has a point, like that's concerning, right?

It's something worth thinking about. Are we still wrestling with this stuff like post 9-11 and about these exact same questions about when people can be tried and whatever? Yeah. I mean, now there is something of an international legal framework. So it's a little bit easier. Like back then it was totally like, you know, kind of the wild west in terms of international law.

And now there is something of like a framework set up for that. And one of the things that, so like Weissanski, who is the guy who's initially against having a Nuremberg trial, he actually changes his mind over the course of the trial because the prosecutors do such a good job of bringing forward evidence of Nazi war crimes. And Weissanski decides that even if the methods used to like create this legal framework were kind of fucked up, the principle of international law needed to exist to punish crimes against humanity. And it's worth it.

I'm going to read from something he wrote actually in The Atlantic in 1946. The reasons for my change is that the failure of the international community to attach the criminal label to such universally condemned conduct would be more likely to promote an arbitrary and discriminatory action by public authorities and to undermine confidence in the proposition that international agreements are made to be kept than the failure of the international community to abide by the maxim that no act can be punished as a crime unless there was in advance of that act a specific criminal law. So he's like, basically he decides, yes, it's worrisome to try to prosecute these people

for things that like weren't necessarily crimes before. But the consequences of not prosecuting these people are worse. Like it will enable more bad behavior in the future. So this is like a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation, but we should do it. Right. I'm giving a lot of background on this because I think it's interesting. It met the threshold of egregiousness that they were like, we have to do this, basically. It'd be worse to do nothing.

Yeah. Now, in total, 185 people were indicted in the Nuremberg trial. And yeah, it's not enough, but it's a good amount. And like most of those people actually weren't sentenced to death. They were sentenced to like periods of jail time and a lot of those sentences were actually commuted later. What? It's kind of a fucked up story.

Yeah. A lot of top Nazis, people who were like literally ordering mass killings had like their sentences commuted and went on to die peacefully. It happened to a ton of them. That's terrible. It's super fucked up. Yeah. You know, there's a bunch of reasons the different things like that happened, but it happened

a lot. But 12 top Nazis were sentenced to die by hanging. So there were 12 of these guys that an international court said like, you know, even as like laxists were being with punishing the Nazis, you motherfuckers, like we can't let you live. So that's good. But this set off another question, who's actually going to kill these guys? Like who do you bring in to execute one of the worst collections of bastards and like the whole history of humanity?

And the answer, of course, is another piece of shit. And this brings me to the glorious tale of John C. Woods, America's hangman. I'm so excited. This has been our long introduction. Yeah. He's a fun one. He's a fun guy. So John C. Woods was born in Wichita, Kansas on June 5th, 1911.

We have very little detail on his early life. One source I found just says prior to his induction in the army, he lived in Eureka, Kansas. He was married with no children. Now I can tell you from other reading I've done that his parents separated when he was young. One source even says they abandoned him and he was raised by his grandparents. We can infer that he didn't have an easy adolescence when he attended Wichita High School, which is now East High School in Wichita.

He dropped out after just two years and he never graduated. So this is the guy we have executing our top Nazis, one of America's finest high school dropouts, which really is appropriate. Now you know what doesn't drop out of high school? Adds in our products and services? Yep. Yep. All of the products and services that support this show are high school graduates.

None of them are college graduates. Valid Victorian. Well, that's a little much. I don't know if we can afford valedictorian products. Sophie, are any of these products valedictorians? Yeah, of course. All of them. Well.

I think Sophie's lying. Maybe not all of them. Yeah. But you know who won't lie to you. But didn't Courtney say that everybody gets a first place medal? Yeah. So everybody gets a valedictorian. I can't.

Well, if you trust Sophie, trust that these products are all valedictorians. We should really just roll out to ads at this point. Ads. Products. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right.

I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI, sometimes you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. This season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark.

And not in the good and bad ass way. And nasty sharks. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI.

How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space.

And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left offending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world.

Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back! Alright, so we're talking about John C. Woods, America's hangman. Now, on December 3, 1929, 18-year-old high school dropout John Woods joined the US Navy and reported to duty somewhere on the West Coast, probably California, who was eventually assigned to the USS Saratoga, but almost immediately went AWOL and deserted. He was caught by the law in Colorado and sent back to California, where he was court-martialed.

After being convicted, a Navy medical officer looked at John and recommended he receive a medical board examination. On April 23, 1930, they released this report. The patient, though not intellectually inferior, gives a history of repeatedly running counter to authority both before and since enlistment. Stingmata of degeneration are present and the patient frequently bites his fingernails. He has a benign tumor of the soft palate for which he refuses operation. His commanding officer and division officer state that he shows inaptitude and does not

respond to instruction. He is obviously poor service material. This man has had less than five months service. His disability is considered to be an inherent defect for which the service is in no way responsible. He has not considered a menace to himself or others. So the Navy diagnosis John with constitutional psychopathic inferiority without psychosis. Oh my God.

This is not a real diagnosis today. It's kind of a nonsense term for like, he doesn't want to be in the military. But did they just pick him out where they like, we're gonna... No, he joined. Yeah, he joined the military. But for this assessment where they like, things aren't going right. That's why we're gonna give you this assessment. Well, cause he, yeah, he runs away after five months and he's been like a giant piece of

shit before it. So they're like, what is wrong with you? We need to take a closer look. They sit him down. Yeah. Yeah. And what they're saying is he's like, he's gross. He doesn't take care of himself.

He has like open sores all over his body. He's like a nasty, unshowered mess. And he doesn't do what anyone tells him to do. And yeah, like they diagnose him with constitutional psychopathic inferiority without psychosis, which was originally coined in Germany in the 1880s to describe irredeemable criminals with antisocial characteristics. And in fact, a lot of people were gassed with this diagnosis under the Nazis. But we just used it to say this guy shouldn't be in the Navy anymore and John was discharged.

So that's the end of his Navy career. And you would think that it would be impossible for him to rejoin the military when one of the branches has kicked him out by saying he has psychopathic inferiority. No way. He gets back in. Oh, of course he gets back in. Yeah. Why not?

Just a different branch. So Woods gets kicked out of the Navy for being a piece of shit. And he spends the next few years bumping from job to job and doing very poorly at all of those jobs. He wound up in a marriage that the sources I found just called scandalous without any other details. I have no idea what he did. But it was probably super shady given everything that comes later.

He was arrested at one point for writing a bad check. And in 1933 at the age of 22 and basically out of options, John Woods joins the Civilian Conservation Corps. Have you ever heard of the CCC? Yeah. I think that was a thing, that's not a thing that people would have joined when I was in high school. Is it?

No. No. No. No. I don't think. I mean, I think there's, yeah. Like this was like a big thing during the New Deal in the 30s. Oh.

So like you have the Great Depression. It fucks up the country and FDR, his administration, establishes this group of civilians who basically like we hire up all of the jobless young men in America and we have them go build parks and roads. Oh, yeah. And libraries and all kinds of shit. Libraries. All kinds of cool shit.

It's one of the coolest things their government ever did. And I'm not just saying that because my grandpa would have starved to death without it. But John was not a good fit for the CCC and he was dishonorably discharged several weeks later after going AWOL and refusing to do his job. So he loves to go AWOL. We're noticing a bit of a pattern here. He loves to join quasi-military and military organizations and then leave. Two paychecks and I'm out.

Cool dude. Yeah. Yeah. Enough to buy some cigarettes and I am on the road. Yeah. Now, after failing at the Civilian Conservation Corps, John spent years barely making ends meet by working in construction and handling labor tasks on farms. He briefly worked for Boeing as a tool and die maker, but was not particularly good at

this job, nor was he good at anything else, nor was he good at dealing with other human beings. People who knew John generally described him as slovenly and ill-kimped. You get the feeling he did not shower regularly. He dressed poorly and he had a problem with authority. When he registered for selective service, which is like the draft in 1940, he was working as a part-time employee at a feed store in Kansas. So not an inspiring tale so far for this guy.

No. On December 7th, 1941, Japan made a significant error in judgment and bombed Pearl Harbor. This led to the U.S. getting into World War II in pretty short order and it led to a bunch of guys getting drafted into that war and John C. Woods was one of them. He was drafted by the U.S. Army and assigned to be a combat engineer, which is not the job you want this guy to have. No. No.

Don't let this man build bridges. The draft, they were just like, we'll take anybody. We need all hands on deck. Yeah. We'll take anybody and we're not going to look into your background too much. A lot of people who weren't even 18 managed to join during the draft. It was a fun time. Real fun time.

Now, he shouldn't have been able to join any branch of the armed services because he had a dishonorable discharge. But the DOD just doesn't seem to have noticed the Department of Defense just didn't look into it at all. It's some cool stuff. Now, in 1943, John was assigned to Company B of the 37th Engineer Combat Battalion and the 5th Engineer Special Brigade. He almost certainly took part in the D-Day landings on Omaha Beach in 1944.

It's hard to say for sure because the records aren't great and he was a huge liar, but most sources seem to suggest that he did take part in the Normandy landings, which is some shit to deal with. Yeah. Now, there's only one biographer who's ever written about this guy as far as I can tell and his name is French McLean. He's a former Army officer and he seems convinced that John Woods took part in the landings and saw heavy combat and I saw a lot of his, the other guys in his unit die really horribly

and was kind of scarred by this as a result. I'm surprised though because he seems like nothing affects, like he's the perfect guy to do that kind of combat actually, right? Because he's not, he doesn't process things the same way. Yeah, maybe. I mean, I don't think, I don't know that he was sad about his comrades dying as much as he didn't want to die himself and was like, this is bullshit, like getting shot at is some bullshit.

Gotcha. Like, I don't get the feeling that he was traumatized by losing friends because I don't think he was very good at making friends, but I get the feeling he was like, I don't want to die. Yeah, that's fair. That's fair. Yeah. Like, he's not a self-sacrificing kind of dude.

So as the US military and its allies started to advance through occupied Europe, they faced the same problem that armies throughout all time have faced. Some of the hundreds and thousands of men fighting their way across the continent were pieces of shit. There were rapists, thieves and murderers all present in the Allied military that liberated Europe. And again, like, this is the same as any other war in history. But in this case, the US was extra concerned about optics because the Nazis had been really

brutal occupiers and we were fighting a PR war as well. Allied command wanted to make it very clear that we weren't the same as the Nazis and that our soldiers would not be treated the same. So like, if they committed crimes on subject populations, we weren't just going to let them get away with it. So this meant that American criminals, like soldiers who raped French women after D-Day, had to be punished, like, immediately and severely. And not long after D-Day, several American soldiers were convicted via court martial

for the rapes of a number of French women and they were sentenced to hang. Now, the only problem was that we didn't really have any hangman set up to do the job. It wasn't really something we'd planned for super well. And very few men, even in an army full of combat veterans, actually turned out to be willing to, like, hang a person. Like, it's kind of hard to find people who are willing to do that job. They had loads of guns with them. Why were they, like, the most humane thing or, like, the way that we have to deal with

this is by some super old school method. Yeah. There's actually kind of neat reasoning to that, which is that you execute soldiers by firing squad. And the idea is that when a soldier has committed a crime, like, rape on a civilian, they don't get to be a soldier anymore. And so they don't get to die like a soldier anymore. And I think that was the reasoning is, like, what these guys did is so fucked up, we're

not going to give them the honor of being shot. Like, there were guys we executed by firing squad for, like, lesser offenses and stuff. But, like, you don't get that if you rape a civilian woman. Like, we're just going to hang you, which, you know, I don't know, that's kind of nice reasoning. I like the reasoning. It just requires so much infrastructure. It does.

It does. And they had not prepared for it, which is, like, something the military is pretty common. They rarely prepare for a lot of the things they wind up needing to do. So, like, they need a hangman and almost nobody winds up willing to take the gig, even if it means getting out of the line of battle and avoiding combat. But John C. Woods was super ready to not do any more combat. And when he, yeah, like, he was like, oh, yeah, fuck this shit. And so when he heard the army was looking for a hangman, he jumped at the opportunity.

Now he was not the only person to volunteer. And so he distinguished himself from the small crowd of applicants by claiming to have helped execute people by hanging back in the United States. Woods claimed that he'd hung two people in Texas and two more in Oklahoma. He would have done his resume, that's so funny. Yeah, he absolutely, he right on his hangman's resume. Yeah. Yeah, it's like that time I pretended to speak French so I could get this podcasting gig.

Is that real? Don't, oh, don't tell Jack that, Sophie. Copy. Now, yeah. So yeah, Woods claimed to have hung several people in the past. And the judge advocate, who was like, you know, that's who like handles military justice and they were the people who were like doing the hiring in this case, recommended that we check this out and like verify that he'd actually executed people before.

But nobody actually did anything. McLean, the author of a book called American Hangman, which is again the only biography on John Woods, says, the army doesn't check to find out. I'm sure there was the thought, how complicated could a hanging be? So like, the people in charge are like, we should at least make sure this guy knows what he's doing, but then they don't because it's too hard. And they're like, ah, what's the worst that could happen? Like if he wants the job that bad, it's just hanging people.

That is just pre-Google too. It's like, you couldn't be sure that he could figure out a hanging. Now it's like, if you left someone in a room for 30 minutes, they'd probably tell you how to hang someone, but that's crazy. Yeah. And the fact that he doesn't have Google to tell him how to hang people correctly will be a factor in this story later because he's never good at it. I mean, I guess you could, like he did hang all the people he was supposed to.

We'll see. Like it's a complicated determining whether or not someone's good at hanging. Now the army decided he was as good as they were going to get and they hired him. Now McLean has some interesting opinions on Woods motivation for taking the job. He says, he did not get wounded on Omaha Beach, but he saw a bunch of guys get killed. I'm sure he thought, I do not want to go through that experience again. He was right on the border with Germany and about to cross the Ryan River. He probably thought he'd get hammered again.

He volunteers to get out of the combat engineers. He's accepted and promoted from private to master sergeant and his pay goes from 50 to $138 a month. So in other words, like this guy is part of, like because no one else is like so few people are willing to do the hangman's job, he gets like immediately a massive promotion. Like basically like within the enlisted ranks, going from private to master sergeant is almost going as high as you can possibly go. And he basically triples his income.

And he triples his income. Yeah. It's a great gig. Like and he doesn't get shot at anymore. If you're a sociopath who doesn't care about like anything but your own benefit, this is a great move for John C Woods. Like he fucking nails it here. And Frank McLean, who is himself a retired army colonel, describes Woods as a psychopath

who lied his way into the hangman's job and only became the army's hangman to avoid combat. So like everyone who looks into this is like, this guy has a piece of shit and he's doing this so he doesn't have to fight. They're not really good reasons to be a hangman though. Or I don't know. Yeah. I mean, I'm going to guess very few people I would describe as like pleasant human beings have done the job of hangman.

Yeah. That's fair. Yeah. And it's probably hard to hire anyone who doesn't suck for that job. Apologies to all the hangman in the audience. I know there's a lot of you. But yeah. So for the rest of World War II, John C Woods was a hangman and he executed a little over

30 US soldiers for a variety of crimes. Now he was not very good at this job. And I'm going to quote from an article in the UK Sunday Express, quote, his inexperience led many condemned men to painfully long deaths. Woods didn't weigh or measure his victims and in his early career, didn't stretch the rope beforehand so that it wouldn't lengthen underweight. He didn't tie a traditional hangman's noose, but use a cowboy noose he'd seen in the movies with 13 knots that he claimed he'd invented.

Oh my God. So these guys would just, some of them would just not even be at the right height, right? No. So they're just slowly strangling. Yeah. You're supposed to break the neck quickly. It's supposed to be a pretty quick way, but a lot of John's patients take a long time to die because he doesn't do the things you're supposed to do to the rope to make sure it's

going to be the proper level of tauntness. And he's like using a knot he saw in a movie and 13 knots that he made up on his own. He's like, I'm a pioneer of this technique. Oh my God. Yeah. People have been hanging each other for thousands of years. We have the knot technology pretty solid at this point, but this gets back to what you asked a little earlier, what I think unites all of these guys and it is that reckless

self-confidence. So this guy being like, I don't need to read on how to hang a guy, I'll just make up the knot myself. I can't believe there was no one there to oversee him. They just didn't care. There was, but like, well also like how many people have seen a proper hanging go down. But can't you tell if you're like, uh, that guy was, that took like an hour. It's a crowded war, like a lot's going on.

This is nobody's number one priority. Sure. Sure. I kind of slide through the cracks for a while. Now June 29th, 1945 is the first time John C. Woods winds up in the media spotlight. That's because three German civilians had been sentenced to die for the murder of second Lieutenant Lester Roos of the U.S. Army Air Corps. Newspapers from this time report that Woods had been a veteran executioner before the

war and that he'd executed several hundred people. All of this was a lie. But as soon as the news starts talking to Woods, he starts claiming that he's on his like 300th execution, um, when it's really like he's done maybe a dozen or so at this point. He knows how to do it. Yeah. So by the time the war ended, Woods had executed 34 Americans, which is more than a third of

the U.S. soldiers executed in Europe and North Africa during the war. Once the war ended, though, is when his hanging career really took off. See, the international community needed someone to execute all the top Nazis convicted in Nuremberg. He got a job for the faint-hearted, since there were still quite a few Nazis hanging out in Europe and the chance of being murdered by one was far from zero. Lucky for the Allies, John C. Woods did not care about that. In fact, he didn't seem to think much at all about the consequences of taking on this job.

While John had almost certainly been lying about his past as an executioner, the almost two years he spent on the job before the Nuremberg trials seems to have inculcated in him a deep love of the craft. And as a result, he not only, uh, performed the executions, he designed and built the gallows that the third Reich surviving war criminals would be hung from. So that's, he's like, he's graduated now. He's like making the scaffolding and everything. Is he getting better?

Is he actually better at his job? No, no, no. Oh, God. I mean, better probably, but he does not build these gallows well. Um, McLean and several sources I found claim that Woods deliberately made the trapdoors of the gallows too small so that they could dimmed men would hit their heads on the way down. I, I, the Nazis deserved it, but it is, it is like, yeah, it's, it's one of those things.

He's absolutely a piece of shit, but also like, I'm not mad. Like, I'm not mad. Someone got in one last dig at the Nazis. I totally. Um, now I should note that this is not like, um, a hundred percent agreed on. Like John Woods is somebody that like, there's actually surprising number of historians who study hangman and those kinds of nerds debate about this guy quite a lot. Um, some will claim that like the fact that his trapdoors were too small was simple accidental

incompetence. Some will say that it was, uh, purposeful. Um, I'm not a gallows expert, um, but I just want to note that this is like, there's debate over as to why the trapdoors were too small. Now after a fair amount of digging online, I was able to find a book which is available online for free. It's, uh, released in the creative commons called A Hangman at War by Richard Clark Traukot Witz.

It seems pretty well researched, um, but I don't know how to determine Traukot Witz's competence to talk about stuff like this, but it seems pretty well researched. Uh, and Traukot Witz defends Woods's competence as a hangman and gallows designer. His book claims that Woods actually built a special new sort of trapdoor for the gallows specifically because he'd noticed in his other executions that condemned men were hitting their faces on the way down. But if that's the case, then he fucked it up because several of the Nazis Woods executed smashed their faces open on his shitty trapdoor on their way down.

So while Traukot Witz seems to defend him on this, I think I side with McLean in that it was probably either him fucking up or him purposefully fucking up the gallows because he didn't like Nazis. It's, it's, it's a complicated case. I don't know who's right about this. I should note that Traukot Witz's book still definitely paints a picture of John C. Woods as a sociopath. In the section about the execution of three war criminals in June 1945, he notes this.

Life ran a five page report on the trials and executions with 30 photos, and the caption referring to Bax's execution, Life claimed, after this hanging as after the other ones, the hangman wept, a statement which no one will find credible whoever looked into Woods's career and character for a single minute. So even this guy's big defender is like, no, he didn't give a shit about people. It's interesting that life needed a, I don't know, lie and make it seem like he was a, he felt bad about hanging people. Some sort of hero, yeah.

Yeah, like they just, it was, it was such a gross thing to watch a hanging that you need to inject some humanity into the event, even if the guy doing it clearly is doing it just to not get shot at and doesn't give a fuck about the fact that he's killing somebody. So but, but after the war, he's just doing it for the money, right? I mean, he's still in the military. Yeah. But yeah, it's better money. So you know what's also better money?

Products and services? That's right. That's right. And these products and services, I think if they could, would also build deliberately shoddy gallows to make the hanging of Nazi war criminals less pleasant. We support that. Yeah, here we go. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the

racial justice demonstrations and you know what, they were right. I'm Trevor Aronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI, sometimes you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. This season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced, cigar smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns.

He's a shark and on the gun badass way and nasty sharks. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful

lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all

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But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left offending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your

podcasts. All right, we're back. So we're talking about John C. Woods' real piece of shit, and I want to talk a little bit about his personality before we get into his actual execution of the Nazi high command. Now one of our most prolific sources on the personality of John C. Woods was Hermann Obermeyer, a journalist and a publisher who during the war was a military clerk. He had a number of interactions with Woods, and he seems to have hated him. And he said this after the war, quote, John Woods was a short muscular sort of man, and

I would describe him as kind of the world's flotsam. He talked the language of the hobos and flotsams and the people who do these kinds of jobs. He was, I think, an honest craftsman who took pride in his job, and he thought it was a very good job. He had 30 executions a year maybe, and the rest of the time the army treated him very well because he had a skill that nobody else had in the army. So he was allowed to be drunk the rest of the time and do whatever he wanted, so long as he showed up for these things and performed them well.

That's hilarious. He does have sort of a Popeye, Mr. Clean vibe, right? Yeah. Yeah, nobody wants to do this, so let's give him extra money and let him be drunk all the time. Yeah. Oh, my God. That is kind of the reasoning that I Heart Radio has for me, but I only rarely execute

people. Now, at least once Woods's drinking led to him fucking up and showing up late to an execution. His excuse was that he'd been unable to find the right kind of rope, and I'm going to quote now from the book, Hangman at War. He shuffled into the general's room, boots unpolished, and instead of chewing him out, the general jumped up and exclaimed, Glad to see you, Woods. Any other soldier when walking into Superior Officer's room would take care that his dress

was impeccable, would salute crisply and not expect a more cordial greeting than at ease. The army gave Woods very special treatment indeed. Once Obermeyer even got a nanny's job to make sure Woods didn't get drunk and failed to appear at an execution. So he gets drunk and shows up late to kill somebody, and he shows up to the general to get disciplined, and the general's just super nice to him, because again, nobody wants to do this job. There's almost something inspiring about, even in an organization of hundreds of thousands

of trained killers, it's so hard to find someone who's willing to kill an unarmed man that like- I know. I think this is heartening, really. They have to let him be drunk and BSP's shit, because no one else will do it. Yeah, it is kind of heartening. Even in, at this point, all these guys have seen horrible things, like they're still not willing to do what this guy does.

It's kind of amazing. And his previous job, the other guys are like, I don't want to kill my buddies. And he's like, I will be the first to kill an American soldier. Let me out. Oh, I don't give a fuck. I'll kill anybody. Yeah, let me out. Yeah.

Screw it. Yeah. And this then, this drunken hobo, like, executioner, was the man selected to hang the greatest collection of war criminals ever incarcerated and sentenced by a court. And some articles I've read on this suggest that the choice of this drunken, dirty hobo man as executioner was a deliberate move by allied authorities, a sort of last middle finger to the leadership cadre of the Third Reich, like basically saying like, we respect you pieces of shit so little that this is the guy we're hiring to kill you.

Like we can't even get someone who can come in without liquor on their breath to do this job. And I'm not sure. I don't. I think that's more sort of like wishful thinking than actual, probably realistic, like I think that all of the people in the High Command are probably a little bit too professional for that. They probably just didn't have anybody else.

But it is worth noting that the choice of hanging as a method of execution was picked to send a direct message to men like Herman Gehring and Phil Marshall Cytel. As I discussed earlier, like shooting firing squad is the way the, yeah, because we talked about this earlier and you said that the shooting was more humane, right? Or more honorable. It's, it's what you do to, yeah, it's what you do to soldiers being shot is an honorable way for a soldier to die. You know?

Oh, right. And so for the American guys that didn't make good on what they were supposed to be like as soldiers, that's why we hung them as civilians and the same thing for these guys now. Yeah. And these guys, like the Nazi generals, like Herman Gehring was a fighter race in World War One. He was like the guy who took over Manfred von Richthofen's squadron after the Red Baron died.

And he was also like, obviously in the military hierarchy, the Third Reich, he was the head of the Luftwaffe and in Field Marshal Cytel was like the highest ranking or at least one of the highest ranking German generals left alive. So was General Yodel. These were military men and like the thing they wanted to protect above everything else was their military honor. And like they protested hugely against the fact that they were going to be executed by hanging.

Gehring repeatedly said that he was willing to be shot. He had no problem with a soldier's death, but he thought that hanging was the worst thing they could do to a soldier. And that's how most of these guys felt. One of the major sources for this episode was a book called The Nazi Hunters by Andrew Nekorsky and it cites a guy named Fritz Sochel, a Nazi who oversaw the slave labor program. So he was the guy like responsible for organizing like mass slavery and like labor gangs that killed tens of thousands of people.

Here's how he complained about the court's decision to hang him instead of shooting him. Quote, death by hanging, that at least I did not deserve. The death part, all right, but that, that I did not deserve. Oh my God. This fucking guy. This fucking guy. How much were any of them like, yes, what I did was horrible or are they just quibbling about how they're going to die?

Some of the, a couple of them were Hans Frank, who was the head of Poland, of occupied Poland and like guilty of unspeakable war crimes and facilitating the mass extermination of Poland's Jewish population seem to honestly deeply regret what he'd done and like fully accepted that he needed to be executed and like shit, like, like some of them. I don't know. Like you can argue like how real all that was or if he was just trying to like get some sympathy at the end. Some of them claimed that like, yeah, like something bad should happen to me.

I don't know. I'm, I'm hesitant to like go too much detail about Frank just because he was still a gigantic piece of shit and I don't want to like give him credit for like acting like slightly less of a piece of shit right before dying. But guys like Kytel and Yodel and Gehring are pieces of shit right to the end and wine like babies about the fact that they're being hung after helping to facilitate the conquest of a regime that gassed millions to death and burnt their corpses. So yeah, all of their requests to be shot instead of hung were denied, but not all of

the 11 condemned Nazis survived to meet John Seawoods at the gallows. Herman Gehring and a last active defiance had managed to secret a cyanide capsule on his person. He poisoned himself and died horribly, but privately avoiding the hangman's noose. So that's a bummer. You hate to see it. Yeah. Now, the remaining condemned Nazis, however, were unable to escape and they all wound up

meeting John Seawoods on the morning of October 16th, 1946. On that day, Woods was, as Obermeier puts it, one of the most important men in the world. And he flaunted that fact by showing up with dirty pants, an unpressed jacket, a crumpled hat and reeking of booze. He was clearly unwashed and his teeth were unbrushed. This is the man who led 10 Nazi war criminals to their deaths. Oh my God. And then he peed on them right before.

Yeah, you kind of love to see it. Just a big old piss right on them. I'm going to quote now from a selection from the book The Nazi Honors. At 11 AM, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Hitler's foreign minister, was the first to arrive in the gym. The original plan was for the guards to escort the prisoners from their cells without manacles, but following Gehring's suicide, the rules had changed. Ribbentrop's hands were bound as he entered, and when the manacles were replaced with a

leather strap, after mounting the scaffold, the former diplomatic wizard of Nazidem, as myth archly put it, proclaimed to the assembled witnesses, God protect Germany. Allowed to make an additional short statement, the men who had played a critical role in launching Germany's attacks on country after country concluded. My last wish is that Germany realize its entity and an understanding be reached between east and west. I wish peace to the world. Woods then placed the black hood over his head, adjusted the rope, and pulled the lever

that opened the trap, sending Ribbentrop to his death. Two minutes later, Field Marshal Keitel entered the gym. Smith duly noted that he was the first military leader to be executed under the new concept of international law, the principle that professional soldiers cannot escape punishment for waging aggressive wars and permitting crimes against humanity, with the claim that they were dutifully following orders of superiors. Keitel maintained his military bearing to the last. Looking down from the scaffold before the noose was put around his neck, he spoke loudly

and clearly, betraying no signs of nervousness. I call on God Almighty to have mercy on the German people, he declared, more than two million German soldiers went to their deaths for the fatherland before me. I now follow my sons, all for Germany. While both Ribbentrop and Keitel were still hanging from their ropes, there was a pause in the proceedings. An American general representing the Allied Control Commission allowed the 30 or so people in the gym to smoke, and almost everyone immediately lit up.

Now, there would be one more smoke break over the course of the day. In true to form, Woods's executions were as sloppy as his dress. Joachim von Ribbentrop took 14 minutes to die. Keitel choked to death for almost half an hour. It is possible that both of these were due to errors, either in the construction of the gallows or in the type of noose Woods tied. But McLean, Woods's biographer, believes he intentionally botched at least one job. The hanging of Julius Stryker, the first arch propagandist to the Nazi party.

And I'm going to quote one more time from the Nazi hunters. This is a good bit. At 212, Smith noted that, the ugly dwarfish little man, Julius Stryker, the editor and publisher of the venomous Nazi party newspaper, Der Sturmer, walked to the gallows, his face visibly twitching. Asked to identify himself, he shouted, Heil Hitler, allowing for a rare reference to his own emotion, Smith confessed, the shriek sent a shiver down my back. As Stryker was pushed up the final steps on top of the gallows to position him for Woods,

he glared at the witnesses and screamed, Purim fest, 1946. The reference was to the Jewish holiday that commemorates the execution of Heyman, who, according to the Old Testament, was planning to kill all the Jews in the Persian Empire. As formally for his last words, Stryker shouted, the Bolsheviks will hang you one day. While Woods was placing the black hood over his head, Stryker could be heard saying, Adele, my dear wife. But the drama was far from over. The trapdoor opened with a bang, with Stryker kicking as he went down.

As the rope snagged taut, it swung wildly and the witnesses could hear him groaning. Woods came down from the platform and disappeared behind the black curtain that concealed the dying man. Ubrexley the groan ceased and the rope stopped moving. Smith and the other witnesses were convinced that Woods had grabbed Stryker and pulled him down hard, strangling him. Had something gone wrong, or was this no accident? Lieutenant Stanley Tillis, who was charged with coordinating the Nuremberg in earlier

hanging of war criminals, later claimed that Woods had deliberately placed the coils of Stryker's noose off-center so that his neck would not be broken during his fall. Instead, he would strangle. Everyone in the chamber had watched Stryker's performance and none of it was lost on Woods. I knew Woods hated Germans and I watched his face become florid and his jaws clench. He wrote, adding that Woods' intent was clear. I saw a small smile cross his lips as he pulled the hangman's handle. Oh my God.

This guy, I feel like you have to either he sucks at his job or he's at least good enough to fuck people over. You know, I think where I am on this is he was bad at his job, but it was a job that the best way to do it was poorly because Nazis don't deserve a nice clean execution. Totally. As the government, you have to try to give them one because otherwise you're not upholding the kind of moral high ground you need to uphold to try to make the point that they were trying to make by trying these guys in a court of law.

I don't want our government to have tortured them. I don't want our government to have executed them painfully. But I do want an incompetent, shitty asshole hangman to fuck it up so that it's a little bit worse for them. I think is kind of like the perfect balance of justice in as much as you can achieve it here. Yeah. Agreed.

But so he straight up strangled the last guy with his bare hands? Oh, yeah. Well, Stryker wasn't the last. No, I think he like pulled him down like the guy strangling, he pulled him to like strangle him faster. And there's debate, you know, that guy, you know, one of the witnesses who is there with Woods one day says that he thinks that Stryker fucked out up so that it would be more painful because he hated Germans and he wanted to get to strangle a guy.

McLean, Woods's biographer, argues that Woods intentionally fucked up Stryker's execution, not because he hated Germans, but because the Nazi propagandist had stolen the show from him by like making a big like, like, speech and stuff. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. McLean wrote at an execution John Woods wanted to and insisted on playing the lead actor. So like that's McLean's angle is that like Woods was just jealous that he'd stolen the

spotlight for a little while and he wanted to take it back. And like, yeah, it's wild. Yeah. Now, halfway through the execution of these 10 men, which were all executed on the same day in a couple of hours, John C Woods was asked how he felt by an American officer who I think was concerned for his mental health, like wanted to make sure he was okay, you know, because it's, it's a tough thing. Woods's response was wins early chow.

I'm fine. When do we eat? Oh my God. Oh, God, I love it. Now in the immediate aftermath of the executions, Woods agreed to do an interview with Stars and Stripes magazine. He bragged that the hangings had gone off without a hitch. I hang these 10 Nazis in Nuremberg and I am proud of it.

I did a good job. Everything went A number one. I have never been to an execution, which went better. I am only sorry that that fellow gearing escaped me. I'd have been at my best for him. No, I wasn't nervous. I haven't gotten the nerves. You can't afford nerves in my job, but this Nuremberg job was just what I wanted.

I wanted this job so terribly that I stayed here a bit longer, though I could have gone home earlier. So that's what he claims to the news. And from Woods's point of view, the only hitch in the whole day seems to have come afterwards at a post-execution celebration in the NCO's club. Woods was informed that he would not be allowed to drink more than his nightly ration of four ounces of liquor. He demanded that the sergeant in charge break out the booze and eventually got so violent

over the sergeant's refusal to do so that the commandant of the guard was called on him. He never got an increase in his liquor ration. You just got belligerent afterwards. He does deserve some extra shots, I think, for hanging the Nazis. He does deserve some extra shots. If anything deserves shots, it's hanging the Nazis. Now Woods did spend a lot of time drunk in the immediate wake of the executions, though.

Obermeyer recalled a more or less drunken moment after the hangings when another soldier asked John how he'd feel about dying via hanging. And John C. Woods responded, you know, I think it's a damn good way to die. As a matter of fact, I'll probably die that way myself. How did he think you're... Well, the soldier asked basically that question you asked, like, what the hell are you talking about? Like, don't say shit like that.

That's fucked up. And Woods replied, I'm damn serious. It's clean and it's painless and it's traditional. It's traditional with hangmen to hang themselves when they get old, which I think he's just making up. I don't think it's traditional at all. I think he's just lying. But yeah.

Do you know how he died? Or are we getting there? Oh, yeah. Oh, we're getting there. We're getting there. Now, Woods became something of a minor celebrity in the wake of the executions. He gave interviews to any journalist who would sit and talk to him. The Blizzard of media attention came as a shock to his wife, Hazel Woods, and I'm going

to read a quote she gave to the Emporia Gazette on October 17th, 1946, when they asked her about the fact that her husband had killed all of the Nazi high command. He never told me that he was doing that type of work. He didn't mention any hangings, and the first I knew of it was when I saw his picture in the papers. Oh my God. So. He doesn't even tell his wife.

Real piece of shit. And it's, there's a couple, like the charitable is like, oh, he didn't want her to worry because it's such, you know, it would have increased their risk and maybe he felt that she'd be safer not knowing. I don't think that's the case. I think he either just didn't think to do it or his pay tripled, right? But he doesn't want to have to send extra money back to his wife because that he can't spend it on.

Oh, that's such a piece of shit reason. That's my guess. I just thought he was a communicator, you know, he doesn't see. That's also very possible. Yeah. He seems like that kind of guy that would just have a whole relationship and it would just be about eating or whatever. I mean, how would you feel if like you're your romantic partner after years of executing

war criminals and you think you thinking he was like putting together like phone, like telephone wires like, oh yeah, I've just been hanging people for years just hanging folks all day. That's what I've been doing. That's, that means you need to ask more questions. I think that's what that means. Yeah. Most relationship experts would agree.

Yeah. Now, as interest in the executions began to wane and America moved on from World War II to go on to the important business of forgetting all of World War II's lessons, John seems to have gotten somewhat desperate for attention. Interviews conducted with him in this period reveal his increasing attempts to convince journalists that a secret cabal of Nazis was trying to murder him for his role in killing their leaders. I'm going to quote now from an article in the Mail Special Service.

After I started hanging these German war criminals last year, someone tried to poison me in Germany and somebody shot at me in Paris, but the poison only made me sick and the bullet missed me. Somebody has to do this job. I got into it by accident years ago in the States. I attended a hanging as a witness and the hangman asked me if I would mind helping. I helped and later took over myself. I just don't let it bother me.

Now that this Nuremberg job is over, I'm ready to go back to the United States and I'm planning to leave in a few days, but I may come back to Germany. There are more than 120 war criminals waiting here to be hanged, including those 43 sentenced to the Almedy Massacre. I had some buddies killed in that massacre. I'll just come back here just to get even for them. So this is how he continues to present himself in the post-war period. And it's hard to say with a guy like John, but it is possible that he believed a lot

of what he was saying. People who knew him said that in the years after the executions he took to carrying a pair of.45 caliber handguns everywhere he went as protection against possible Nazi assassins. He was quoted by one reporter as saying, if some German thinks he wants to get me, he'd better make sure he does it with his first shot because I was raised with a pistol in my hand, which he definitely was not. Is this a real threat? Because it's a great question.

It sort of is, right? But also, wouldn't they be screwing themselves over by calling attention to themselves, by trying to kill this hangman who really wasn't a shot-caller? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's what you'd think, although he'd be easier to kill the hangman than Eisenhower. But yeah, it's possible, like, I can see how, you know, as much of a liar as we know John Woods was, I can see how he could have legitimately believed his life was in danger.

It's not unreasonable to think that that would make someone paranoid, even if there was no actual plot against him. But it is possible there was a plot against him. So yeah, eventually the army stopped having much of a use for John and he went back to serving as a normal soldier. And in 1950 he was stationed on the Innawatak, a toll in the Pacific, one of our nuclear weapon test bases, and Woods's job was basically to act as a guard and a gopher for the scientists and engineers who worked there.

And thanks to Operation Paperclip, many of these scientists were Germans who had previously worked on the Nazi rocket program or in the military aircraft industry. And on June 21st, 1950, John C. Woods was tasked with changing some light bulbs, showing his characteristic lack of attention to detail. He changed these light bulbs while standing in ankle-deep water. A current of electricity surged through the water for unclear reasons and electrocuted him to death instantly. In the years since, there have been numerous rumors that John Woods was murdered, presumably

by Nazi scientists for his role in the execution of their leaders. This is not impossible, but there is no hard evidence to support this theory. So yeah, that's how it all goes down. Fascinating ending. Wow. Yeah. Five stars. Yeah.

And it's like one of those things where it's not impossible that some of these Nazi scientists would have wanted revenge, but also like the scientists tended to be even the ones who did a lot of Nazi shit and used slave labor and stuff, like Werner von Braun did some awful things, but he cared more about the science than the Nazism. He wasn't in love with the Fuhrer or anything. He was kind of like Kytel. Well, he was just willing to do the horrible Nazi shit to get to do the things he wanted to do.

Didn't the government kind of vet these scientists a little bit to make sure they weren't totally dangerous? No, no, no, no. As long as they... Okay. So one of the people that we brought in after World War II was Hitler's chief architect and the guy who had managed the Germans armaments industry during World War II and had organized the massive use of slave labor and was a gigantic piece of shit and one of Hitler's best friends.

And we forgave that guy because he knew things. He was good at organizing shit and we needed... We wanted his help in sort of cold war planning shit. Oh my God. We did this with a lot of... Werner von Braun designed rockets that were used to be fired specifically on civilian chunks of cities in London or cities in England. And we forgave him because he knew how to build rockets.

We didn't give a shit what they did as long as they were good at the kind of science we needed. It was totally... It's not impossible that these guys killed him. It's not impossible. That said, it's also totally in character for John C. Woods for him to have been completely unconcerned and uncareful while working with electricity and get himself killed. Yeah.

Because he was a dumb, gross piece of shit who didn't pay attention to his work. So hard to say, yeah. He didn't die by hanging though. Sorry, John. No, he did not die by hanging. Great, John. So Courtney, how are you feeling about John C. Woods at the end of this little tale? Man, that was a fun one.

Yeah. Yeah. He's not the worst guy. No, no, no, no. Like he's... French McLean, his biographer, frequently describes him as a bum, which I think is fair. He's not like a crazy monster who wanted to kill people because he enjoys death. He was like just kind of a shitty dude who didn't want to go to war and thought killing

people was easier and then liked that had made him important enough that he could drink all day. Like that's my feel for John C. Woods. Yeah. Some of those instincts I can relate to. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

It's a fascinating tale and it's as close to getting what they deserved as these guys could have gotten. They certainly didn't deserve to be executed by a hangman who cared deeply about his craft. No, but they did get... Yeah. The special trapdoors. I love that touch. Yeah.

Yeah. And I... It's one of those things. I don't know if it's true that he designed the trapdoor specifically to hit people's faces on the way down, but if you look at pictures of these guys' corpses, there's clear pictures of all of their bodies immediately after execution because it was part of the legal documentation and they all busted their faces open on that fucking trapdoor. Yes.

Yeah. It kind of rules. I'm normally not... I think it's fucked up when people talk about wanting prisoners in jails to get raped or whatever because that's not why we should have a just... But these guys are Nazis. I'm okay with them getting hit in the face one extra time on the way down. I'm not gonna consider that a miscarriage of justice.

I think it's kind of fine. I think it's kind of fine. So yeah, I feel like we could all use a good story of terrible people having something horrible happen to them. I love this. I have a quick question. Sure. So I never think... I always think about the Hitler stuff in World War II and then I never

think about Germany's government right after, but this has made me think about that. So did we install who we thought should be the leaders? Did the U.S. and Britain and the leading country... did the Allied countries do that? Or how did their new leadership form? Well, I mean, it was not an immediate process. Germany was split between East and West and the Soviets controlled East Berlin and there was a East German state that was set up with initially Soviet backing. It wasn't like a complete satellite state or anything like it had.

Actually one of the things that they'll point out is that the East German security apparatus, their secret police were actually better than the Soviet secret police because Germans are just good at that sort of thing. But so there was the East German state that was like a communist state in East Germany and then there was West Germany and Berlin was split right down the middle. And West Germany was sort of controlled by the Allies for a while after the war and then gradually set up to have its own democratic elections and government and stuff. And we just made sure there wasn't one of these horrible people in that role.

Well, I mean, kind of from the beginning of the German federal republic, like the current German state that exists, one of their rules is that you can't be a fucking Nazi. Like you can't have swastikas, you can't display things like they're... The people who wound up like running for office and stuff for the most part were folks who'd been like, a lot of them were folks who'd been like in the early stages of folks who'd been like persecuted by the Nazis, who'd been like left-wing activists and stuff in the pre-Nazi period. Yeah, some folks like that, like there's some sketchy stuff that happened too, but kind

of a lot of the Nazi, like the actual people who wanted to do Nazi shit either died during the war or fled the country or afterwards like new enough to keep their heads down. I'm not competent to go into like deep detail about like how the German republic was sort of established post-World War II, but it was like a gradual process of us running things until we felt like things were rebuilt enough and set up enough that like they could start having elections and self-governing and like even after the point at which they became an independent state, there was throughout a lot of the Cold War like a huge US and British military presence in Germany, they were effectively an occupied country and there's

still US military bases in Germany right now. Obviously, Germany is a fully independent country now and they have their own military. But it's also like one of the like the Bunswehr, the current modern German military. Some people would describe as kind of a laughing stock. Laughing stock's not fair, but it's not very large and it's not very capable. And some of that's pretty purposeful. Like I think there was a reticence for Germany to have a large military ever again after World War II and that's starting to change in part because of like Russian aggression

in Ukraine and this understanding that like the German, the Bunswehr and like the EU's military for like they don't have very many tanks, like they don't have a super capable. So like there's, I think there's some people talking about the fact that that may have to change. I think it's understandable for there to always be reticence for the rest of the future of Germany ever having a large military again. Totally. But the reason that I asked was because leadership wise seems like it did work out, you know,

like they have. Oh yeah, no, no. Absolutely. They have had good leaders since then. Hugely. Hugely. If you're looking at like this, the great successes of international like government and particularly even of US foreign policy, like I'm not a give the US credit for a lot

of things guy, but the Marshall plan, which is the plan by which we rebuilt most of Europe and Germany was a huge success. And both the occupation of Germany and the occupation of Japan post war were huge successes because both nations have turned into very prosperous countries where people have a fairly high degree of personal freedom and seem to be relatively, if you're looking at the grand scheme of societies in the world, both are doing all right. Like if you compare that to Imperial Japan or Nazi Germany, yeah, you have to look at the rebuilding of both countries is a pretty significant success.

Way to go, America. Good job. Well, it was a lot of people. It's a shame we didn't again, learned nothing from it because we never, we never did anything like that again. Not competently like you can contrast like what happened with the attempted rebuilding of Iraq and Afghanistan to what happened in Germany and Japan and it's very unpleasant. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, fun tales. Not good, America. Okay. That was fun. Yeah.

You know. Yeah. Yeah. It is nice to go back to these stories of like a time when you could be proud of America, like that time we had that drunken hobo execute all those Nazis, like, ah, that makes me just want to like sing the Star Spangled Banner, salute a flag. I'm feeling very patriotic. Yes.

Yeah. Yeah. I can't wait for listeners to see what this guy looks like. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Show her a picture. I did. Oh, I did.

She showed me a few. Yeah. I was like. Exactly like him. I got to say, you guys, one of my favorite parts of the show is Googling the bad guys and being like, oh yeah, that looks like a piece of shit. Never fails. Yeah.

Yeah. Oh, he's amazing. Well, you got any pluggables to plug as we, we sail out on a river of patriotism? Well, the podcast, you guys, Private Parts Unknown, we just did a two-part series from Mexico City, one episode about masculinity and then an episode with some amazing artists that are kind of fucking with a binary and yeah, I'm really proud of them. So check them out, Private Parts Unknown, wherever you get podcasts. So check out Private Parts Unknown.

Think about Private Parts when you think of not, nope, nope, nope. That's not a good way to lead people into this. No. Boy, Sophie, I am not in a good place right now. I am just spinning out into control. We have a website, BehindTheBastards.com. I have a social media at I write okay. We have Instagram and a Twitter at At Bastards Pod and we have a desire for you to, sometimes

the world needs an unshowered Nazi killing hobo and if that's you, shit, I don't really know where to go with this. Sometimes the world gets what it needs. This is, yeah. Sometimes the world gets what it needs. All right. Well, the episode's over. All right.

Go, go home, everybody. Well, you're probably home or in your car or pooping. Keep doing what you're doing. Robert, Robert. The episode's over. Yeah. Yeah. Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations.

In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Alphabet Boys told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. As you know, Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut.

That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know. Because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world.

Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.