Forbidden History - The Curse of Hitler’s Executioner

Episode Date: September 5, 2024

Johann Reichhart was a German state executioner who is reported to have killed around 3,000 people during WWII. Reichhart went from dispatching enemies of the Nazis, many of whom were resisting National Socialism, to executing Nazi war criminals…   Cast List: Jamie Theakston: Investigative Reporter Richard Felix: A historian and lecturer specialising in local and paranormal history Dr. Linda Papadopoulos: Author & Psychologist Andrew Gough: Writer, presenter and editor of The Heretic Magazine  Guy Walters: A British author, historian, and journalist who has written several books on WWII. As a journalist for The Times, he writes on historical topics for the national press. Lynn Picknett: Historian and researcher specialising in exposing historical conspiracies. She is also the co-author of several notable works Enno Muller: Berlin Bunker Owner Helen Fry: Author & Historian Fritz Lustig: Former ‘Listener’ at Latimer House Eric Meyers: Narrator Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Forbidden History Podcast. This program is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. It contains mature adult themes. Listener discretion is advised. Johann Reichard was the most famous executioner in Nazi Germany. In a career which spanned just over 20 years, it was said that he put more than 3,000 people to death using a guillotine. Then, in a bizarre twist of fate, at the end of World War II,

Instead of being sent away to a life in prison, he was used by the Allies to execute Nazi war criminals. But who was Reichart? What drove him to assassinate so many people in record time? And what part did a top-secret country manner, called Latimer House, play in prizing highly classified information from top Nazi officials? Johann Reichert was the last great executioner of the modern era. He'd killed about 3,000 enemies of the state. Hitler must have loved this guy.

The German guillotine was quick and efficient. There was a bench. You were literally dragged, placed on the bench, head through and off. It was so dehumanizing, so depersonalized. This man must have not seen his victims as people, but as things to be gotten rid of in as efficient way as possible. efficient way as possible. He could pride himself that the person would come in and be dead within four seconds.

He was a truly professional executioner. Today, we associate the guillotine with the brutality of the French Revolution, when over 16,000 men and women were executed by the device. However, the Nazis were equally devoted to it. They are thought to have beheaded almost as many victims during their 12 years in power. here at Plotsenzi Prison in Berlin, where many enemies of the German state were executed. In the olden days, executions had been done with a sword for beheading, hanging with a rope, broken on the wheel.

But in 1853, the Germans took on the guillotine, which of course had been in France since the 1790s. But being Germans, of course, they adapted it and revolutionized it, and it became the most efficient form of execution ever devised anywhere in the world. With any dictatorship, the most important thing is fear, and not fear necessarily the dictator, but fear of the people around you. And the thing that all of these dictators do

is they make you feel that you can't rely on each other, that someone's always out to get you, that the people closest to you, and in fact, that's what ends up happening. happening. There's so many executions because, you know, I can say something in, you know, I don't know, in the heat of the moment that I think what Hitler's doing is wrong. But if I've said it and you've heard it and you point in me, well, then that's all it takes. The most infamous Nazi executioner was a man called Johann Reichert. He was born in Bavaria

in Southeast Germany in 1893 to a family of professional executioners, which went back eight generations. His own career started in 1924 and went right up to the end of World War II as the premier executioner for the Nazis. He traveled across the country, taking his guillotine with him, dressed formally in a dark top hat and jacket with white gloves. It's reported that he executed over 3,000 people in total, most of them during the war period of 1939 to 19. 1945. Reichart came from a family who had been in the execution trade for generations. And a family, as well as executing people, were also knackers, which is the word used for people

who are dismembering animals that are unfit for human consumption. So you have this equation between, you know, just killing a human being or killing an animal. It's all the same to the Reichart family. They're just in butchering animals and humans. Reinhardt executed whoever he was told to, and these are the people who received the harshest sentences from the people's court. Political dissidents, those who were suspected of anti-war protest, those who were speaking out in the radio about the government. It's really anyone that stood in the way of the Third Reich doing what they wanted to do. That's who he was killing.

Reichhardt executed enemies of the party. He believed that this party was going to take Germany forward, that they were doing good work. would work, so anyone that was a threat to that was the person that he killed. And it didn't discriminate between male or female or young or old, educated, uneducated. This was just about whether you're in the in-group or the out-group, people that I think are of value or people that I devalue completely. Each beheading followed the exact same procedure. The accused is pushed into the garrishly lit execution chamber. In front of them is a

smartly dressed man in a frock coat and top hat, Johann Reichardt. In the center of the room is the guillotine, attached to which were buckles and straps. And rising above, hanging menacingly high, is a huge silvery black blade. Within a few moments, the condemned person is bound face down on the guillotine and a steel rod is pressed onto their back. With their face looking into a basket, their nostrils detect the smell of dried blood over the stench of disinfectant and sawdust. He will have seen his trade, not as the gruesome thing that it was, but actually is something to be done as effectively and as efficiently as possible.

He actually adapted the guillotine so that it could be transported. They would literally have a smaller guillotine with a small guillotine. just a heavier blade on the back of a truck, and he would stop in places and get people onto this truck and then kill them, one after the other. The thing about Reichart was he was an obsessive executioner, and he was determined to make his mark. Being a good German, he was all for efficiency.

And basically, the idea was the least mess, the fastest execution is great. Rikart was said to be a Dowerman, who rarely smiled or showed any emotion as he went about doing his job. And at the end of the war, it was reported that he tossed his famous guillotine into a river in shame. Why he did this isn't clear, but many suspect that he wanted to cover up his violent and brutal career. Richard Felix, a historian who runs Darby Jail in England, is an expert on crime and punishment in the 19th and 20th centuries.

He has built an exact replica of Reichart's guillotine. Falbile, that's German for drop hatchet. It's a version of the guillotine, but a precision version created by the Germans, made of oak and metal, much more efficient than any guillotine ever knew how to be. Johann Reichhardt, the German executioner, designed this and made it probably the most efficient form of executioner. execution ever created. All that happened was that the blade was wound to the top in preparation. The delinquent was then dragged out of here by the two assistants and strapped onto the bascule. This was then tilted forward and he was then slid all the way through there.

Reichhardt then dropped the lunette, trapping the neck, and then all was ready. The judge then came forward and said, Henke, Alfredenso their job. Executioner, perform your task. And at that point, he pulled the lever, and down came the blade, and the head was off. It's the most efficient form of execution ever created. Reichartt was a utilitarian in every sense of the word, so he'd show up. and he'd get the job done. There was no frills.

There was, you know, no smiling or apologising. At the same token, there was no, you know, jeering or swearing or bullying. He was there to do a job. And in his case, there was almost a robotic, you know, nature to what he was doing. He would, you know, everyone was more or less the same. And it was just about getting through it as quickly and as effectively as possible. One of the things that strikes you when you look at photographs of Breikar, going about his desperately sinister business

was not only the way he was dressed like a very particular grotesque ringmaster of the circus, but also his face showed absolutely no emotion. It was as if it'd been white clean. It was actually as if he was in the zone of an executioner's mind, whatever that might be. Reichart dressed like an undertaker. It's very funereal.

And I think it's there to act as a kind of barrier between him and the victim. It's saying, I am simply an anonymous person. And we see it today with ISIS, how the executioner in these awful, awful videos that ISIS put out, is always dressed in a specific way. It's not there to create terror, I suggest. It's there to create formality.

What made Reichark really effective is his innovation. He abandoned the old French, all-wood and guillotine and created his own, smaller. shorter, eight foot high, heavy blade. So boom, the head's chopped off. There's a special funnel that takes the blood out in front where there's sawdust that absorbs it.

He has all this innovation. He had to kill more people faster than anyone ever before. Rye shot had the bascule removed. No more strapping you on. No more wriggling about. You were dragged out by the two assistant executioners, brought forward, slid straight onto him. That drop and the blade dropped.

He could get someone executed in three seconds, and he could get this machine reloaded with another body and the blade down in 30 seconds. It is often forgotten that when the Nazis took office, they were initially cautious about using the death penalty. Their grip on power was not as firm as it would come to be, and they were aware that public opinion might turn against them if they executed too many of their own citizens.

However, in October 1936, acting on the advice of his Justice Minister, Franz Goetner, Hitler decided that the guillotine should be Nazi Germany's preferred method of execution. Hitler ordered 20 fulviles to be built and put around the prisons in Germany. They were made smaller than the guillotine so they could fit inside small rooms with low ceilings, obviously prisons, but when Reichhardt actually had to travel from one prison to another prison to do the executions, legend has it that he actually had a portable foulbile mounted on the back of a van. The delinquent was actually dragged to the back of the van and beheaded on the back of it. Now that's quick. At the peak of Reichhart's professional career,

he was executing tens of people a day. And at the government, would order this bell to be run. And so all the prisoners would know when this bell was ringing that an execution was taking place. And when the bell stops, the execution was over, and one of their prisoners was dead. And it was a fate that anybody in that prison, especially during the Nazi regime,

knew that they too could face. They could be the person causing that bell to ring and then to stop. One of Johann Reichardt's most famous victims was a young girl called Sophie Shaw. She was a 21-year-old opponent of the Nazi regime who was beheaded on February 22, 1943. Her crime was to have been a leading member of the White Rose movement, which had peacefully resisted the regime by riding anti-Nazi leaflets and distributing them around university students in Munich.

At 5 p.m. that day, she was led from her cell to a small building, which contained the guillotine and strapped the gun. down. Within seconds, the young woman's head lay in a bloody basket. They were arrested by the Gestapo handing out anti-Nazi leaflets and basically taken to the so-called People's Court. This was after being interrogated for four days by the Gestapo, not fun. And then they were handed over to Johann Reichart for execution. Sophie Scholl has become one of the key figures that we associate with resistance to the Nazi regime.

She was, of course, this incredibly tragic figure because she was betrayed, she was captured, and she was executed, and she was executed by Reichhardt. And there must have been something crossing through his mind as he's taking this sort of young woman in her 20s onto his contraption, and he's chopping her head off. It's estimated that some 16,500 people were killed by the Nazi. using a guillotine, most of them between 1939 and 1945.

As a result, executioners like Reichhardt became wealthy. He was paid a basic salary of 3,000 Reichmarks a year and received an extra 65 rake marks bonus per execution. In the end, he amassed over 200,000 rikmarks, worth well over $1 million today. Being an executioner in Germany was a well-paid job, and of course the more people you're executing, the more money you're going to earn. So when he starts off, he's earning 3,000 Reichs marks a year, which is a decent kind of lower middle-class wage. By the time the Nazis come into power and during the war, and as the insanity and madness of the regime and the murderousnesses of the regime comes into full effect, his income's gone up to 36,000 rights marks a year, which makes him a very much. very wealthy man.

The interesting thing is that Reichardt was killing enemies of the state faster than anyone ever had, and he wasn't phased by that. You can argue that it was the most humane thing he could do is just get on with it, kill him quick, chop the head off, next, take away that anxiety. But in reality, he's getting paid.

He's a professional killer, and he's making a lot of money doing it. How and where did Reichhart and other important Nazis sheltered during the final months of World War II? How did the Allies secretly eavesdrop on German commanders during the war? And what happened when Reichart was eventually captured following the surrender of the Nazis? Johann Reichart was the most famous executioner in Nazi Germany.

In a career which spanned just over 20 years, it was said that he put more than 3,000 people to death, using a guillotine, which he specially adapted for maximum killing speed. As if having your relative executed by Reichhardt and the Nazi state wasn't appalling enough, the family would then receive a bill from the state for the cost of the execution. It would have on it the cost of Reichart's fees on 600 Reich marks. You would have, you'd be invoiced all the processing costs. And also, most awful of all, you'd also be inviced 12 Phenix for the cost of the stamp, which was used to pay for the invoice to be posted to you.

So in fact, Reichart wasn't paid for. by the state. He wasn't paid for by taxpayers' money. He was paid for by the people who he was killing. In the final months of World War II, Berlin was under constant air bombardment from the Allies. And yet Reichart continued to carry out his executions in and around the capital. As a result, he spent long periods of time alongside other top Nazi officials in underground bunkers as the city was destroyed above them. Most of the city has been redeveloped, and many of the old Nazi buildings and structures have been destroyed. Hitler's famous Fura bunker has been filled with cement and built over with a housing estate. But there are

a couple of military bunkers left, which you can still enter. Jamie Thiexton has been granted special access to a bunker found in the Berlin's suburbs, which was used by senior Nazi officers, and it said, Johann Reichart himself. So, we have to go two floors down now. Then our feet will be six meter under Berlin. So how many floors does it go down? Two floors down and two floors up, so five floors in total, and about six thousand five five hundred square meter.

So tell me who would have been. been down here in this bunker? It was supposed only for the high-ranking German officers and their families. But when the Russians were getting on Berlin and into Berlin, all the Germans were pouring into the bunker and then were up to 14,000 people in here instead of the 3,500 who should be in this bunker. So it was only designed for 3,500 people and yet there would have been up to 14,000 people. Yes, and it was designed for one to two hours for one air race. for one air raid, but at the end they stayed in here for about one week, day and night.

And so do they have, like, kitchens and bathrooms down here? Not kitchens, but bathrooms. Some of the toilets are missing now, but the walls were just gray, and there was no collar on the wall or anything like that. It was really simple. But it feels more like a prison rather than a place where a high-ranking Nazi officials would have come. Yes, but it was a time

when they realized that it was not going very well and so it was more important to be safe than being on a shiny nice place like the furor bunker where it was very nice while here they had to build it in like 10 months so it was yeah very raw. Berlin was was in turmoil and was being smashed to pieces and so something that was built for high-ranking German officers to shelter in, all of a sudden, could well have ended up with disease-ridden people down there. The conditions were awful, there was no decoration, the sanitation was poor, the lighting was poor, and it was a very basic air raid shelter. Without the luxuries found in Hitler's bunker, this bare, damp and disease-ridden shelter

would have made life very uncomfortable to survive in, partly fitting for high-ranking officials, like Johann Reichart. So hang on, so this thing here, this provided the power for the entire bunker, for all the people living down here. Yes, but only when the power from outside was cut off. There were only like five, six light bulbs powered in one floor and the ventilation system that you could have some air to breath. But it was really only for emergency. So this would pump all the air around the bunker. So without this, everyone, what, they would have died down here?

Yes. Yes, within a few days. days. These poor guys would spend hours, sometimes days in the pitch black. Down there with people choking, vomiting, urinating, defecating. It must have been hell on earth. Did they have a sanatorium down here? No, they just died. There were some doctors around who tried to help, but it was not organized. They didn't have any equipment, no medicine. and so on. So they tried their best, but basically, if you get ill, you died, and you could move dead bodies around with this.

They took out the dead on these? They wanted to, but it was so crowded that they couldn't take them out. It was like on a rock concert. You were pushing them up, and then just moving them over your head. Carried the dead people over their heads. Through the exit, then they piled them up, and when there was a breaking in the bombings, they just throw them out. The whole of Berlin was literally ridden with rats and disease, cholera, they were taking this down into the bunker with them. People were dying in there, not of bombing, but of disease, and were literally dragged

out and thrown outside and the doors slammed shut again. It's certainly a dreadful, dreadful place and gives the most awful atmosphere of, I think, despair. Following the surrender of the Nazis in 1945, Reichart was arrested and imprisoned in Lans prison in southern Germany. In a bizarre twist, he was offered a deal by the Allies. Help us execute Nazi war criminals or spend the rest of your life behind bars.

He accepted and put 156 Nazi war criminals to death by hanging. Instead of sending him to prison immediately, they say, well, look, you've got a choice. We'll either put you away, or you can come and work for us. come and work for us. And so he then becomes an executioner for the people that had ordered all of those executions over all those years. It shows how Wrightcott has this kind of totally absent moral compass in which he's willing

to execute people for whoever. You could also argue, of course, that this is the allies being incredibly sort of brutal and nasty thinking, and thinking, look, well, hang on a minute, it's your own man killing you now. This is how much power we have over you. When you think about it from the Allies perspective, they're not skilled at executions. They haven't been doing executions. So they're going to latch on to Reichard.

Of course they are, because he's a professional. But it's also this subtle sort of two fingers to the Germans. So we're going to have your own, you know, famous executioner kill you. And imagine the revenge, the psychological warfare that that must have entailed. It's not widely known, but a lot of the names of the German officer, who were hung by Reichart after the war, came out of a super-secret bugging operation that took place at a country estate just outside London,

Latimer House. It was run by MI5 and MI6, under the obscure name Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Unit, and it secretly bugged the conversations of dozens of leading Nazi generals. The thing about Latte's replace is that it is not your ordinary prisoner of war camp. It's more of a place of refuge.

Here you have captured German officers who are given complete freedom to walk around the luxurious grounds. Why were the British allowing that to happen? Well the rooms are bugged, the bars are bugged, and because you're so comfortable, the war has ended, they could just let their guard down and relax. But the information that the British garnished was incredible. They find out about all sorts of of different strategies and secrets and technologies, it was a goldmine and a brilliant approach to interrogation. What's incriminating is the fact that all these German generals are talking about some of the crimes that they themselves are done

or crimes they've heard of. This, of course, is massively important evidence for the Allied war crime units. And some of the evidence gathered was then used in trials or to find the guilty men. So of course, who's then carrying out some of the exes the people in those trials, it's Reichardt. British journalist Jamie Thiexton is on the trail of the career of executioner Johann Reichard.

When he starts to work for the Allies after the war, secrets and information gleaned from the Latimer House operation gave Reichard a whole new list of Nazis to terminate. Jamie meets historian and author Helen Fry, who is an expert on what went on here at Latimer house and the intelligence and secrets gathered from its Nazi occupants. To give an idea of the sheer volume of the intelligence that was gathered across these centres, there were 100,000 transcripts for the duration of the war time, taken from bug conversations of around 10,000 German prisoners of war. So a vast mass of intelligence that was gathered that fed into the war effort. So would they have kept prisoners down there?

Some of the die-hard Nazis, yes, in isolation for a day or so. One of those die-hard Nazis was Hitler's Deputy Fuhrer, Rudolf Hess, who was taken prisoner by the Allies in 1941. So there were rumours that Hess was brought to Latimer House for a few days. He was allegedly held overnight before they took him up to the comfort of upstairs. It would have been the die-hard Nazis, those that needed a bit, you know, to be more cooperative. they may have held them in isolation, disorientate them,

and hope that they would then upstairs be more amenable in interrogation. Near the end of the war, a place called Latimer House was where high-ranking German generals that had been captured were, when I say imprisoned, were kept a little bit more like house arrest, to be honest with,

and there was a reason for it. They had quite a bit of freedom inside the place. They had their own officers. mess and they were allowed to talk to each other and the whole place was bugged. This was beyond top secret. I mean, this was only declassified in the last decade. And in fact, one of Kendricks, the commanding officer Kendricks, intelligence officers, when he started here, was told on his first day, what is going on here is as top secret as anywhere in the country. And his pistol was slid across the desk and he said to him,

If you ever betray what goes on here, then you do the decent thing. And if you don't, I will. The documents don't tell us precisely who was held here, but we know they had special areas for die-hard Nazis, uncooperative prisoners, perhaps holding them in isolation for a day, just to kind of break their will of resistance, really. And where did they do the listening from? Well, the listening wasn't here.

It was in a separate, specially constructed block on the other side of the site. So what's fascinating is you have layers of secrecy. And those that worked in the bugging operation didn't necessarily know what was going on on this side of the site. The Allies obviously try and extract information. They come up with this genius idea

to take a bunch of these German generals and put them up in a stately home and say, you know, we've got to keep you here for a few days until, you know, you have these other official meetings so we can gather intelligence. And they just, you know, apply them with, you know, they're...

There's good food there and there's drink and there's cigars and they just sit back, bug the place and listen to what they say. How important was the intelligence that they gathered? Well, at this site, the prisoners began to talk about V1, the doodle bug, and eventually the V2, the rocket program, Hitler's secret weapons. And that enabled Churchill to Order Operation Crossbow, which was the bombing of Penedimunda, which was the secret weapon development site. And that all came from information that was gleaned from the prisoners that were held here?

Here and at the two sister sites of Trent Park and Wilton Park, but also lots of snippets of information which fed into the overall intelligence network. And there was very little we didn't know about Nazi Germany. So as far as I understand it then, the sort of lower ranking prisoners were kept in the cells like this, whereas upstairs in these houses, the higher ranked officers were wind of, wind and dined. Is that right? Yes, exactly. It was understanding the psyche of your enemy, if you like. And if you treat them well, because don't forget they thought they could still win the war,

if you treat them well, then they will start spilling the beans, they will start talking to each other when they think no one's listening and start bragging about their war and particularly about the technology, boasting that Germany had better technology and they were going to still win the war. And of course, little realizing that the walls had ears in a sense and everything was being picked up and recorded. They're all held in this beautiful British country house, North London, and they're made to feel very relaxed. So they're giving drinks and brandies and cigars

and nice palatial surroundings that they feel befits their status as very, very senior officers. And so, of course, they relax, unaware of the fact that all the rooms have got microphones in them. And you have a lot of former German refugees, you know, who can obviously speak and understand German, listening away transcribing all these conversations. The most secret part of Latimer House was the bugging and surveillance done on its German

prisoners from the so-called M-room. Fritz Lustig was one of a small team of secret listeners who operated from a hut in the grounds of the house. Jamie met him to find out just what a secret listener actually listened to. My role at Lathema House was secretly to listen to the conversations of German prisoners of war who had been selected specially to be sent here because it was expected that they provide certain important information to the British authorities. Give us an idea of the kind of military secrets that were given up during that time.

Well, the military secrets they talked about would be either technical, from safe dupot crews or saved ex-German Luftwaffe pilots. And they would talk, for instance, about new technical developments fitted to their aeroplanes, which of course it was very important for the British to know. And the more details they gave, the more we recorded them, and there were microphones in the trees and the bushes and so on.

So they could be listened to wherever they were. wherever they were. In this really lavish and comfortable setting, the information that the British get from these officers is a gold mine. They get names. They're almost privado where one is trying to one up the other, well, I know about this operation and this person is in charge. It was all about the names.

What did the British do? They took these names and they went and they got those people. And guess what? Reichart would actually execute them. All of these generals were trained how to withstand but they felt absolutely safe. They're in this stately home. They're waiting for their interrogation, as it were.

So they're sitting around just sharing stories from the field, talking about who they killed, talking about what their colonels and their generals did. And they were able, the Allies, to extract so much information from this and use it against them that it was absolute genius. Did a prisoner ever find a bugging device? As far as I know, the prisoners never found the bugging devices. Some of them were most, as we said, security conscious, and they would turn on the water taps

when they were talking about something secret. But the microphones were of very high quality, and usually we could even understand what they were saying when the water was running. It sounds a little bit like the Big Brother House. Well, yes, it was. So there they were quite happily bragging about what they'd done, telling each other about who they'd done it.

to, how they'd done it, who they'd killed. The guys were listening to their bugs and then passing back to the intelligence services. And what they were doing was building a case against themselves and creating more necks for Reichhardt's noose. It's incredible to think that information gleaned from the spying on top Nazi generals in this building helped to convict others of war crimes, convictions that led many to be executed. by Johann Reichhardt himself back in Germany. We know Reichhardt executed 3,000 people

and he basically showed no remorse. The only remorse he ever showed was when the Allies got him to execute his own and then he became troubled. Did he feel for these people or was that was his job to actually hang the people that he believed in, that had been his bosses,

the Nazis. He was a highly efficient bringer of death. It has to take a very unique kind of person that can go home at night after being surrounded by that much pain and fear and misery and be able to sleep and eat and get up the next morning and do the same again. At the end of his life, Johann Reichart was a lonely and disliked person. His marriage had failed. And one of his sons, Hans, committed suicide in 1950 due to his association with his father's profession.

But he seems to have had something of a conversion in his old age. When in 1963, there were public demands during a series of taxi driver murders for the reintroduction of the death penalty in West Germany. Incredibly, given his long career, Reichart spoke out against capital puny. He died alone in a nursing home in Dorfin, Germany, in 1972, age 79.