André Obrecht

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André Obrecht was the official executioner of France from 1951 until 1976.

Born in Paris on August 9, 1899, he was the nephew of the chief executioner Anatole Deibler. He only learned about his uncle's job at ten, when a bunch of postcards depicting an execution were published in September 1909. As he had lost his own son, who was born only one month after Obrecht, Deibler had a father-like relationship with young André, and the affection between the two men never stopped.

Obrecht entered the executioners' team on April 4, 1922, as second assistant: by day, he worked in a factory, as a machine operator. He remained at this place until 1939, when Anatole Deibler died. It was his cousin, Jules-Henri Desfourneaux, who succeeded to Deibler. André took Desfourneaux's former place as first assistant.

But Obrecht and Desfourneaux disliked each other: Obrecht thought his cousin was too slow and a real suck-up. In late 1943, after having executed a dozen of resistants, unfairly condemned, Obrecht and his colleagues and friends, the Martin brothers, quit. Obrecht came back in 1945, but his hatred of his cousin had terribly grown up. After an execution in 1947, the cousins fought and Obrecht decided, for the second time, to quit.

When Desfourneaux died in 1951, Obrecht wrote to the ministry of Justice, proposing his candidature to became chief executioner. He was agreed and, on November 1, 1951, he was officially nominated. On November 13, in Marseilles, he executed his first condemned, cop killer Marcel Ythier.

As time passed by, the number of executions decreased. In the early '70s, Obrecht learned he had Parkinson's disease. Though his health was quite bad, he guillotined four men: Roger Bontems and Claude Buffet in Paris, on November 28, 1972 (murder of a nurse and a jail warden), Ali Benyanès in Marseilles, on May 12, 1973 (murder of a 8-year old girl during a hold-up) and finally, in Marseilles too, Christian Ranucci on July 28, 1976 (kidnapping and murder of a young girl; many think Ranucci was in fact innocent).

On September 30, 1976, Obrecht definitely quit his strange job. The very next day, his title was handed to the final executioner in France, Marcel Chevalier, who was his nephew and assistant since 1958.

Obrecht died on July 30, 1985 in a hospital of Nice. Four years later, reporter Jean Ker, who interviewed him many times, released a book called "Le Carnet noir du bourreau" (Executioners' black diary), which was his biography, written at the first person of singular. Obrecht left an image of himself as a normal guy, quite authoritative at work, a real heart-breaker and, more than anything else, lonely because of his job.