Johann Reichhart

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Johann Reichhart (29 April 1893 – 26 April 1972) was a German executioner. He kept detailed records of his work which amounted to 3,165 executions. ^[1]

[edit] Biography

Johann Reichhart was born in Wichenbach near Wörth an der Donau into a "dynasty" of executioners going back eight generations^[2] to the mid-eighteenth century which included his father Franz Xavier and his brother Michael. His career began in 1924 and spanned the time of the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich. Reichhart executed over 3,000 people, most of them during the period 1939 – 1945 when, according to his own records, 2,876^[2] were put to death. In the latter years the executions were largely from heavy sentences handed down by the Volksgerichtshof (the People's Court) for political crimes such as treason, including Sophie and Hans Scholl of the German resistance movement White Rose. Most of these sentences were carried out by Fallbeil (meaning "drop hatchet"), a shorter, largely metal re-designed German version of the French guillotine.

Towards the end of the war with the allied armies closing in, he claimed during questioning, to have disposed of his own mobile fallbeil in a river.

Following VE Day, Reichhart was not tried for carrying out his duty of judicial executioner, but was employed by the Occupation Authorities until the end of May, 1946, to help execute 156 Nazi war criminals at Landsberg am Lech by hanging. He cooperated with Allied chief-executioner Master Sergeant John C. Woods in the preparations for further executions of those found guilty and sentenced to death at the Nuremberg Trials^[3][4].

Reichhart is generally considered to have carried out more executions than any other practitioner, certainly in modern times. During his service it was characteristic that he sought to accelerate the time taken during an execution and to make the suffering of the condemned as swift as possible.

In view of this aim, he was instrumental in removing the tilting body board of the fallbeil and relying on a fixed bench to which the condemned were physically restrained by two assistant executioners, thus removing the time consuming act of buckling straps around the condemned's body. This shortened the elapsed time of the decapitation to only three or four seconds.

Additionally, and mainly owing to the large batch numbers he was required to execute consecutively following the assassination attempt on Adolf Hitler, he initiated a system whereby the knife of the fallbeil was only partially raised between each execution thereby removing the time consuming need to shackle the lifting cable to the knife assembly after its usual free-fall descent. Once the condemned was in position, the cable-winch ratchet would be disengaged with the knife just sufficiently high enough to fall, still attached to its cable, and accomplish a clean decapitation.

Reichhart's office made him a lonely and disliked person, even after abolition of the death penalty in West Germany in 1949. His marriage failed, and his son Hans committed suicide in 1950 due to the association with his father's previous profession.

When, in 1963 there were public demands, during a series of taxi driver murders, for the re-introduction of the death penalty in West Germany, Reichhart was vocal in his support for this legislation. He also maintained that the preferred method should be the Fallbeil as it was the fastest and cleanest method of execution.

Reichhart died in Dorfen near Erding in 1972.

[edit] Notes

[edit] References

Bois de Justice - Information on both the Fallbeil and Guillotine