The Bastard Who Executed The Top Nazis

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Hello Internet, I'm Robert Evans, hosted Behind the Bastards, and
I still don't know how to introduce my podcast now
that we're transitioning to a new introduction. But that doesn't
matter because today we have a rip roaring episode about
a terrible person from history and helping me to tell
that tale. Will be my guest today, Courtney Kozak, co

(00:24):
host of the Private Parts Unknown podcast, which is also
co hosted by Sophia Alexandria, are our frequent guest. Uh, Courtney,
how are you feeling today? I'm excited to be here, Robert,
thank you for having me indulging my bastard worship. Now
what bastards do you mostly worship? You know, I got

(00:47):
into it. I think I got into it through the
standard gateway of a good old Hitler worship. Good old Hitler. Yeah,
we all love us a Hitler. Yeah. Yeah, And then
I mostly worship through your show. That's my Yeah. Well
who's okay? Well who's been? If who's who's been your
favorite bastard we've covered recently? You know, I am so

(01:11):
freaked out about climate change? So what was? Yes, Yeah,
that was. He's a real piece of ship. He is
he's ruining us. Well, today we have a lighthearted episode, um,
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 um who was a terrible

(01:32):
hangman um, 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 like
a Dexter, Yeah, totally, yeah, if Dexter was like known
by his incompetence rather than his hypercompetence, totally. Yeah. I

(01:58):
don't think this guy meant to do most to 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? I think I think it's relentless self confidence.
Ah yeah, that makes I think all of the worst

(02:21):
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 metal.
I you know, yeah, maybe, I don't know. I do
think that that is one of the one of the
One of the consequences of are are focusing on people's

(02:45):
self esteem is that all of the worst people in
history had had great self esteem. Um. You know, Hitler
was a guy who really believed in himself and his
ability to change the world. It's like if you you
look at all of those like like new age memes
that get spread on Twitter about like visualizing your future
and like making it happen, and like how you can
you can accomplish anything if you set your mind to it.

(03:07):
And it's like that's great when you're thinking about like
your friend who wants to like open up her own
like h or whatever, yoga studio, who wants to start
a bar, But like there's also Hitler's out there, yeah, um,
and they have great follow through. Um. But you know,

(03:29):
our story today starts when the follow through, uh stops
following through on May seven, 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 we are starting at the end of Nazism today,

(03:50):
which is a nice little change of pace. H Yeah,
what year is it? Yeah? Never came back forty five
May seven. That was the end of the war in
in Europe. Yeah, officially so. In the wake of Germany's defeat,
many of its top Nazis where, of course, while beyond
the reach of justice. Adolf Hitler had of course shot himself.

(04:11):
Joseph Gebels had blown himself and his wife up with
a grenade. Heinrich Himler 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 Herman Gerring, who was the head of the
Liftwaffe and like the former like second in command to
uh to Adolf Hitler, um he got taken alive. Also

(04:34):
taken was Julius Striker, editor of Dear Schirmer and the
man most responsible for shaping the party's early propaganda efforts.
We don't talk about Striker a lot because, like Gebels
became a big name. But Striker was like kind of
the Steve Bannon of the Third Reich, Like he was
the first like propaganda head who like really got like
their messaging and shipped on point. And they kind of

(04:55):
dumped him once they got into power because he was
a huge asshole. Um, but he was. He was real
critical figure and like the Night of Long Knives and
helping to ignite a lot of anti Jewish hatred. So
people wanted him, Like it's good that he got captured,
even though he was kind of out of the picture
for most of the forties 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

(05:17):
so you wouldn't we would you want a guy Like
if someone like in nineteen forty five was like, hey man,
I stopped being a Nazi in nineteen forty Uh, Like
you wouldn't be like, well, all right, you missed the
worst year. You get a pass. I would love to
give people a pass, you know what I mean. If
it's like, if you'll just stop being an asshole, we'll

(05:37):
let you We'll let you go. I mean there's a
point at which that's okay. Like, uh, if you're a
guy who like marches around with a Nazi organization for
a while a couple of years, but you don't like
participate in any attacks, you don't like sell anybody any guns,
you don't kill anybody, and you're like, oh, this is
fucked up and you leave Like fine, I don't, I don't.
I don't want you to uh be like murdered or anything.

(06:01):
But like at the point at which the Holocaust happens,
I feel like the guys who you know, weren't as
active later in the Reich like still fuck you, dude,
Like yeah, you can still pay with your life. And
you know there was an element of this that was
they led a lot of top Nazis off. Actually, like
the prosecute, even of the Nazis that we caught or

(06:24):
who survived the war. Um, the prosecution wasn't particularly thorough. Um. 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. Dr Mangela, the infamous doctor Death, escaped. Um.
But like also like like those are kind of more

(06:45):
famous cases. Um. Have you ever heard of the Eisset scrouping? 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 couple weeks ago. But he's
been living like a regular life in Ohio for like years,
wasn't he a Nazi? Yeah, yeah, I think it was

(07:07):
a concentration camp guard. Usually when you hear about those
guys who made it to a super old age, they
were either concentration cap guards or insets grouping dudes, and
those were like mobile German military units during the invasion
of Russia who just like shot hundreds of tens, like
tens of thousands of people in single actions to death,
like they were the first stage of the Holocaust, and

(07:28):
the vast majority of like 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. Like there's some really crazy stories.
There were even like one or two s S members
who later joined the US military, Like one of them
died fighting in Vietnam. Like it's we didn't prosecute most
of these guys. Hilarious. Yeah, So when you get a

(07:51):
guy like Striker like arrested and tried, like you can say, like, well,
he wasn't really a part of the later parties efforts,
but also like suck him. You gotta get rid of
all these people, like you hat, you gotta punish him
when you can Um, and it was kind of random,
like they chose not to arrest and punish more of
the Einsetz group. And because they only had so many

(08:12):
chairs in the courtroom in Nuremberg, and they didn't want
to like 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 wouldn'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 you build

(08:32):
a bigger court. It's World War two. So also captured
was Field Marshal William Kitel, Hitler's yes man General Um.
During the invasion of Poland, Kitel had issued criminal orders
that had allowed the arrest and execution of Jews and
other civilian noncombatants. While Kitel was not an enthusiastic backer
of the Holocaust, he gave orders that required the Wehrmach

(08:53):
to 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 be in But
he was a Nazi because it was good for his
career and he didn't want to have his soldiers wipe

(09:14):
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 he was that was his job.
He thought thought it was justified by that. So he's
a piece of ship, but in a different way than
like one of the Nazis who's like rapidly champing at
the bit to kill, you know, Jewish people. Like. In
some ways, he's even worse because at least that Nazi

(09:36):
like believes in something right. And Kai tells like, I'm
just not gonna I'm not gonna fight this because I
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 ship for sure. But our our guy,
our main guy, is our is the Steve Bannon comparison, right, Well,
he's he's he's one of them. He's definitely the one

(09:58):
I think is most copable of the guys who get
the two who are most copable in genocide of the
people who are tried at Nuremberg are Julius Stryker and
and Hermann Gerring. When you're talking about like the guys
at the top level of the of the party who
are who are responsible? Now, there were other guys too.
Like one of the people captured was Ernst Calton Brenner. Uh.
He's the man who had succeeded Reinhardt Hydrick, who was

(10:20):
the architect of the Holocaust. Hydrick was assassinated in like
forty two, but he planned the Holocaust uh And Calton
Brenner 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. UM. Another was Hans
Frank uh an o G Nazi, a former member of
the Tool Occult Society and the governor of Poland under

(10:41):
the Nazi regime. Uh 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. UM.
And then you've got Joachim von Ribbentrop, who was Hitler's
diplomatic emissary and like the guy in charge of his

(11:01):
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, like you
got 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,

(11:22):
let's how 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? Yeah? Yeah, a lot of
them went to Brazil, to Argentina, um Bolivia, and in fact,
interestingly enough, um ernst Rome, who was the head of
the brown Shirts before the Nazis came to power. He

(11:44):
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. Um 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. Um. So like that there,

(12:07):
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's wild that's so funny. It's like they're a
band and he's like, Okay, I'm gonna go do my
own thing in Bolivia. Man, this is working out for
me in Germany. And in fact, Ernst Rome is often

(12:28):
called the John Lennon of Nazism and he was shot early. Yeah,
so yeah, it really really actually does check out quite
a lot. So where we are at the start of this,
We've arrested a bunch of top Nazis, uh, and no
one's really sure what to do with them, right, So,

(12:48):
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? Whose laws do you try these
people under? There's no international legal system in a meaningful

(13:08):
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 talked about
this in a recent episode, the rules against using chemical weapons,
but then Italy used chemical weapons on Ethiopia and no

(13:30):
one did anything. It was It's kind of like when
Obama made his redline on Syria. It's like, we're clear,
we don't want people doing this, but what do we
do when they do it? You know? Um, 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,
right because it was the Nazis. But then do you

(13:53):
try them under American law? How 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 they did whatever the funk they wanted,

(14:14):
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 funk that up, the system itself has to
be as legitimate as you can make it, which means
you can't like half asset 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

(14:36):
a really messy question and it's sort of trying 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 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 um. For example,

(14:56):
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 ship 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.

(15:20):
So it's it's complicated. Like, so they put together a
charter for this tribunal to try these guys, um, And
it's specifically outlines that individuals can be punished for their
membership and 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 like gets guys
like Striker and stuff. Um. The charter also establishes that

(15:43):
individuals could be punished for crimes against humanity even if
those crimes had not actually been illegal in the nation
they were committed and at the time. So this is
kind of like, uh, pretty groundbreaking stuff and it's not
something we have a really returned to as a species,
which is kind of a bummer, um, I mean a
little bit after the Bosnian genocides and stuff. But was

(16:04):
everybody on board like internationally with like this is how
it should go down. Yeah, I think for for World
War in the wake of World War two, I think
pretty much everybody was on this is one of those
rare instances where like, I mean, there are some disagreements,
but or like Russia in the US and Great Britain
are all kind of like, we gotta there's got to
be like a big thing that we all do for this,

(16:26):
like it we can't just like it can't just be
one country executing its prisoners or whatever, like that's not enough.
And yeah, so this is like the one time most
of the world agrees on like an like the execution
of international justice. Um. And that's kind of cool. Um. Now,
since uh, the people being prosecuted here a Nazis, it's

(16:49):
not easy to care about like the fact that some
of the things they did would be considered illegal in
like U S courts, like charging people for crimes that
weren't crimes when they committed them. Um. But it is
worth noting that some of the precedent behind the Nuremberg
trial is really unsettling. Um. Charles Weizanski, a federal judge
in the US, initially led the charge against the Nuremberg trials. Uh.

(17:11):
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 fun the Nazis,
But how does that you could do that for anything
in the future. Um, And like that could end in

(17:31):
a really dark place. And he has a point, like
that's concerning right, It's it's something worth thinking about. Aren't
we still wrestling with this stuff like post nine eleven
and 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.

(17:53):
Like back then it was totally like you know, kind
of 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 um,
So like Wizansky, who was the guy who was initially
against having a Nuremberg trial, he actually changes his mind
over the course of the trial because the prosecutors do

(18:13):
such a good job of bringing forward evidence of Nazi
war crimes, and Wizanski decides that even if the methods
used to like create this legal framework, we're kind of
fucked up the principle of international law and needed to
exist to punish crimes against humanity, and it's worth it. Um,
I'm gonna read from something he wrote actually in The
Atlantic in ninety six the reasons for my change that

(18:35):
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 discriminary 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 an
advance of that act a specific criminal law. So he's like,

(18:59):
basically it is it's 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, um 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. Yeah.
I'm giving a lot of background on this because I
think it's interesting. Every met the threshold of egregiousness that

(19:23):
they were like, we we have to do Basically it'd
be worse to do nothing. Yeah. Now, in total, a
hundred and eighty five people were indicted in the Nuremberg trial. Um,
and yeah, it's it's not enough, but it's it's a
good amount. Um. And like most of those people actually
weren't sentenced to death, that were sentenced to like periods

(19:44):
of jail time, and a lot of those sentences were
actually commuted later. It's kind of a fucked up story. Yeah,
a lot of a lot of top Nazis, people who
were like literally ordering mass killings, had like their sentences
committed and went on to die peacefully. Happen to a
ton of them, ar of all super fucked up. Yeah,
you know, there's a bunch of reasons that different things

(20:05):
like that happened. Um, but it it happened a lot. Um.
But twelve top Nazis were sentenced to die by hanging. Um.
So there were twelve of these guys that an international
court said, like, you know, even as like Laxis. We're
being with punishing the Nazis. You motherfucker's like, we can't

(20:25):
let you live. Um, 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

(20:46):
of John C. Woods, America's hangman, and that 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 five, nineteen eleven. We have very little detail
in his early life. One source I found just says,
prior to his induction in the army, he lived in Eureka, Kansas.

(21:08):
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. Uh, 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, h he dropped out after just two

(21:28):
years and he never graduated. So this is 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? Ads
in products and services? Yep, yep. All of the products
and services that support this show our high school graduate.

(21:51):
None of them are college graduates valid victorian. H Well,
that's a little much. I don't know we can afford
valedictorian products. Sofia are any of these products paledictorians? Yeah,
of course the Well I think Sophie's lying, But didn't
you know who party say that everybody gets the first

(22:12):
place model, so everybody. Well, if you trust Sophie, trust
that these products are all valedictorians, I don't we should
really just roll out to adds at this point, adds products.

(22:34):
We're back, all right, So we're talking about John C. Woods,
America's hangman. Now. On December third, nineteen, eighteen 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 U s S. Saratoga,
but almost immediately went a wall and deserted. He was

(22:55):
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 received a
medical board examination. On April twenty, nineteen thirty, they released
this report. The patient, though not intellectually inferior, gives a
history of repeatedly run encounter to authority both before and

(23:16):
since enlistment. Stigmata of degeneration are present, and the patient
frequently bites his fingernails. He has a benign tumor of
the of the soft palate, for which he refuses operation.
His commanding officer and division officers 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

(23:37):
defect for which the service is in no way responsible.
He is not considered a menace to himself or others,
So the Navy diagnoses John with constitutional psychopathic inferiority without psychosis.
This is not a real diagnosis today, um it's kind
of a nonsense term for like he doesn't want to
be in the military. Did they just pick him out?

(24:01):
Were they like, we're gonna know he joined, Yeah, he
joined the military, but for this assessment where they like,
things aren't going right, that's why we're going to give
you this assessment. Well, because he yeah, he he runs
away after five months and he's been like a giant
piece of ship before it. So they're like, what is
wrong with you and you need to take down Yeah. Yeah,

(24:23):
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 him body. He's like a like a nasty,
unshowered mess, and he doesn't do what anyone tells him
to do. Um. And yeah, like they diagnosed him with
constitutional psychopathic inferiority without psychosis UM, which was originally coined

(24:44):
in Germany in the eighteen eighties to describe irredeemable criminals
with antisocial characteristics and in fact, a lot of people
were gassed with this diagnosis under the Nazis UM. But
we just used it to say this guy shouldn't be
in the navy anymore. Uh. And John was discharged, So
that's the end of his Navy career. Um, and you
would think that it would be impossible for him to

(25:04):
rejoin the military when one of the branches has kicked
him out by saying he has a psychopathic inferiority. No
way he gets back in. Oh, of course he gets
back in. Yeah, why not just a different branch. Yeah.
So Woods uh gets kicked out of the Navy for
peek a piece of ship. And he spends the next
few years bumping from job to job and doing very

(25:26):
poorly at all of those jobs. Uh. 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, um, but it was probably super shady given
everything that comes later. Um. He was arrested at one
point for writing a bad check in a nineteen thirty three.
At the age of twenty two and basically out of options,

(25:48):
John Woods joins the Civilian Conservation Corps. You ever heard
of the c c C. Yeah? I feel like that
was a thing. That's not a thing that people would
have joined, like when I was in high school, is it? No? No, no, No,
I don't like this. I mean I think there's yeah,
like this was like a big thing. And during the
New Deal in the thirties. Um, so, like you have

(26:10):
the Great Depression, it fox 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,
like a lot of libraries, all kinds of ship libraries,
all kinds of cool ship. It's one of the coolest
things there government ever did. Uh. And I'm not just

(26:32):
saying that because my grandpa would have starved to death
without it. Um. But John was not a good fit
for the c c c U and he was dishonorably
discharged several weeks later after going a wall and refusing
to do his job. So he loves to go a
little bit of a pattern here. He loves to join
quasi military and military organizations and then leave to paychecks

(26:55):
and I'm out, dude, h yeah, yeah, enough to buy
some cigarette 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 dye maker, but was not particularly good

(27:16):
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 kempt. 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 nineteen forty, he was working as a part time

(27:36):
employee at a feed store in Kansas. So not an
inspiring tale so far for this guy. Now, on December
seven one, Japan made a significant error in judgment and
bombed Pearl Harbor. This led to the U. S getting
into World War Two in pretty short order, and it
led to a bunch of guys getting drafted into that war,

(27:58):
and John C. Woods was one of them. He was
drafted by the U. S Army UH 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. So yeah, the draft, they were just like,
we'll take we'll take anybody we need, all hands on deck. Yeah,

(28:20):
we will take anybody and like, we're not gonna look
into your background too much. A lot of people who
weren't even eighteen managed to join during the draft. God
it was yeah, it was a fun time, real fun time. Now. Uh,
he shouldn't have been able to join any branch of
the Armed Services because he had a dishonorable discharge, But

(28:41):
the d O D just doesn't seem to have noticed.
The Department of Defense just like didn't look into it
at all. It's it's some cool stuff. Now. In nineteen
forty three, John was assigned to Company B of the
thirty seven Engineer Combat Battalion and the fifth Engineer Special Brigade,
and he almost certainly took part in the D Day
land things on Omaha Beach in UM. It's hard to

(29:04):
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 UM,
which is some ship to deal with. UM. 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

(29:24):
John Woods took part in the landings and saw heavy combat,
and like I saw a lot of his the other
guys in his unit die really horribly and was was
kind of scarred by this as a result. I'm surprised though,
because he seems like nothing effects, 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,

(29:47):
I mean, I don't think. I don't know that he
was sad about his comrades dying as much as he
was didn't want to die himself and was like this
is bullshit, Like getting shot at is some bullshit. Like
I 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. Um, but I get the feeling

(30:08):
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 U. S. 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 ship. Uh. There were rapists, thieves,

(30:29):
and murderers all present in the Allied military that liberated Europe.
Um 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 has 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

(30:51):
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. Um. So
this meant that American criminals, like soldiers who raped French
women after D Day had to be punished like immediately
and severely. Um. And not long after D Day, several
American soldiers were convicted via court martial for the rapes

(31:13):
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. Um,
And very few men, even in an army full of
combat veterans, are actually turned out to be willing to
like hang a person, Like it's kind of hard to

(31:36):
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 methods. Yeah, there's actually kind of neat reasoning to that, um,
which is that you you execute soldiers by firing squad.

(31:59):
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. Um, 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. Um, Like, there were guys
we executed by firing squad for like lesser offenses and stuff.

(32:22):
But like you don't get that if you rape a
civilian woman, like we're just gonna hang you, which you know,
I don't know, it'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 they

(32:42):
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 like,
he was like, oh yeah, fuck this ship. And so

(33:03):
when he heard the army was looking for a hangman,
he jumped at the opportunity. Now he was not the
only person of volunteer, uh, 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, absolutely right on his hangman's resume. Yeah,

(33:31):
it's like that time I pretended to speak French so
I could get this podcasting gig. Is that real? Oh
don't tell Jack that, Sophie, now yeah, uh so, yeah,
would's claimed to have hung several people in the past. Um,
and the judge advocate who was like the you know
that that's who like handles military justice and they're the

(33:53):
people who were like doing the hiring in this case,
recommended that we check this out and like verified that
he'd actually exit cute to people before, but nobody actually
did anything. Um 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?

(34:15):
So like the like the people in charge of 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, well, what the worst that could happen?
Like if he wants the job that bad? It's just
hanging people that this is 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

(34:36):
room for thirty minutes, if you can probably tell you
how to hang someone, but that's crazy, yeah yeah. And
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. Um,
I mean, I guess you could, like he did hang
all the people he was supposed to. Well, we'll see,

(34:56):
Like it's a complicated determining whether or not someone's good
at hanging. Now, um, the army decided he was as
good as they were going to get, and they hired him. Now.
McLean has some interesting opinions on Wood's 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

(35:19):
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 fifty
to a hundred and thirty eight dollars a month. So,
in other words, like, uh, 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

(35:41):
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 triples
his income and he triples his income. Yeah, it's a
great gig, Like, and he doesn't get shot at anymore. Like,
if you're a sociopath who doesn't care about like anything

(36:03):
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 light 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 is a piece of ship and he's doing this

(36:25):
so he doesn't have to fight. The good reasons to
be a hangman though, or I don't know, Yeah, I don't.
I'm gonna 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

(36:46):
anyone who doesn't suck for that job. Um. Apologies to
all the hangman in the audience. I know there's a
lot of you, um, But yeah, that's so. For the
rest of World War Two, John C. Woods was a
hangman and he executed a little over thirty U S.
Soldiers for a variety of crimes. Now, he was not
very good at this job. And I'm gonna quote from

(37:08):
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 thirteen knots
that he claimed he'd invented. Oh my god, So these

(37:33):
guys would just some of them would just not even
be at the right height, right, no 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 tautness.

(37:55):
And he's like using a knot he saw in a
movie and the thirteen knots that he made up on
his own. He's just he's like, I'm a pioneer of
this technique. Oh my god. Yeah, but people have been
hanging each other for thousands of years, Like we have
the not technology pretty solid at this point. But this
gets back to what you asked a little earlier. What

(38:16):
I think unites all of these guys, and it is
that reckless self confidence, this guy being like, I don't
need to read on how to hang a guy there
to oversee him. It 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 that guy was tally.

(38:43):
It's a crowded war, like a lot's going on. This
is nobody's number one priority. Sure he does kind of
slide through the cracks for a while. Now. June is
the first time John C. Woods winds up in the
media spotlight. That's because three Germans have billions had been
sentenced to die for the murder of Second Lieutenant Lester

(39:03):
Rouss 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 had executed several hundred people.
All of this was a lie um, But as soon
as the news starts talking to Woods, he starts claiming
that he's on his like three hundred 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,

(39:26):
by the time the war ended, Woods had executed thirty
four 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. It was
not a job for the faint hearted, since there were

(39:47):
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. Well.
John had almost certainly been lying about his past as
an executioner. The almost two years he's spent on the
job before the Nuremberg trials seems to have inculcated in

(40:08):
him a deep love of the craft, and as a result,
he not only 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 scaffold ing and everything. Is he
getting better? Is he actually better at his job? No? No,
I mean better probably, But he does not build these

(40:31):
gallows well, um McLean And several sources I found claimed
that Woods deliberately made the trap doors of the gallows
too small so that the condemned men would hit their
heads on the way down, which the Nazis deserved it.
But it is it's like, yeah, it's it's one of
those things. He's absolutely a piece of ship. But also

(40:53):
like I'm not mad, Like I'm not mad. Someone got
him one last dig at the Nazis totally um. Now,
I should note that this is not like, um a
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.

(41:15):
Some will claim that like the fact that his trapdoors
were too small was simple accidental incompetence. Some will say
that it was 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.

(41:38):
It's released in the Creative Comments, called A Hangman at
War by Richard Clark Troutcott Wits. Uh. It seems pretty
well researched. Um, But I don't know how to determine
trouvi atitz Is competence to talk about stuff like this,
But it seems pretty well researched. Uh. And trevi at
Vitz defends woods as competence as a hangman and gallows designer.

(41:58):
His book claims that woods at really built a special
new sort of trap door 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 trap door on their way down. So while trout
at Vits seems to defend him on this, I think

(42:20):
I side with McLean and 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 trout itt its his book still definitely paints a
picture of John C. Woods as a sociopath. Uh. In
the section about the execution of three war criminals in

(42:40):
June ninety, he notes this life ran a five page
report on the trials and executions with thirty photos and
the caption referring to backs 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 his career and character for a single minute. So
even this guy's big defender is like, no, he didn't

(43:04):
give a shit about people. Um, it's interesting that life
needed uh, I don't know, lie and make it seem
like he was 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

(43:26):
just to not get shot at and doesn't give a
fuck about the fact that he's killing somebody. Interesting. 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

(43:49):
and services, I think if they could would also build
deliberately shoddy gallows to make the hanging of Nazi war
criminals less pleasant. Let me support that. Yeah, here we go.

(44:11):
All right, we're back. So we're talking about John C.
Woods real piece of ship, and I want to talk
a little bit about his personality, um before we get
into his actual execution of the Nazi high command. Um. Now,
one of our most prolific sources on the personality of
John C. Woods was Herman Obermeyer, a journalist and a
publisher who, during the war was a military clerk. Uh.

(44:33):
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 hoboes
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 thirty executions a year maybe, and

(44:56):
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 like sort
of a Popeye Mr Clean vibe. Yeah, yeah, yeah, nobody

(45:16):
wants to do this, so let's give him extra money
and let him be drunk all the time. Yeah, oh
my god. Uh. That is kind of the reasoning that
I heart radio has for me. But I only rarely
execute people now, at least once woods is drinking led
to him sucking up and showing up late to in execution.

(45:38):
His excuse was that he'd been unable to find the
right kind of rope. Uh. And I'm gonna 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 officers room would
take care that his dress was impeccable, would salute crisply,
and not expect a more cordial green than Eddies. The

(46:01):
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 in execution. So like,
he gets drunk and shows up late to kill somebody,
and he shows up to the General to get disciplined,
and the General is just like super nice to him
because again, nobody wants to do this job, which like
there's almost something inspiring about Like even in like an

(46:24):
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.
They have to let him be drunk and be a
speci of ship because like no one else will do it. Yeah,
it is kind of hardening. Yeah, like even in like
at this point, all these guys have seen horrible things,

(46:45):
like they're still not willing to do what this guy
does 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.
I don't give a funk, I'll kill anybody. Yeah, let
me screw it. Yeah. So um this then this, this, this,

(47:05):
this drunken hobo like executioner was the man selected to
hang the greatest collection of war criminals ever incarcerated and
sentenced by a court. Uh. Some articles I've read on
this suggests that the choice of this drunken, dirty hobo
man as executioner was a deliberate move by Allied authorities,

(47:25):
a sort of last middle finger to the leadership Cadra
of the Third Reich, like basically saying like, like, we
we respect you pieces of ships 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. Like 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

(47:48):
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. Um. 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 Gerring and Field Marshal Kitel Um as I
discussed earlier, like firing squad as the word yeah, because

(48:08):
we talked about this earlier, and you said that the
shooting was more humane, right or more honored. 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, right, And so for the 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,

(48:31):
and these guys like the Nazi generals like Herman Garring
was a fighter race in World War One. He was
like the guy who took over Manfred von Richtoven squadron
after the Red Baron died. Um and he was also
like obviously in the military hierarchy of the Third Reich,
he was the head of the Liftwaffa UM and in
Field Marshal Kitel was like the highest ranking or at
least one of the highest ranking German generals left alive.

(48:53):
So as General yodel um, these were military men, and
like the thing they wanted to protect above everything else
was their military honor um, and like they protested hugely
against the fact that they were going to be executed
by hanging. Gurring repeatedly said that he was willing to
be shot, he had no problem with a soldier's death, um,
but he thought that hanging was the worst thing they

(49:14):
could do to a soldier. And that's how most of
these guys felt. Um. One of the major sources for
this episode was a book called The Nazi Hunters by
Andrew Nikorski uh, and it cites a guy named Fritz Sockhell,
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.

(49:36):
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 guy also, fucking guy, how much. Were any of
them like, yes, what I did was horrible? Or actually,

(50:00):
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 of Poland, of occupied Poland
and like guilty of unspeakable war crimes and and facilitating
the mass extermination of Poland's Jewish population. Um seemed to
honestly deeply regret what he'd done and like fully accepted

(50:24):
that he needed to be executed. Uh, and like like
like some of them, I don't know, like you can
argue like how real all that was or he was
just trying to like get some sympathy at the end.
Some of them claimed that like yeah, like I, uh,
something bad should happen to me. I don't know, Like
I'm hesitant to like go too much detail about Frank

(50:46):
just because he was still a gigantic piece of ship
and I don't want to give him credit um for
like uh acting like slightly less of a piece of
ship right before dying. But guys like Kitel and Yodel
and Garing ore pieces of ship 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

(51:08):
that gassed millions to death and burnt their corpses. So
um yeah. All of their requests to be shot instead
of hung were denied, but not all of the eleven
condemned Nazis survived to meet John Seawoods at the gallows.
Herman Garring, in a last active defiance, had managed to
secret a cyanide capsule on his person. He poisoned himself

(51:28):
and died horribly but privately, avoiding the hangman's noose. So
that's a bomber. You hate to see it now. The
remaining condemned Nazis, however, were unable to escape, and they
all wound up meeting John Seawoods on the morning of
October six, ninety six. On that day, Woods was, as
Obermeyer puts it, one of the most important men in

(51:51):
the world, and he flaunted that fact by showing up
with dirty pants, an unpressed jacket, a crumpled hat, and
reeking of booth. He was clearly unwashed and his teeth
were unbrushed. This is the man who led tin Nazi
war criminals to their deaths. Oh my god, just a
big old piss right on them. Uh. I'm gonna quote

(52:15):
now from a selection from the book The Nazi Honors.
At one eleven, A. M. Joakim von Ribbon Trop, 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 giring suicide,
the rules had changed. Ribbon Trop'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

(52:36):
of Nazi dom as Smith 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 wishes that Germany realized its entity in an
understanding be reached between East and West. I wish peace
to the world. Would then place the black hood over

(52:57):
his head, adjusted the rope and pulled the lever that
opened the trap, sending Ribbon Trop to his death. Two
minutes later, Field Marshal Kitel 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

(53:17):
were dutifully following orders of superiors. Kitel 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 the two million German soldiers went to their deaths
for the fatherland before me. I now follow my son's
all for Germany will. Both Ribbon trop and Kitel were

(53:40):
still hanging from their ropes. There was a pause in
the proceedings. An American general representing the Allied Control Commission
allowed the thirty or so people in the gym to smoke,
and almost everyone immediately lit up. At least you guys,
they have them a smoke break because it's the forties.
They're like, ship, we need a cigarette, Okay, I mean it,
I would have a cigarette. Then that's the time to

(54:02):
have a fucking cigarette now there would be one more
smoke break over the course of the day, and true
to form, Woods, his executions were as sloppy as his dress.
Joachim von Ribbentropp took fourteen 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

(54:23):
noose Woods Tide, but McLean Woods. His biographer believes he
intentionally botched at least one job, the hanging of Julius Striker,
the first arch propagandist to the Nazi Party. And I'm
gonna quote one more time from the Nazi hunters. This
is a good bit. At two twelve, Smith noted that
the ugly dwarfish little man Julius Striker, the editor and
publisher of the venomous Nazi Party newspaper Dear Schirmer, walked

(54:46):
to the gallows, his face visibly twitching. Asked to identify himself,
he shouted, Heil Hitler, allowing for a rare reference to
his own emotions. Smith confessed the shrieks sent a shiver
down my back. As Striker was pushed up the final
steps on top of the gallows to position him for Woods.
He glared at the witnesses and screamed pure in Fest
ninety six. The reference was to the Jewish holiday that

(55:07):
commemorates the execution of Hayman, who, according to the Old Testament,
was planning to kill all the Jews and the Persian Empire.
Asked formally for his last words, Striker shouted, the Bolsheviks
will hang you. One day. While Woods was placing the
black hood over his head, Striker could be heard saying, adele,
my dear wife. But the drama was far from over.
The trap door opened with a bang, with Striker kicking

(55:28):
as he went down. As the rope snagged taught, 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. Abruptly, the grown ceased
and the rope stopped moving. Smith and the other witnesses
were convinced that Woods had grabbed Striker and pulled him
down hard, strangling him. Had something gone wrong or was
this no accident? Lieutenant Stanley Tillis, who was charged with

(55:50):
coordinating the Nuremberg and earlier hanging of war criminals. Later
claimed that Woods had deliberately placed the coils of Striker's
news 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 clinch,
he wrote, adding that Woods's intent was clear. I saw

(56:12):
a small smile cross his lips as he pulled the
hangman's handle. Oh my god, this guy. I I feel
like you have to either he sucks at his job
or he's at least good enough to funk people over.
You know. It's I think where I am on this
is he was bad at his job, but it was

(56:34):
a job that the best way to do it was poorly.
Because Nazis don't deserve a nice, clean executively, and you
can't as the government. You have to try to give
them one because otherwise you're you're not 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

(56:56):
don't want our government to have executed them painfully. But
I do want an incompetent, shitty asshole hangman to funk
it up so that it's a little bit worse for them.
That's I think it is kind of like the perfect
balance of justice inasmuch as you can achieve it here. Yeah, agreed,
But so he he straight up strangled the last guy.

(57:18):
A Striker wasn't the last now, I think he like
pulled him down, like the guy strangling. He pulled him
to like strangle him faster. And and there's debate. You know,
um that guy. You know. One of the witnesses who
is there with Woods one day says that he thinks
that um Striker 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. His biographer

(57:41):
argues that Wood's intentionally fucked up Striker'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 like by yeah exactly, um McLean wrote at an execution,
John Woods wanted too and insisted on playing the lead actor.

(58:02):
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
ten men, which were all executed on the same day
in a couple of hours, Uh, John C. Woods was
asked how he felt by an American officer who I
think was concerned for his mental health, like wanted to

(58:23):
make sure he was okay, you know, because it's it's
a tough thing Woods. His response was wins early chow,
I'm fine. What do we eat? Oh my god? Uh
gotta love it now. In the immediate aftermath of the executions,
Woods agreed to do an interview with Stars and Stripes magazine.

(58:43):
He bragged that the hangings had gone off without a hitch.
I hanged these ten Nazis and Nuremberg, and I am
proud of it. I did a good job. Everything went
a number one. I have never been doing execution which
went better. I am only sorry that that fellow Garring
escaped me. I'd have been at my best for him. No,
I wasn't nervous. I haven't got any nerves. You can't
afford nerves in my job. But this Nuremberg job was

(59:04):
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 point of view, the only
hitch in the whole day seems to have come afterwards.
At a post execution celebration in the n c O
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

(59:26):
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. Woods never got an
increase in his liquor ration, he just got belligerent afterwards.
He does deserve some extra shots, I think, for he
does deserve some extra shots. If you if anything deserves shots,
it's hanging the Nazis. But now, uh, Woods did spend

(59:51):
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 you think here? Well, what the soldier asked,

(01:00:14):
basically that question, you asked, like, what the what the
hell are you talking about? Like, don't say ship 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 hangman
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 do you know how
he died? Or are we getting there? We're getting there,

(01:00:37):
We're getting there now. Woods became something of a minor
celebrity in the wake of the executions. He gave interviews
to any journalists who would sit and talk to him.
The blizzard of media attention came as a shock to
his wife, Hazel Woods, and I'm gonna read a quote
she gave to the Emporia Gazette on October seventeenth, ninety six,
when they asked her about the fact that her husband
had killed all of the Nazi high command. He never

(01:00:57):
told me that he was doing that type of work.
He didn't mention any hangings. And the first thing I
knew of it was what I saw his picture in
the papers. Oh my god. So it doesn't even tell
his wife a real piece of ship, and it's there's
a couple like the charitable is like, Oh, he didn't

(01:01:18):
want her to worry because it's such you know, it
would have increased their risk, and maybe he felt that
she'd be safe or 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 gets spend it all that He

(01:01:40):
wasn't a communicator, you know, he doesn't. 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 your your romantic partner after years of executing war criminals,
and you think you thinking he was putting it together

(01:02:02):
like phone like telephone wires like, because 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,
made relationship experts would agree. Yeah. Now, as interest in
the executions began to wane and America moved on from

(01:02:24):
World War Two to go onto the important business of
forgetting all of World War two's lessons, UH, Johnson to
have gotten somewhat desperate for attention. UH. 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 a quote now from an article in the Male
Special Service. After I started hanging these German war criminals

(01:02:47):
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 to 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 the Nuremberg
job is over, I'm ready to go back to the
United States, and I'm planning to leave in a few days,

(01:03:09):
but I may come back to Germany. There are more
than a hundred and twenty war criminals waiting here to
be hanged, including those forty three sentence to the Almity 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

(01:03:29):
him said that in the years after the executions, he
took to carrying a pair of forty five caliber handguns
everywhere he went as protection against possible Nazi assassins. He
was quoted by one reporter is 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. Um, is this a real threat? Is? Because

(01:03:52):
I mean it's a great question. It sort of is right.
But also, wouldn't they be screwing themselves over by like
calling attention to themselves by like trying to kill this
hangman who really did wasn't a shot caller? Yeah? Yeah,
I mean that's what you'd think. Um, although he'd be
easier to be easier to kill the hangman than Eisenhower,
you know. Um, But yeah, it's possible. Like I can

(01:04:15):
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 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

(01:04:36):
John and he went back to serving as a normal soldier.
In the nineteen fifty who was stationed on the Ino
Wa Talk, a toll in the Pacific, one of our
nuclear weapon test basis, and woods job was basically to
act as a guard and a gopher for the scientists
and engineers who worked there, and thanks to Operation paper Clip,
many of these scientists were Germans who had previously worked
on the Nazi rocket program or in the military aircraft industry.

(01:05:00):
And on June twenty one, nineteen fifty, 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

(01:05:20):
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, yeah, that's how it
all goes down. Fascinating ending five star Yeah, and it's
it's pretty It's like one of those things where it's
not impossible that some of these Nazi scientists would have

(01:05:43):
wanted revenge, but also like the scientists tended to be,
you know, even the ones who did a lot of
Nazi ship and used slave labor and stuff like Verne
von Braun did some awful things, but he cared more
about the science than the Nazism. Like he wasn't in
love with the fewer or anything. Um, he was kind
like Kitel Well, he was just like willing to do
the horrible Nazi ship to get to do the things

(01:06:03):
he wanted to do. Um. 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 two was Hitler's chief architect and
like the the guy who would like manage the Germans
armaments industry during World War two and had like organized

(01:06:27):
the massive use of slave labor um and was a
gigantic piece of ship and one of Hitler's best friends.
And we forgave that guy because he knew things we
he was good at organizing shit and like we needed
we we wanted his help and sort of like Cold
War planning ship like like renavon Brand designed rockets that

(01:06:47):
were used to be fired specifically on civilian chunks of
cities in London or cities in England like and we
forgave him because he knew how to build rockets, like
all the we we didn't give a ship what they
did as long as they were good at the kind
of science we needed. So it's totally it's not impossible
that these guys killed it. It's not impossible. That said,

(01:07:08):
it's also totally in character for John C. Woods for
him to have been completely unconcerned, uncareful while working with
electricity and get himself killed because he was a dumb,
gross piece of ship 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 hangings sorry John.

(01:07:33):
So Courtney, how you feeling about John C. Woods at
the end of this little tale? Man? That was a
fun one. Yeah, he's not. He's not the worst guy. No, no, no, no,
Like he's he's French. McLean Is biographer frequently describes him
as a bum um like, which I think is fair. Like,

(01:07:55):
he's not like a crazy monster who like wanted to
kill people because he enjoyed he's 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 that's my feel for
John C. Woods. Yeah, some of those instincts I can

(01:08:17):
relate to. Yeah, yeah, Yeah, it's a fascinating tale. And
it's as close to getting what they deserved as as
these guys could have gotten. They certainly didn't deserve to
be executed by a hangman who cared deeply about his
his craft. No, but they did get. Yeah, the special

(01:08:42):
trap doors. I love that touch. Yeah, yeah, and I
you know, it's one of those things. I don't know
if he if it's true that he designed the trap
door specifically to hit people's faces on the way down.
But if you look at pictures of these guys corpses,
we there's clear pictures of all of their bodies immediately
after extitly cution because it was part of like the
legal documentation, and they all busted their faces open on

(01:09:04):
the trap door. Yes, uh yeah, it kind of rules.
Like I'm normally not as I think it's sucked up
when people talk about like wanting you know, prisoners and
jails to get raped or whatever, because like that's not
why we should have a juter. Yeah, but like these
guys are Nazi, Like, I'm not all I'm okay with

(01:09:29):
them getting hit in the face one extra time on
the way down. I'm not gonna I'm not going to
consider that a miscarriage of justice. Um, 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. Um sure, So

(01:09:53):
I never think I always think about the Hitler stuff
in World War Two, 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 did like the US in Britain

(01:10:13):
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 UM controlled East Berlin
and there was an East German state that was set
up with initially Soviet backing. It wasn't like a complete
like satellite state or anything like it had like actually,

(01:10:36):
one of the things that they'll point out is that
the East German um security apparatus, they're like uh secret police,
were actually better than the Soviet secret police, because like
Germans are just good at that sort of thing. Um.
But so there was the East German state that was
like a communist state in East Germany, and then there
was like West Germany, and like Berlin was split right
down the middle, and West Germany was sort of controlled

(01:10:58):
by the ally Is for a while after the war
and then gradually set up to have its own democratic
elections and government and stuff. Um. And we just made
sure there wasn't one of these like horrible people. Well,
I mean kind of from the beginning of the German
uh Federal Republic uh, like the current German state that exists.

(01:11:21):
One of their rules is that you can't be a
fucking Nazi, like you can't have swatzt because you can't
display things like they're the people who wound up like
running for office and stuff for the most part, where
folks who had been like a lot of them, where
folks who've been like in the early stage of folks
have been like persecuted by the Nazis who been like
left wing activists and stuff in the pre Nazi period. Yeah,

(01:11:43):
some folks like that. Like there's some sketchy stuff that
happened too, but like kind of a lot of the
Nazi like the actual people who wanted to do Nazi
ship either died during the war or fled the country
or afterwards like new enough to keep their heads down. Um.
You know, I'm not I'm not competent to go into
like deep detail about like how the German Republic was

(01:12:06):
sort of established post World War Two, 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. Um, there was throughout a lot of
the Cold War, like a huge US in British military

(01:12:26):
presence in Germany. They were effectively inoccupied country and there's
still military US military bases um in Germany right now. Um.
Obviously Germany is a fully independent country now and they
have their own military um. But it's also like one
of the like the bunswir the current modern German military
some people would describe as kind of a laughing stock

(01:12:48):
laughing stocks. Not fair, but it's not it's not very
large and it's not very capable, and some of that's
pretty purposeful. Like I think there there was there was
a reticence for Germany to have a large military ever
again after World War Two, and that's starting to change
in part because of like Russian aggression in Ukraine and
this understanding that like the German the Bundswair and like

(01:13:12):
like the like the use military for like they don't
have very many tanks, like they don't have super capable
um so like the there's I think there's some people
talking about the fact that they 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

(01:13:33):
asked was because leadership wise seems like it did work out,
you know, like they have yeah, no, no, they have
some good leaders since that hugely huge 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
to give the US credit for a lot of things, guy,
but the Martial Plan, which is the plan by which

(01:13:55):
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 seemed to be relatively

(01:14:16):
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. Yet 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, um because we never

(01:14:38):
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 and it's very unpleasant. Yeah, yeah, anyway, fun tales

(01:14:59):
not in America, 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. Ah,
that makes me just want to like sing the star
Spangled banner, salutifly. I'm feeling very patriotic. Yes, yeah, yeah,

(01:15:24):
I can't wait for listeners to see what this guy
looks like. Yeah, oh yeah, show her a picture. She
was exactly like him. I gotta 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 ship never fails. Yep. Oh he's amazing. Well,

(01:15:52):
you got any plugables to plug as we we sail
out on a river of patriotism? Well? Uh, the podcast,
you guys, Private Parts Unknown. We just did a two
part series from Mexico City. UM, one episode about masculinity
and then an episode with some amazing artists that are

(01:16:14):
kind of fucking with a buyinary 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. Um,
think about private parts when you think of knots. Nope, nope, nope.
That's not a good way to lead people into this. Uh, boy, Sophie,

(01:16:38):
I am not in a good place right now. I'm
just spinning out in the control. We have a website
behind the bastards dot com um. I have a social
media at I right, okay, Uh, we have Instagram and
a Twitter at at bastards pod um and we have
uh desire for you to Sometimes the world needs an

(01:17:04):
unshowered Nazi killing hobo and if that's you ship, I
don't really know where to go with this. Sometimes the
world gets what it needs is sometimes the world gets
what it needs. All right, Well the episodes over, We're done,
Go go home, everybody. Well you're probably home or in
your car or pooping. Keep doing what you're doing. But

(01:17:27):
wrote the episodes over, Yeah,

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;} The Bastard Who Executed The Top Nazis