Painful Execution of Alfred Jodl *Warning REAL FOOTAGE JJ

On October 16, 1946, at 12 minutes past 2:00 in the morning, a 56-year-old German general walked into a converted gymnasium in Nuremberg. His hands were bound behind his back. His face was pale but composed. 13 wooden steps stood between him and the gallows. Alfred Jodl had signed orders that killed millions.

He had drafted the commander order. He had put his signature on the directive that condemned Soviet prisoners of war to mass starvation. He had stood beside Adolf Hitler in the Wolf’s Lair and turned military operations into instruments of extermination. Now, he had 8 minutes left to live. This is the story of those 8 minutes.

The men who built the gallows, the hangmen who pulled the lever, the witnesses who watched, and the long painful death that followed inside the wooden trap below. Nuremberg prison sat behind the Palace of Justice in a city the war had reduced to rubble. American military police guarded the corridors. Cell 17 on the ground floor held Alfred Jodl through the final months of the trial.

The cell measured 9 ft by 13, a small barred window, a wooden cot, a table bolted to the wall. A guard watched through a slot in the door every 30 seconds, day and night, for over a year. Jodl was never alone. Not when he slept, not when he ate, not when he wrote letters to his wife Lucie.

The verdicts came on October 1, 1946. Jodl was found guilty on all four counts: conspiracy to wage aggressive war, crimes against peace, war crimes, crimes against humanity. The sentence was death by hanging. He had expected a firing squad. As a professional soldier, he believed that a military execution was his right. The tribunal refused.

The rope, the judges decided, was the appropriate end for a man who had helped plan the deaths of millions of civilians. His final petition for clemency was denied on October 9. His wife was permitted one last visit on October 15. They spoke through a wire mesh barrier. Guards stood 3 ft away. Luise later wrote that her husband looked thin but calm.

He told her he had made peace with what was coming. He asked her to take care of their daughter. He gave her no message of repentance for the dead. That same evening, American soldiers began preparing the execution chamber. The gymnasium chosen for the hangings was small, plain wooden walls, a concrete floor.

Three black gallows had been built in the center of the room over the previous days, constructed by American Army carpenters under the supervision of Master Sergeant John C. Woods. Woods was a hangman from San Antonio, Texas. He claimed to have executed 347 men during his career. The number was a lie. The real figure was closer to 60.

But Woods had been chosen, and Woods would do the work. Each gallows stood 8 ft high. A trapdoor measuring 3 ft square. A wooden platform reached by 13 steps. Black curtains hung beneath the platform to hide what happened in the moments after the drop. The ropes were thick hemp soaked in oil to prevent fraying.

The nooses had been tied with the regulation knot used in American military hangings. 11 men were scheduled to die that night. Hermann Göring had taken cyanide 2 hours earlier in his cell. His body lay on a stretcher covered with an American Army blanket in a room next to the chamber. 10 men remained. Joachim von Ribbentrop went first at 1 minute past 1 in the morning, then Wilhelm Keitel, then Ernst Kaltenbrunner, then Alfred Rosenberg, then Hans Frank, then Wilhelm Frick, then Julius Streicher, then Fritz Sauckel. Alfred Jodl was ninth.

At 2 minutes past 2 in the morning, two American military police entered cell 17. They wore white helmets and white gloves. They were young men, both in their 20s, both selected for the duty because their commanders trusted them not to flinch. Jodl was standing when they arrived. He had been awake for hours.

He wore his Wehrmacht uniform stripped of all insignia. The Iron Cross was gone. The general’s collar tabs were gone. The eagle on his chest had been cut away. He was in the eyes of the court no longer a soldier. He was a condemned prisoner. His hands were bound with leather straps behind his back. He was searched one final time for any hidden poison capsule.

The lesson of Göring’s suicide was fresh and the Americans took no chances. A chaplain walked beside him. A small group of officers followed. The walk from the cell to the gymnasium took 90 seconds. The corridor was cold. The footsteps of the escort echoed against the stone walls. No one spoke. When the heavy wooden doors opened, Jodl saw the chamber for the first time.

Two journalists stood against the far wall, selected by lottery to witness the executions. Soviet, American, British and French officers stood in a row. A military photographer waited with his camera. The gallows stood directly ahead. Jodl walked without assistance. His shoulders were straight. Witnesses later said his face showed no emotion.

He climbed the 13 wooden steps to the platform. The hangman waited at the top. An American officer read the formal sentence aloud. The translator repeated it in German. Jodl was asked if he had any final words. He looked out across the chamber. His voice was steady when he spoke.

His last words were brief and addressed to his country, not to his victims. There was no mention of the dead. No mention of the commando order. No mention of the Soviet prisoners who had starved by his signature. The men who watched would later write that the silence afterward felt heavier than the words themselves.

The chaplain offered a final prayer. Jodl bowed his head briefly. The black hood was pulled down over his face. The noose was placed around his neck. Sergeant Woods adjusted the knot behind the left ear. The standard position for an American military hanging. At 10 minutes past 2:00 in the morning, Woods pulled the lever. The trapdoor dropped open.

Alfred Jodl fell through the floor of the platform into the dark space below. The drop should have broken his neck instantly. The vertebrae should have separated cleanly. Death should have come within seconds. It did not. The rope had been miscalculated. Several of the executions that night were botched in the same way.

The drop was too short. The knot may have been placed incorrectly. Jodl did not die from a broken neck. He died from slow strangulation behind the black curtain. His body twisting on the rope while the officers and journalists waited in silence above. The death took 18 minutes. The doctor on duty was an American Army physician named Lieutenant Colonel Roy Farrell.

He climbed beneath the gallows at regular intervals to check for a pulse. The first check showed Jodl was still alive. The second check several minutes later showed the same. Witnesses in the chamber heard sounds from below the curtain. Some later refused to describe what they heard. When the heartbeat finally stopped, Farrell pronounced death.

The body was cut down. A stretcher was brought in. Jodl was carried to a separate room where the bodies of the other executed men had been laid out in a row. A photographer took an official identification picture. The face was bruised and swollen. The mouth was slightly open. The eyes were closed. The image was filed in the records of the International Military Tribunal and remains in the United States National Archives today.

The body was placed in a plain wooden coffin. The coffin was loaded onto a truck. Before dawn, all 11 bodies, including Göring’s, were driven to a crematorium in Munich. The names on the paperwork were false. The Allies feared that any known grave site would become a place of pilgrimage for Nazi sympathizers.

The bodies were cremated together over the next 12 hours. The ashes were collected into containers. The containers were driven to a small tributary of the Isar River outside Munich. The ashes were scattered into the moving water at a location that was never officially recorded. The Americans wanted no grave. They wanted no marker. They wanted no shrine.

Alfred Jodl’s family was not informed of the burial location. His wife Luise spent the next 7 years searching for answers. She filed petitions. She wrote letters to American officials. She received no information. In 1953, the Munich District Court for Denazification reviewed Jodl’s case posthumously.

The court, working under West German law and a different evidentiary standard, declared him not guilty of the original charges. The ruling was overturned by the Bavarian Minister of Political Liberation later that same year. The reversal stood. Jodl remained, in legal terms, a convicted war criminal. His wife continued to defend him until her death in 1998.

She believed he had been a soldier following orders. She believed the trial had been victim’s justice. She refused to accept that the documents he had signed were anything more than military necessity in a war he had not chosen. The victims of those documents had no voice in the matter.

Soviet prisoners of war died by the millions in German captivity. The Commissar Order of June 1941, which Jodl helped transmit through the operational chain, instructed Wehrmacht units to shoot captured Soviet political officers without trial. By the winter of 1941, German camps held over 3 million Red Army prisoners.

Most were kept in open fields, fenced with barbed wire, with no shelter against the freezing rain. They were fed almost nothing. By February 1942, 2 million of them were dead. They had names. They had families. Their bodies were piled into mass graves outside places called Bergen-Belsen, Stalag 318, and Stalag 326. The order Jodl signed did not kill them by accident. It killed them by design.

The Commando Order of October 1942 condemned Allied Special Forces to immediate execution upon capture. The men of Operation Musketoon were among the first to die under it. Captain Grain Black, Captain Joseph Houghton, Sergeant Miller Smith, Lance Sergeant Richard O’Brien, Lance Corporal Eric Curtis, Lance Corporal Cyril Abram, Private William Chudley.

They had destroyed a Norwegian power station. They were captured. They were sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp. They were shot in the back of the neck on October 23, 1942. Their bodies were burned. Their families were told nothing. Civilians in the Caucasus and the Balkans died in reprisal killings authorized by the operational directives Jodl had helped produce.

Whole villages were burned. Hostages were taken from streets and shot in groups of 50 or 100 for every German soldier killed by partisans. In Kragujevac, Serbia in October 1941, German forces operating under such directive shot more than 2,700 men and boys in a single day. Among them were school children taken directly from their classrooms.

Their teachers were marched out with them and shot at the same edge of the same field. The youngest was 12 years old. His name is recorded in the Kragujevac memorial archives alongside hundreds of others. His mother waited for him at home that evening. He never came back. These dead had no trial. They had no last words.

They had no chaplain at their side. They were not weighed on a scale or measured for a drop. They were shot in ditches. They were starved in pens. They were hanged in village squares without names. Alfred Jodl received eight minutes. He received a chaplain. He received the right to speak. He received a hood.

He received a doctor. He received 18 minutes of dying behind a black curtain while a room full of witnesses stood in silence. This was the difference between his death and theirs. Not the rope, not the gallows, not the pain. The difference was that someone had been required to watch him die. Someone had been required to record it.

Someone had been required to say his name aloud and read his sentence and confirm his death and sign the paperwork. His victims had received none of these things. The court at Nuremberg gave them in the end only this: the names of the men who had killed them, spoken in a chamber, the crimes written down on paper, the sentences carried out in public record, the rope around a general’s neck at 12 minutes past 2:00 in the morning on October 16, 1946.

It was not enough. It was never going to be enough, but it was something in a century that had given the dead so very little. Alfred Jodl is gone. His ashes are gone. The river that carried them has flowed for 80 years. The Commando Order remains. The names of the men it killed are written in archives across Europe. Some are remembered by families.

Some are remembered by villages. Some are remembered only by a stone in a cemetery in a country they died trying to liberate. They are the reason the gallows were built. They are the reason the rope was pulled. They are the story that should never be allowed to end.