Executed

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Adolf Eichmann – a brief biography

On 31 May 1962, a man who seemed from the outside quite an ordinary person, even banal, was hanged in Ramla prison in Israel. It was, and still is, the only time the Israel state has executed a person. Tall, slim, bespectacled and with a receding hairline, his external persona was indeed very mundane but this was no ordinary person. The man in question was 56-year-old Adolf Eichmann, responsible for the logistical management of the mass deportations of Jews to the Nazi death camps.

Born 19 March 1906 in the town of Solingen in western Germany, Eichmann was brought up in a middle-class Lutheran environment. (Eichmann kept his faith right up to the late 1930s, long after it was fashionable for Nazis to denounce religion).

Following his mother’s death in 1914, Adolf Eichmann’s father, an accountant, took his two sons to live in Linz, Austria, the town that Adolf Hitler always considered his home. Eichmann’s early life was certainly ordinary, dropping out of his studies to become a mechanical engineer and drifting from one job to another before finding more permanent employment as a travelling salesman for an Austrian oil company.

The Jewish Expert

Eichmann joined the Austrian Nazi Party in April 1932 having been approached by a friend of his father’s, an SS man, who said to the younger Eichmann, ‘You belong to us’. Within seven months he had become attached to the SS itself, Hitler’s paramilitary corps, headed by Heinrich Himmler. In 1934, as an SS corporal, he worked at the newly-opened Dachau concentration camp.

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Admiral Byng – the Execution of a Scapegoat

John Byng was born on 29 October 1704 in Bedfordshire, England. One of fifteen children, John, like his father, Rear-Admiral Sir George Byng, joined the Royal Navy and by the age of 23 had reached the rank of captain.  

Until 1739, Byng was stationed around the uneventful Mediterranean. Then, perhaps due to his father’s influence, John experienced a rapid rise up the promotional ladder. In 1742, he was given the governorship of the colony of Newfoundland. In 1745 he was appointed Rear Admiral, followed by Vice-Admiral in 1747, all of which he obtained without having seen any military action.  His father, George, had been victorious in a number of naval battles, but when his son was finally to be tested it resulted in disaster.

Minorca

Admiral John Byng is mostly famous for his notorious execution by the British authorities in 1757 following the loss of the Mediterranean island of Minorca to the French at the start of the Seven Years’ War. Hostilities began in Europe only two days after the declaration of war in 1756 with a French attack on Minorca on 20 May. After a fierce yet inconclusive naval battle with the French fleet, the cautious Admiral Byng, charged with relieving the garrison at Minorca, decided to move his fleet to the safety of Gibraltar and from there recoup. But by 28 June, the French had captured the island.

A combination of factors had hampered Byng, factors that he brought to the attention of his superiors: lack of men, unrepaired ships, failed communications, delays of orders, and problems with reinforcements, which, together with Byng’s overly cautious and pessimistic assessment, all led to the British failure at Minorca.

“Not Doing His Utmost”

Nevertheless, the outrage focused on Byng, who was court-marshalled and accused of ‘not doing his utmost’ and sentenced to execution. Politicians and the public, who at first demanded Byng’s head, realised that Byng had become a mere scapegoat for the inadequacies of the Admiralty. Now they called for leniency: ‘for our own consciences’ sake, as well as in justice to the prisoner, we pray your lordships, in the most earnest manner, to recommend him to his majesty’s clemency.’

Prime Minister, William Pitt (the Elder), pressed King George II to use his royal prerogative of mercy and overturn the verdict. The king declined.

On 14 March 1757, Admiral Byng, aged 52, was taken on board the HMS Monarch, shipped near Portsmouth, and executed by firing-squad. An eyewitness describes the scene:

‘About noon, the Admiral having taken leave of a clergyman, and two friends who accompanied him, walked out of the great cabin to the quarter-deck, where two files of marines were ready to execute the sentence. He advanced with a firm deliberate step, a composed and resolute countenance, and resolved to suffer with his face uncovered, until his friends, representing that his looks would possibly intimidate the soldiers, and prevent their taking aim properly, he submitted to their request, threw his hat on the deck, kneeled on a cushion, tied one white handkerchief over his eyes, and dropped the other as a signal for his executioners, who fired a volley so decisive, that five balls passed through his body, and he dropped down dead in an instant. The time in which this tragedy was acted, from his walking out of the cabin to his being deposited in the coffin, did not exceed three minutes.’

He was the first and last British admiral to be executed.

“To encourage the others”

Byng’s execution became a cause célèbre in Britain, and philosopher Voltaire would later jeer in his Candid, ‘Dans ce pays-ci, il est bon de tuer de temps en temps un amiral pour encourager les autres’ (‘In this country, it is good to kill an admiral from time to time to encourage the others’). It certainly did. Naval historian, N A M Roger, wrote, ‘The execution of Byng … taught officers that even the most powerful friends might not save an officer who failed to fight … Byng’s death revived a culture of determination which set British officers apart from their foreign contemporaries’.

Posthumous Pardon

To this day, Admiral Byng’s family continues to petition for a posthumous pardon, which so far, has been denied them. On the 250th anniversary of Byng’s execution, in 2007, members of the current-day Byng family were interviewed by The Guardian, in which they said, “The Byngs won’t take the refusal of a pardon lying down. We’re going to take this further.”

Rupert Colley.

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Claretta Petacci – a brief biography

Claretta Petacci, born 28 February 1912, was perhaps the biggest love in Benito Mussolini’s life, a man 28 years her senior. Brought up in a wealthy family, Clara’s father was the pope’s personal physician.

Having been devoted to the Duce since childhood, she first met him, quite by accident, in 1932, when he drove pass 20-year-old Petacci in his car. Over the coming weeks, she pursued him relentlessly until, eventually, she secured an audience with him. Mussolini, never one to resist a woman’s advances, soon took her to bed.

Although Mussolini was married and had five children, he and Petacci were to remain lovers until their deaths in 1945. (Pictured below: Mussolini with his wife, Rachele, and their first three children, c1923).

Clara’s diaries

Petacci kept a detailed diary of their time together which, in 1949, was seized by the Italian authorities. The diary, under Italian law, was kept locked away for seventy years and only published in 2009. The detailed entries provide intimate details of her relationship with Mussolini, and a record of his inner thoughts. Mussolini, often bored, would ring her several times a day. As a lover, he is portrayed as a boastful and needy man, often fishing for compliments, and in need of constant reassurance about his looks, his virility and the love of both Clara and the Italian people.

It was Petacci who recorded how Mussolini boasted of having, in his younger days, up to fourteen lovers at a time, and able to satisfy four women a night. This, from the man who, in his speeches, liked to emphasise the importance of family. Sex with Rachele, his wife, was dull and, worse still, she failed to appreciate just how great a man he was. Clara, on the other hand, never failed to stroke his ego – comparing him favourably to Napoleon and constantly reminding him of his genius. Continue reading →

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Fanny Kaplan – the woman who tried to kill Lenin

Late in the evening of the 30 August 1918, Vladimir Lenin, the Bolshevik leader, emerged from a meeting at the Hammer and Sickle factory in Moscow when he was approached by an unknown woman who called out his name. Detained momentarily by a colleague, who was remonstrating about bread shortages, Lenin was about to get into his car, his foot on the running board, when the woman produced a revolver and fired three shots. One shot missed him, ripping through his coat and hitting his colleague in her elbow, but the other two struck him down – one bullet went through his neck, the other into his left shoulder.  Lenin survived – just. It had been the second attempt on Lenin’s life in just seven months.

Vladimir Lenin’s would-be assassin was 28-year-old Fanny Kaplan. Born Feiga Chaimovna Roytblat in the Ukraine on 10 February 1890, Kaplan, one of seven children, was drawn to revolutionary politics from a young age.

Dora Kaplan / Fanny Kaplan

At the age of sixteen, she joined an anarchist group based in Kiev, was given the name Fanny Kaplan, sometimes Dora Kaplan, and charged with assassinating the city’s governor. But the bomb she was preparing detonated in her room, almost blinding her. She was arrested and, had she not been so young (she was still under twenty-one), she would have faced the death penalty. Instead, she was sentenced to ‘eternal penal servitude’ in Siberia. During her time of forced labour, her eyesight deteriorated to the point of near blindness.

Following the February Revolution of 1917 and the overthrow of the last Russian tsar, Nicholas II, Kaplan was released as part of a post-revolutionary political amnesty. She suffered from severe headaches and bouts of blindness but, following an intensive course of treatment, she regained partial sight.

Socialist Revolutionary

She made her way to Moscow and there fell in with the Socialist Revolutionary Party (SR), who, following the October Revolution, had fully expected to share power with their socialist colleagues, the Bolsheviks. Indeed, a Constituent Assembly consisting of SRs, Bolsheviks and others met in Petrograd on 18 January 1918, but when the assembled gathering rejected most of Lenin’s suggestions, he had it dissolved within the day.

And so, the embittered SRs plotted to undermine the Bolsheviks by targeting their leader. Thus, on 30 August 1918, Fanny Kaplan shot Lenin. Having done the deed, she followed SR protocol and allowed herself to be arrested, prepared to sacrifice her life for the cause.

Today I shot at Lenin

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Karl Lody – a brief biography

Karl Lody was a German spy and the first to be executed in Britain during the First World War.

Born in Berlin on 20 January 1877, Karl Hans Lody spoke perfect English with an American accent, having been married to an American and living in Nebraska. Having obtained a US passport under the name Charles A. Inglis, which allowed him to travel freely, Lody arrived in Edinburgh on 27 August 1914. Staying in a hotel, he hired a bicycle and cycled each day to the docks at the Firth of Forth and Rosyth’s naval base, both of strategic importance during the First World War, in order to observe and take notes.

Snow on their boots

MI5, who had been monitoring letters sent abroad, intercepted Lody’s very first message back to the Germans. The address in Stockholm that Lody had used was well known to MI5, instantly arousing their suspicions. But they did not arrest him immediately, preferring, instead, to monitor his activities. Lody’s letters were usually signed ‘Nazi’, an abbreviation of the name Ignatz, the German form of Ignatius, and nothing to do with Adolf Hitler’s Nazi party which did not come into existence until after the war. (‘Nazi’ was also a generic term for an Austro-Hungarian soldier, akin to ‘Tommy’ for a British soldier or ‘Fritz’ for a German one.)

Many of Lody’s letters, some of which were coded, contained misleading information, which MI5 were more than happy to allow through. One example was Lody’s assertion that thousands of Russian troops had landed in Scotland on their way to the Western Front, which may have led to the infamous ‘snow on their boots’ rumour that gained popular currency in wartime Britain.

DORA

On 29 September, fearing his cover was about to be blown, Lody moved to Dublin. He travelled via Liverpool and while there made notes describing the Liverpool docks and the ships he saw. This letter, sent without coding, revealed pertinent information. It was at this point MI5 decided Lody had to be stopped. Continue reading →

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Galeazzo Ciano – brief biography

In 1930, the dashing and rich 27-year-old Galeazzo Ciano married Edda Mussolini, daughter to the Italian dictator, Benito Mussolini. Six years later, he became Mussolini’s foreign minister. Yet, on 11 January 1944, on his father-in-law’s orders, he was executed.

Galeazzo Ciano’s father had made a name for himself as an admiral during the First World War. An early supporter of Benito Mussolini’s, he built his fortune through some unethical business deals. Thus, Galeazzo, born 18 March 1903, was brought up in an environment of wealth and luxury, and inherited his father’s love for fascism. Father and son both took part in Mussolini’s 1922 ‘March on Rome’.

Diplomacy and Marriage

Ciano studied law before embarking on a diplomatic career which took him to South America and China. In between postings, on 30 April 1930, he married Edda Mussolini, hence becoming Mussolini’s son-in-law – facilitating a rapid rise up the promotional ladder. The couple were to have three children although Ciano, like his father-in-law, had numerous affairs. He was certainly disliked by his mother-in-law who, understandably, thoroughly disproved of his womanizing.

In 1935, Mussolini made Ciano his minister for propaganda. The same year, Ciano volunteered for action in Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia, serving in a bomber squadron and reaching the rank of captain. He returned to a hero’s welcome and in June 1936, aged only 33, Mussolini appointed him minister of foreign affairs, replacing Mussolini himself. (Ciano’s father, meanwhile, was serving as the president of the Chamber of Deputies, a post he held from 1934 to shortly before his death in 1939).

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The Execution of of Hideki Tojo

On 23 December 1948, former prime minister of Japan, Hideki Tojo, was executed for war crimes.

Born in Tokyo on 30 December 1884, Hideki Tojo, the son of a general, was brought up in a military environment that held little regard for politicians or civilians. An admirer of Adolf Hitler, Tojo advocated closer ties between Japan and Germany and Italy, and in September 1940, the three Axis powers signed the Tripartite Pact.

Appointed Japan’s Minister for War in July 1940, Tojo was keen to accelerate the coming of war against the US. He viewed the US as a weak nation, populated by degenerate and lazy civilians. Tojo was appointed Japan’s prime minister in October 1941 and within two months had ordered the attack on Pearl Harbor, thus turning the war into a global conflict.

As well as prime minister and minister for war, Hideki Tojo was also appointed home and foreign minister. From February 1944 he was also made Commander-in-Chief of the General Staff. Thus, he ruled almost as a dictator, answerable only to Emperor Hirohito.

But as the war turned against Japan, Tojo faced mounting pressure from his government and military hierarchy. Eventually, on 18 July 1944, after a string of losses, the Emperor obliged Tojo to resign.

Following the atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in early August 1945, Tojo was amongst those who maintained Japan should still not surrender.

‘Sorry it is taking me so long to die’

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Lavrenty Beria – a brief biography

On 23 December 1953, Lavrenti Beria was executed. Born in Georgia on 29 March 1899, Beria had risen to prominence in Georgia during the Russian Revolution of 1917 and, during the 1920s, became a firm favourite of fellow Georgian, Joseph Stalin. In 1938 Beria was appointed head of the dreaded secret police, the NKVD.

‘Perfidy and cunning’

A brutish, inhumane man, Lavrenti Beria declared in 1937 that enemies ‘of the party of Lenin and Stalin [would] be mercilessly crushed and destroyed’. He was true to his word and played a major role in Stalin’s Great Purges of the 1930s, sending countless numbers to the gulags or to be executed. Stalin called Beria ‘our Himmler‘. It was meant as a compliment.

Yugoslavian writer, Milovan Djilas, described Beria as ‘plump, greenish, and pale, with soft damp hands… with [a] square-cut mouth and bulging eyes behind his pince-nez.’ Svetlana Alliluyeva, Stalin’s daughter, described him as ‘more treacherous, more practised in perfidy and cunning, more insolent and single-minded’ than even her own father.

Uncle-figure

A lover of Rachmaninov’s music and a cuddly uncle-figure to Svetlana Alliluyeva, pictured, Beria had his bodyguards abduct young girls off the streets for his devious sexual pleasure. Those that refused his predatory advances risked being packed off to a gulag.

Beria had risen through the ranks as first secretary of the Georgian Communist party, forcing through collectivisation and quashing nationalistic tendencies. His first task as head of the NKVD, was to purge his predecessor, Nikolai Yezhov (or Ezhov), and wind down the Great Terror that had reached a climax in 1937. The worst may have been over but the arrests continued and Beria, according to contemporary accounts, was not shy in getting his hands dirty while interrogating suspects; relishing in torture and beatings meted out to the unfortunates brought before him.

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Edith Cavell – a brief biography

When the First World War broke out, Edith Cavell was working as a matron in a Brussels nursing school, a school she had co-founded in 1907 and where she’d helped pioneer the importance of follow-up care. But at the time, July 1914, she was on leave, holidaying with her family in Norfolk, England. On hearing the news of war, her parents begged her not to return to Belgium – but of course, she did.

Following the German occupation of Brussels, Cavell refused the German offer of safe conduct into neutral Netherlands. She continued her work and in the process hid refugee British, Belgian and French soldiers and provided over 200 of them the means to escape into the Netherlands from where most managed the journey back to England. With the Germans watching the work of the hospital, and its comings and goings, her arrest was inevitable. It duly came on 3 August 1915. Edith Cavell, arrested by the Germans, readily admitted her guilt.

‘Patriotism is not enough’

Cavell was remanded in isolation for ten weeks, not even being allowed to meet the lawyer appointed to defend her until the morning of her trial, a trial that lasted only two days. Cavell, along with 34 others, was found guilty. Her case became a cause célèbre but the British government, realising the Germans were acting within their own legality, was unable to intervene. However, the Americans, as neutrals, pointed to Cavell’s nursing credentials and her saving of the lives of German soldiers, as well as British, but to no avail. Along with her Belgian accomplice, Philippe Baucq, the nurse was found guilty and sentenced to be shot. Continue reading →

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Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya – a brief biography

On 29 November 1941, Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya, aged 18, was executed by German occupiers.

The Germans had invaded the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941 and by late November had surrounded and laid siege to Leningrad and were bearing down on Moscow. The Soviet authorities were recruiting volunteers to break through the German lines and operate as partisan fighters in German-occupied areas. Their task, generally, was to cause as much disruption to the German advance. It was a dangerous assignment but one which 18-year-old Zoya readily volunteered for.

Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya was born 13 September 1923 in the district of Tambov, about 300 miles southeast of Moscow. She was well-cultured and devoured the works of Tolstoy, Dickens, Shakespeare, Goethe and Pushkin and loved the music of Tchaikovsky and Beethoven, and was a member of the Soviet youth Komsomol organisation. (Pictured below is Zoya’s Komsomol membership card).

Partisan

Having been accepted as a partisan, despite her tender age, Zoya was given the name ‘Tanya’. Handed a revolver and trained how to use it, she was assigned to a small group of partisans and given instructions. Their first task was to lay mines on the Volokolamsk highway, just behind German lines, about 80 miles west of Moscow. Excited and nervous, Zoya declared, ‘If we fall, let’s fall like heroes’. Another task involved laying spikes in the road but the more dangerous jobs were reserved for the young men. Zoya pleaded her case, stating, ‘Difficulties ought to be shared equally.’ Her commander, a man who went by the name of Boris, acquiesced.

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