The Bastard Who Executed The Top Nazis

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 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

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 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 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 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 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.

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, 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, 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. 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 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 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 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 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.

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

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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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

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

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 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, 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 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, 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

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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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, 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.

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 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 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, 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 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. 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 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. 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 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 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, 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 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 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

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 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 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. 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

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. 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 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. 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 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 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 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? 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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 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 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, 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

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, 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 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 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 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. 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. 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 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 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, 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 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? 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 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, 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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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.

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 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. 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

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, 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 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 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 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 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. 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. 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. 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 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 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

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 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 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.

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. 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 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 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. 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 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 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, 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, 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, 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 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 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, 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. 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 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. 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, 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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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

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

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 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

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

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 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

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

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 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 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 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. 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 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.

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 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. 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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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.

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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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.

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,

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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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

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, 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, 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 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, 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 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 wrote the episodes over, Yeah,