EXCLUSIVE. Before Britain executed German prisoners of World War II, secret tests were conducted it was claimed to ‘improve the efficiency’ of the methods used. 

In documents held at the Records Office in Kew, London, the tests revealed that it was taking up to 25 minutes for victims of the Nuremberg trials and military tribunals to die on the gallows.

Experiments confirmed that the hangings did not inflict instantaneous death; the hearts of condemned prisoners continued to beat following execution.

England’s Hangman

Albert Pierrepoint is claimed to have hanged over 600 people, but the official figure is 435 victims.  His actual job was an assistant in a Bradford grocery and also a brewery’s drayman. 

£15 per hanging

In later life, Pierrepoint was a public house manager.  He was said to have hanged over 200 prisoners-of-war and for each murder was paid £15. 

These included Irma Grese, Ruth Ellis, John Amery, Joseph Kramer, William Joyce, and Timothy Evans.

A Terrible Mess

Pierrepoint described the botched hanging of German spy Karel Richter as ‘a terrible mess. It is I who has faced them last, young men and girls, working men, grandmothers. I have been amazed to see the courage with which they take that walk into the unknown.

All the men and women whom I have faced at that final moment convince me that in what I have done I have not prevented a single murder.’

This is from the man who claimed that he had done more jobs than any other executioner in English history.

Innocent Victims Slain

Despite evidence to the contrary, the British Home Office continued to take the view that hanging was the most humane and efficient form of execution until capital punishment ended in 1965. 

Since, it has been conceded that some executed men, women and youths were totally innocent victims of miscarriages of justice and have since been pardoned. 

Production line hangings

The experiments in hanging techniques at Hamelin in Germany during the winter months of 1945 / 1946 involved putting to death 64 German prisoners of war found guilty on charges that would never for a moment be considered in a legitimate court of law.

Because of the production line scale of sentences handed out at these artificial courts, as many as thirteen prisoners awaited execution at any one time. 

Secondary Executions

It was felt that there would be an ‘inordinate delay’ if bodies were left suspended for more than an hour or more, which was necessary to ensure someone hanged could not regain consciousness. 

A doctor, F. E. Buckland, Assistant Director of Pathology, British Army of the Rhine, was asked by the Director of Medical Services whether he thought there was any objection to injecting the body immediately after the execution with a lethal dose of ‘some chemical solution’. 

According to the file, Doctor Buckland felt no ‘ethical objection’ and believed 10 per cent chloroform was appropriate.

Group Hangings

The first series of killings took place on December 13, 1945.  To be hanged that day were three women and ten men. 

The women were to be hanged one by one, the men in pairs.  According to the file, after the trap was sprung, the medical officer descended the stairs to the room below where, standing on a step ladder, he listened to the beat of the heart for half a minute. 

Coup de Grace by chloroform

He would then inject 10cc of chloroform. Some of the victims he injected directly into the heart, which he noticed caused instant heart stoppage. 

Others were injected intravenously in the arm, which caused the heart to stop within a few seconds.  This latter method proves beyond all doubt that the hanged victims were at that point alive.

20 minutes to kill prisoners

In a third series of executions carried out on May 15 1946 the doctor used an electrocardiograph, an instrument that records electrical heart activity.

This revealed that inaudible impulses were produced for a further ten minutes in the martyrs’ bodies. Twenty minutes would elapse between hanging and merciful release through death. 

Mass Executions

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Dr Buckland concluded that in future executions bodies should be left hanging for fifteen minutes until a heartbeat was no longer audible rather than the customary hour interval. 

This, the doctor surmised, would make it ‘possible to affect dual executions at half-hourly intervals.’  

The hanging procedures were now putting to death a constant stream of victims, including women and children as young as thirteen years of age. 

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