Lord High Executioner by Howard Engel

Author:Howard Engel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Media

It was some time after the invention of firearms that they were first used to execute military prisoners such as spies, turncoats, hostages, and deserters. In parts of Asia, criminals were actually secured over the muzzle of a cannon before it was discharged, but that was in places where it was not unknown to crush the head of an offender by having an elephant step upon it.

In Sweden, burning at the stake was not abolished until 1841, two years after a woman who had murdered her child was executed in this way. Where in Britain those condemned to the stake were first strangled, in Sweden the woman first had her right hand chopped off, and then her head, before her body was burned in public. In 1734, a Swede could be condemned to the block for sixty-eight crimes ranging from blasphemy, adultery, arson, and bigamy to treason and murder. According to my friend Kildare Dobbs, who recently visited Langholmen prison-museum:

… the last execution [in Sweden] took place in 1910, the murderer Johan Alfred Anderson having been beheaded by guillotine, the only occasion on which this French artifact was employed. The executioner was Gustav Dalman [1848–1920], a former infantry corporal who had beheaded the previous five condemned with a broadaxe.…

When Hitler restored the death penalty in Germany in the 1930s, it took the form of a headsman dressed in formal evening attire but wearing a mask, and wielding a broadax. When his client was female, she was dressed in immaculate white, as though for her wedding, in an odious and diabolical distortion of the celebration of marriage.

In Russia, capital punishment was often suspended by the czars, perhaps in an attempt to win popularity, but invariably it was restored, at least for state crimes, when it was needed. Meanwhile beatings with the rod and knout, a form of knotted whip, went on. People disappeared or died in custody, but there was no official sanction of this. Many prisoners died under interrogation and were never brought to trial. Indeed, prisoners in many countries apart from Russia were more prone to die of “accidents” where capital punishment had been ended. Justice was certainly seen to be done in those countries where the death penalty remained firm. Elsewhere, the data are muddled.

What marks the justice systems in Russia and eastern Europe are the arbitrary deeds of the powerful. In one such act, Russia nearly sacrificed one of its foremost novelists when Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky was still a talented youth. The writer was involved in a plot to assassinate Czar Nicholas I. When the scheme was discovered, the writer was invited to sell his comrades to save his life. He refused. Louis Blake Duff picks up the story in The County Kerchief:

They were all found guilty, of course, but Czar Nicholas I refused to sign the death warrant, but he did wish “to give the young men a good lesson.”

That lesson was in the Czar’s eyes a comedy. The prisoners were told to prepare for death. They were taken to a public place where a scaffold had been erected.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.