Spies, Saboteurs and Secret Missions of World War II by Tony Matthews

Author:Tony Matthews
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Big Sky Publishing
Published: 2022-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

The memorial to Mildred Fish-Harnack and her husband, Arvid, located at the Zehlendorf cemetery in Berlin. Mildred’s grave is the only known burial site of all the Red Orchestra members killed by the Nazis.

— Photographer: Mutter Erde. Wikimedia Commons.

A man named Johann Reichhart was the executioner responsible for killing the members of the Red Orchestra, and the Plötzensee Prison in Berlin became one of the most notorious execution centres in the country. About five thousand people were executed there during the war, the victims being either hanged or beheaded. The executions took place in a separate ground–level brick building that was divided into two areas separated by heavy curtains. In one area was a steel beam into which hooks had been bolted. In front of the hooks and behind the curtains the guillotine had been erected. Hitler personally ordered thousands of people to be hanged in this room, including those who had made the ill-fated attempt on his life on 20 July, 1944.

Johann Reichhart has been credited as having carried out more than three thousand executions in this room — around 250 of these were women. Reichhart also carried out executions at several other Nazi prisons in Cologne, Breslau, Frankfurt and Brandenburg. After the war the Allies recruited Reichhart to assist with the executions of Nazi war–criminals and he supervised the construction of the gallows at Nuremberg used to hang all the principal Nazis. He also hanged Martin Weiss, the notorious former commandant of the Dachau concentration camp.

After the war the guillotine at Plötzensee disappeared and for many years was lost. However, in 2014 it was discovered at the Bavarian National Museum in Munich where it had been mothballed in a storeroom.146.

Yet Reichhart did not have a successful or happy life. His wife divorced him, his son committed suicide, and Reichhart lived on a meagre pension until his death in 1972.

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