The Executioners Bible by Steven Fielding

Author:Steven Fielding [Steve Fielding]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781843586968
Publisher: John Blake Publishing
Published: 2011-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 5:

Rivalry

Robert Baxter of Hertfordshire is one of the more mysterious of twentieth-century executioners. Little seems to be known of his private life away from the gallows and there is hardly anything to shed extra light on him in any of the files held at the National Archives. This is despite his being one of the most highly regarded of executioners, who for over a decade was responsible for almost every execution carried out in the city of London.

Robert Orridge Baxter became an assistant hangman in early 1915. Although records of his training are thus far unavailable, it’s not unreasonable to assume he attended the short course of instruction at Pentonville along with Edward Taylor, as both appeared on the list within a few weeks of each other. Baxter was 37 years old, and living at 49 Port Vale, Hertford, when he witnessed his first execution, at Wandsworth, as assistant to Tom Pierrepoint, on 15 July 1915.

The man executed was Robert Rosenthal, a German convicted of treason at Middlesex Guildhall. In April 1915, a letter sent to a man named Kulbe in Holland was intercepted by the British Secret Service. Franz Kulbe was an alias of Captain Von Prieger of the German Admiralty, who was known to be active in the recruitment and control of spies. Traced to a hotel in Copenhagen, the writer of the letter was discovered to be 23-year-old Robert Rosenthal. Rosenthal was known to have spent time in England between November 1914 and April 1915, and to have sent telegrams to a number of addresses in Holland. Several of these had been intercepted and monitored and, when examined again in greater detail, were found to contain coded messages detailing the movements of the British naval fleet at Edinburgh, Portsmouth and Hull.

Rosenthal was kept under surveillance and a few days later he travelled back to England. In due course he made his way back to Copenhagen, where he was arrested on board a ship as it sailed out of Newcastle and passed into international waters. After he had initially denied any involvement with espionage, Rosenthal’s demeanour changed when he was confronted with the evidence of telegrams and the letter from the Copenhagen Hotel, and, leaping to his feet, he clicked his heels and confessed that he was indeed a spy.

His trial was held in camera (in secret), and following conviction Rosenthal wrote to Lord Kitchener, apologising for his actions and offering to divulge information on an American in Berlin working for the American Relief Commission, who was spying for the enemy. Rosenthal was the only spy convicted during world War One to be hanged, while eleven other spies tried and convicted by the court martial were shot at the Tower of London. The reason he went to the gallows and was not shot was simply due to a lack of space at the Tower in the summer of 1915, as several other spies were already waiting on death row and a number of others were on remand pending trial.

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