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I'm following my father's footsteps ...

Suddeutsch Zeitung.

... Following my dear old Dad", as the old music hall song put it. The gentleman in the topper is Johann Reichart, who believed in high dress standards for practitioners of his profession - which was State executioner. Coming from a long-established family of exectioners, Johann started his career in 1924. Business was not too brisk during the Weimar Republic years, but picked up hugely once Hitler came to power. The multiplication of capital crimes of a political nature called for a great productivity increase on the part of Johann and his fellow executioners. One decision of Hitler's of which Johann would have approved was confirmation of the guillotine as the normal means of execution for capital crimes - later in life, he argued strongly for this method as the most efficient method of execution. On his own reckoning, Johann's career total was over 3,000 executions, mainly during the Third Reich period, with heavy weighting towards the wartime period (when Gestapo "influence" of the judicial system and general paranoia greatly increased the supply of subject matter). The method used in most cases was the "fallbeil" (drop-axe ?), a somewhat miniturised German version of the rather grander French guillotine. Just as effective, though. Johann's eminence among the various executioners kept busy at the time derives from his role as the principal headsman to Judge Roland Friesler's "People's Court". Among those "processed" by him were White Rose Group leaders, Sophie and Hans Scholl. After the war, Johann was detained for a time, but it was determined that it would not be reasonable to prosecute him for, after all, only doing his job (not to be confused with "only obeying orders", apparently). In fact, the Americans actually employed him for a time to help their own military exectutioners (not very good, really - probably didn't get enough practice) to execute well over 100 lower-level Nazi war criminals condemned to death by the "secondary" war crimes trials. Johann's profession became redundant when West Germany abolished the death penalty, in 1949. He lingered on - apparently hoping for its restoration - until his death in 1972. As to the top hat etc. - Johann may have adopted this somewhat bizarre getup for the scaffold (I am sure many of the victims thought it a bit strange) from his uncle, Franz Xavier, also a headsman. I wonder what their laundry bills were like ? Best regards, JR.