Members of the Gjentehird, Norwegian equivalent of the BDM catering for young women in the 14 to 18 age range.  The girl on the right wears a lapel pin of the Norwegian Nasjonal Samling (National Unity) Party, Vidkun Quisling's equivalent of the Nazi Party - the device of a flying eagle bearing the Party's Sun Cross emblem.  On her left sleeve she wears a Sun Cross cloth badge (gold cross on red Sun).  The lozenge-shaped enamelled badge on her left breast is one of a range of such badges (Sun Cross circled within a lozenge) often worn by members of the Norwegian NS women's organisation - the Kvinnehird - and its youth arms.  The other badge is the rarely-awarded High Command of the Hitler Youth for Distinguished Foreigners, a rarely-awarded distinction made by the German HJ to its particular foreign comrades.  Best regards, JR.

Norwegian friends ...

... 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.

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

Two Ukrainian women at a fortified railway station at Bogdanovka in the Central Sector, late 1943.
Note log walls and trenches.