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French MacLean. “American Hangman. Mastersergeant John C. Woods. The United States Army’s notorious executioner in World War II and Nürnberg

Fabian Van Samang
p. 152-153
Référence(s) :

French MacLean. American Hangman. Mastersergeant John C. Woods. The United States Army’s notorious executioner in World War II and Nürnberg. Atglen: Schiffer Publishing, Ltd, 2019, 256 p.

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French MacLean. “American Hangman. Mastersergeant John C. Woods. The United States Army’s notorious executioner in World War II and Nürnberg

French MacLean. “American Hangman. Mastersergeant John C. Woods. The United States Army’s notorious executioner in World War II and Nürnberg”

1In 2019, Schiffer Military published a 256-pages biography of Master Sergeant John C. Woods, the American executioner who, on 16th October 1946, hanged ten top Nazi officials in the shabby gymnasium adjacent to the court house at Nuremberg. All of them – military leaders, generals, propagandists – were tried and convicted by the International Military Tribunal for conspiracy, waging wars of aggression, war crimes and/or crimes against humanity. Author of this voluminous and richly illustrated study is colonel French L. MacLean, a retired officer, historian and university professor from Illinois, who previously wrote the much acclaimed ‘The fifth field: the story of the 96 American soldiers sentenced to death and executed in Europe and North Africa in World War II’.

2John Clarence Woods was born in Wichita, Kansas, in 1911. As his parents divorced when he was ten, the boy was raised by his paternal grandparents. At age 18 he joined the Marine, but was ousted because he left his unit without official permission. He worked for Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps, where he met his future wife, Hazel Woods, whom he married in 1933. Woods was a heavy drinker and gambler, who piled up debts. Sentenced to two years in jail on probation for default, it took him quite a while to lie his way back into the army (he falsely pretended being honourably dismissed). In January 1944, after several months of military training, Woods was transferred to England. He participated in the landing on Omaha Beach in June 1944 – his battalion suffered 24 casualties, but Woods himself wasn’t injured. Although he was unexperienced as far as judicial executions are concerned, he volunteered for the job as American hangman in September 1944, falsely claiming he had already assisted in some hangings in the United States. From October 1944 until January 1946, he executed 1 German and 47 American GI’s on French and Belgian soil, all of them hot-headed, poorly educated young men who had been convicted of homicide, rape or robbery. The youngest one, Louisiana-born Matthew Clay, didn’t live to celebrate his nineteenth birthday – he was hung by Woods in June 1945, the execution taking 17 long minutes.

3From June 1945 to September 1946, Woods led 37 Germans to the gallows in Landsberg and Bruchsal Prison. Some of them were charged and found guilty for assassinating American pilots in the closing months of the war, but 21 were convicted for serving as guards in the infamous Dachau concentration camp. Woods and his assistants did a lousy job – 49-years old Justus Gerstenberger, a painter, policeman and father of four, was hit in the face, broke his jaw and lost several teeth when, falling down, he was hit by the massive trapdoor of the gallows, weighing over 100 kilograms. This didn’t stop Woods’ superiors from sending him to Nuremberg, where eleven high ranking Nazi officials recently had been sentenced to death by hanging. Woods built and painted the three gallows (in olive green), stretched the ropes and demonstrated the execution process to the Russian delegates on 15 October 1946, at 2 p.m. The next day he hung ten Nazi officials (Hermann Göring got the jump on him, swallowing a cyanide pill moments before his execution), five on the first, and five on the second gallows. Once again, the executions were botched – Keitel’s death struggle took about 24 minutes, Woods’ victims suffered serious face injuries while falling down, and Woods had to rush down the thirteen stairs to put Jew baiter Julius Streicher out of his misery.

4After the war, Woods continued his service in the American military. In 1950 he was sent to the Eniwetok, an atoll in the Pacific which was used by the American government as a nuclear test site. Unlike the popular story that he died while testing an electric chair, Woods was electrocuted while trying to fix a broken power cord. He was buried at Toronto Cemetery in Kansas on 14 August 1950.

5It doesn’t take too much to turn an executioner’s biography into a gruesome and sensational book, filled with sordid details. Nothing of the kind in ‘American hangman’, which is a carefully researched, detailed and factual account of the life of a man, whose life up to now has remained rather shady. Most of the study is based on previously unknown records from the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). Next to this, the author made use of about twenty published diaries and memoires, over forty articles in magazines and newspapers, and a number of personal interviews he conducted with major witnesses and historians. In short, MacLean’s monography is a well-written, thoroughly documented and interesting book, which sheds light on the life of a largely unknown key-player in the history of the Second World War.

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Titre French MacLean. “American Hangman. Mastersergeant John C. Woods. The United States Army’s notorious executioner in World War II and Nürnberg
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Fabian Van Samang, « French MacLean. “American Hangman. Mastersergeant John C. Woods. The United States Army’s notorious executioner in World War II and Nürnberg »Témoigner. Entre histoire et mémoire, 132 | 2021, 152-153.

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Fabian Van Samang, « French MacLean. “American Hangman. Mastersergeant John C. Woods. The United States Army’s notorious executioner in World War II and Nürnberg »Témoigner. Entre histoire et mémoire [En ligne], 132 | 2021, mis en ligne le 26 janvier 2023, consulté le 29 mars 2024. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/temoigner/10063 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/temoigner.10063

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Fabian Van Samang

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