The gymnasium smelled of fresh paint and hemp rope as Master Sergeant John C. Woods checked his knots one final time.

The Nuremberg Gallows: Eleven Men, Thirteen Steps, and One Botched Execution

When the architects of the Holocaust met the hangman's rope

On October 16, 1946, ten Nazi war criminals were hanged at Nuremberg in botched executions that took some men twenty minutes to die.

The gymnasium of the Nuremberg Palace of Justice smelled of fresh paint and hemp rope. At 1:11 a.m. on October 16, 1946, Master Sergeant John C. Woods, a squat Texan with steady hands and a troubling résumé, checked his knots one final time. In less than two hours, he would hang ten of Nazi Germany's most powerful men—the first mass execution of war criminals in modern history.

Joachim von Ribbentrop, Hitler's foreign minister, climbed the thirteen wooden steps first. His face had aged decades in the eighteen months since his capture in a Hamburg boarding house, clutching a letter from a British officer he hoped would save him. It hadn't. At 1:16 a.m., the trapdoor opened, and the man who had signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact dropped into darkness.

Outside, two thousand journalists waited in the October cold, forbidden from witnessing what would later become one of history's most controversial executions. Inside, only eight official witnesses watched as Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel mounted the scaffold, his Iron Cross confiscated, his military bearing intact. He shouted "Deutschland über alles!" before the hood silenced him.

But something was wrong. Woods had miscalculated the…

💡 Executioner John C. Woods claimed extensive hanging experience, but Army records revealed Nuremberg was actually his first execution—he had lied on his military application.