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"My crimes seem so awful," he cried, "that I can find no excuse for them. I am ready to take the consequences."
Germans are executed with axe and chopping block by a brawny man bedight in evening clothes and black gloves. Seemingly Peter Kuerten's neck cannot escape the axe. But the Düsseldorf Court, unwilling to take the smallest chance of the nine death sentences being set aside by pardon or reprieve, wound up by sentencing the prisoner to toil 15 years at hard labor if not executed, deprived him of all his rights as a German citizen, ordered him to pay all the costs of his trial—one of the most expensive in German criminal history.
*Christine Klein, 10.