In Landsberg prison, Germany, Willi Frey, 23-year-old SS man, showed that he had learned something from the conquerors. "I will go to the gallows singing Give Me Five Minutes More and Open the Door, Richard!" he had boasted. But Willi had not learned much.
Last week, as he and 47 other convicted Nazis walked to the black-curtained scaffolds in the sun-washed courtyard, Willi whispered: "I am dying like Jesus on the cross . . . without fault."
Over two days, the traps banged 48 times. Life had run out for the men who had exterminated 700,000 inmates of Mauthausen concentration camp. Some of their victims had been thrown into whirling cement mixers, tossed to ravenous dogs, buried alive, used for laboratory experiments. Three G.I. executioners made death for the killers relatively merciful.
Death Is an Honor. There was little repentance, even on the gallows. Said Camp Commandant Major Victor Zoller with a smile, as his hands were tied: "I am not a war criminal . . . neither were the others." Screamed the camp dentist as the rope was fastened: "Lord help me! ... I thought the American troops were here for justice & freedom." But death was welcomed, after a fashion, by August Eigruber, once Gauleiter of Upper Austria. "I consider it ... an honor," he snarled as the hood was placed over his head, "to be tried and hanged by the most inhuman of all victors." Anton Kaufmann was less resigned. Snapping the cords about his wrists as he plunged through the trap, he grasped the rope above his head. Kicking & squirming, he fought for 18 minutes before he died.
One man, in a lone cell in the grey prison building, was bitter with a special German kind of bitterness. Granted a stay of execution, Otto Striegel snapped: "Why wasn't I hanged with my comrades?"
In the courtyard, the bodies were being placed in unpainted coffins. A bulldozer was dredging a common grave. The vegetable garden tended by the condemned during their imprisonment burgeoned in the spring sunshine. It could be seen from the cell where Hitler in 1924 wrote Mein Kampf.