Former SS Colonel Paul Blobel was the first to go. Shortly after midnight, four husky MPs led him across the floodlit yard of Landsberg Prison. On the gallows platform, a U.S. Army hangman was waiting for him. Blobel (responsible for the killing of 30,000 Jews at Kiev in 1941) got 90 seconds for his last words. Thrusting out his spade-bearded chin, he cried: "I die in the faith of my people. May the German people be aware of its enemies!"
"Attention!" called Colonel Walter R. Graham, Landsberg's U.S. commandant. Blobel stiffened; the hangman and his assistants slipped a black hood over Blobel's head, adjusted the heavy noose. A priest intoned a prayer. The trap sprang open with a clatter.
For four years Blobel and six other condemned war criminals had been living on borrowed time while U.S. courts reviewed their claims for clemency; twice, their lives had been spared at the last hour (TIME, June 4). Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to review their case. The long wait for the gallows was over.
After Blobel, the other six went to the platform in alphabetical order. Each had an unrepentant last message. Werner Braune, who had murdered thousands of Jews and gypsies, shouted: "Kameraden, es lebe Deutschland!" (Comrades, long live Germany). Faint echoing cries came back through the thick walls from war criminals who are serving prison, terms. Cried Hans Schmidt, former adjutant at Buchenwald: "Like me you are obeying orders . . . I am dying innocent."
Within 2½ hours, the seven—responsible for the killing of millions—were dead. They were the last of 275 Nazis condemned to death by U.S. occupation authorities. Five and a half years after the first war-crimes trial opened at Nürnberg, the horror-laden case was closed.