How Every Major Nazi Leader Died

Number 30: Heinrich Himmler. Chief of the SS, assistant chief of the Gestapo, and one of the architects of the Holocaust. He and Hitler had a falling out in the dog days of World War II after he tried to go behind the Fuhrer’s back to broker a peace deal - and Hitler ordered his arrest. Himmler slipped away from his former inner circle by disguising himself as a soldier. For a brief moment, it seemed like the architect of so much terror might vanish into the chaos of a collapsing Reich. After more than a week on the run, Himmler was captured by a patrol of former Soviet POWS on May 21st, 1945. He was then handed over to the British. But Himmler decided to settle his own trial out of court with a concealed cyanide pill the next day, causing a quick, but thankfully painful, death. But that’s nothing compared to some of the gruesome fates that awaited the top brass of the Nazi death machine. I’m Josh, and this is how every major Nazi leader died. Number 29: Adolf Eichmann was another one of the key players in the Holocaust - and if you’ve ever heard the phrase “the banality of evil,” it was coined in response to him. Eichmann was captured by Mossad agents in Argentina before standing trial in Israel - where he infamously took no responsibility for his crimes. He claimed that he was just an obedient bureaucrat following orders. Of course, that didn’t work. He was sentenced to death on December 15th, 1961. After some time on death row, he was taken to the gallows and hanged on May 31st, 1962. His body was cremated, and the ashes thrown into the mediterranean sea. If Eichmann claimed he was just shuffling papers, the next Nazi put on a lab coat and made cruelty disturbingly personal. Number 28: Known as “The Angel of Death”, Josef Mengele became infamous for his grotesque human experiments on innocent prisoners at the Auschwitz concentration camp. He was also one of the many Nazis who fled to South America via the ratlines. But justice catches up with everyone eventually in one form or another. Mengele spent his last years broke, paranoid, and miserable. He was so afraid of getting caught that he chewed on his own hair until a ball of hair obstructed his intestines. But Mengele never did get caught. Instead, in 1979, he had a stroke while in his swimming pool, sinking to the bottom from paralysis and drowning in his last panicked minutes. And Mengele wasn’t the only one to face his reckoning. Number 27: Another powerful logistical force in the Holocaust, Reinhard Heydrich was one of the orchestrators behind Kristallnacht. He was so scary and brutal that Hitler called him, “the man with the iron heart. ” Few were more feared and hated than Heydrich, but appropriately, he also had one of the most gruesome and painful deaths in the regime. Two Czechoslovak assassins ambushed Heydrich in Prague-Liben on May 27th, 1942. After an attempt to gun the Nazi down failed, they threw a converted anti-tank mine at Heydrich’s car. The resulting explosion peppered his body with shrapnel. He suffered through a week of excruciating treatment as the infection took hold. Just as it seemed he might recover, Heydrich went into shock, slipped into a coma, and died on June 4th. Even the Fuhrer’s right-hand man couldn’t escape the inevitable. Number 26: Much like Himmler, Rudolf Hess was one of Hitler’s closest allies… until he decided to betray him. Hess was by Hitler’s side during the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch, helped him dictate Mein Kampf in prison, and acted as deputy Fuhrer until 1941. That’s when he made the completely bizarre decision to fly to Scotland to try to negotiate for peace. Arrested for being an enemy of peace and disowned by Hitler as a traitor, Hess would spend the next 46 years in prison, before meeting the reaper in 1987, aged 93. He decided to make a fashionable new necktie out of an extension cord, and then gravity did the rest for us. Hess was a traitor, but next, a master manipulator who nearly rewrote history. Number 25: Albert Speer was a monster with incredible PR. He was an accomplished architect, Reich Minister of Armaments and War Production, and a close friend of Adolf Hitler. He managed to avoid a death sentence at the Nuremberg Trials by convincing the public that he was an innocent figure swept up inside the Nazi machine - a statement which has been widely debunked. After getting out of prison in 1966, he made himself a grim international celebrity, giving interviews and writing extensively on the Third Reich from the inside - always painting himself as a lot nicer than he was, of course. He went to London in 1981 to participate in a TV interview program, where he suffered a stroke and dropped dead on September 1st. If you thought you’d seen evil, get ready - the next figure takes it to a whole new level. Number 24: Oskar Dirlewanger was called “The Worst Nazi” by some, which is really saying something. He was a psychopath and a sexual sadist of the worst kind, commander of the Dirlewanger Brigade, a penal unit made purely of violent prisoners. He and his men committed horrific atrocities across Eastern Europe, putting down uprisings and doing unimaginable things to civilians.

He was arrested on June 1st, 1945, when trying to escape after the war ended, where he ended up in a detention center run by Polish guards. Interestingly, Dirlewanger died of “Natural Causes” within a week. Though really, when one of your nicknames is “The Butcher of Warsaw” and you end up in the hands of Polish guards, getting savagely beaten to death is a pretty natural cause for you to go out. Dirlewanger died violently… the next nazi would have a slower, lingering death. Number 23: Joachim von Ribbentrop was the sinister Foreign Minister that kept the Axis Powers working together in Europe with his dark diplomacy. He was also one of the major forces pushing for war between America and Imperial Japan following the attack on Pearl Harbor. Even other Nazis didn’t like him - largely considering him to be dumb and boring. But he did have an achievement no other Nazi could claim to have. When Ribbentrop was captured after the war and put to trial, on October 16th, 1946, he became the first ever Nazi to be put to death by hanging at Nuremberg. The hangman was U. S. Master Sergeant John C. Woods, who didn’t actually do a great job. Ribbentrop’s hanging was botched, meaning rather than having his neck broken, he was strangled exceedingly slowly - taking a full 14 minutes to die. Justice came painfully for Ribbentrop, but the next monster barely faced it at all. Number 22: Despite the name, there was nothing funky about Walther Funk. As the Reich Minister of Economics, President of the Reichsbank, and State Secretary at the Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, he wore a lot of hats - but he sadly never wore the executioner’s hood. During the Nuremberg trials, he openly wept when the full extent of his contributions to the Holocaust were being discussed - arousing the sympathies of the jury just enough to get him life in prison instead of the death sentence. In 1957, he was given compassionate leave because his health was failing, but clearly it wasn’t failing that badly. He’d survive another 3 years before dying of complications from diabetes on May 31st, 1960. Some monsters met their punishment… others, like the next, got a quiet life instead. Number 21: A gifted Naval admiral and self-proclaimed Hitler fanboy, Karl Dönitz, was effectively appointed Hitler’s successor after the Fuhrer moved on to that big, flaming pit in the ground. Admittedly, it was because Göring - who’s coming up soon - had just royally annoyed Hitler. So the mustachioed menace was in a very “anyone but Göring” mindset. Dönitz tendered Germany’s ultimate surrender to the Allies before being convicted of war crimes at Nuremberg - where he insisted he followed the laws of war. He was sentenced to 10 years in prison, before being released and retiring to a small village near Hamburg. He died of a heart attack on Christmas Eve in 1980 at the age of 89. The next nazi decided to fact justice on his own terms Number 20: Hermann Goring was nasty piece of work and one of the most powerful Nazis of all. Among his many titles were Supreme Commander of the Air Force, Minister President of Prussia, Master of the German Hunt and Forests, and whatever other job he wanted. He was captured at the end of the war and at the Nuremberg trials, he was convicted of conspiracy, crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. He was sentenced to death by hanging, despite requesting the firing squad. The night before his execution, October 15, he decided to take a cyanide pill to take the edge off, so he never felt the rope of the hangman’s noose against his throat. The next Nazi vanished so completely, even history had to hunt him down. Number 19: Martin Bormann is one of the most mysterious cases on this list. We know Bormann died and his remains have been discovered… but the big question is: “How? ” As head of the Nazi Party Chancellery and private secretary to Adolf Hitler, he was considered a major part of the Nazi war machine. Even though he managed to evade capture, he was convicted and sentenced to death in absentia at the Nuremberg trials in 1946. He was missing for decades before his remains were found in Berlin in 1972, and identified as his in 1973. The most likely explanation was the ingestion of the convicted Nazi’s favorite diet supplement: Cyanide. The next monster’s reckoning would be brutal… and personal. Number 18: Rudolf Höss - not to be confused with Rudolf Hess - was the Commandant of Auschwitz where over a million people were murdered. After attempting to disappear under a false identity in 1946, he was caught by the British and extradited to Poland - where he stood trial for murder and eventually sentenced to death in 1947. Like many Nazis, he tried to dodge responsibility for his crimes. But strangely, what broke him was how kindly and humanely he was treated by the Polish while in prison. Only then, 4 days before his execution, did he realise the terrible enormity of his crimes and admitted that his life needed to be taken as punishment. He was hanged on specially made gallows in front of 100 people, many of whom were survivors of his torturous camp. If you thought you’d seen cruelty so far, this next one takes it to a whole new level.

Number 17: Described by Historian Michael Allen as, quote, “the vilest individual in the vilest organization ever known”, Odilo Globocnik was a pillar of Operation Reinhard - an organized slaughter of Polish Jews in what is known as the deadliest phase of the Holocaust. If you were having an evil guy competition and your opponent was Odilo Globocnik, you should quit. He fled when the Nazi Regime collapsed, only to be captured by the British cavalry in Austria on May 31st, 1945. He knew that, given just how severe his crimes were, he didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of getting out of this situation alive. But he did have a cyanide capsule, and decided that was the better option. In case you were wondering whether Odilo was going to hell, when they tried to bury his body at a local church yard, the priest told them to bury him outside the yard - he didn’t want the body buried on consecrated ground. Think that was bad? The next orchestrated horrors that make your skin crawl. Number 16: Paul Blobel was an mobile kill squad commander with two grim claims to fame. He orchestrated the Babi Yar Massacre in Kyiv, the largest single massacre of the Second World War, and he pioneered the so-called Gas Van - a mobile gas chamber used to execute prisoners. He personally copped to over 10,000 murders at trial, worse than likely every American serial killer in history combined. He was convicted for all this, and his attempts to cover up evidence of the Holocaust, at the Einsatzgruppen Trial of 1947 and 1948. In 1951, he was led, with a sullen look on his face, to the prison gallows, where he experienced a short drop and a sudden stop. A much kinder and more dignified death than many of his thousands of victims. The horrors keep escalating - the next killer turns atrocity into a terrifying art form. Number 15: One of the most cold-blooded killers in history, with over 100,000 victims, Friedrich Jeckeln carried out coordinated massacres that left Nazi-occupied parts of the Soviet Union in terror. His reign of murder destroyed countless lives - and his methods were chillingly systematic. There were days where he watched 25,000 prisoners killed in a row without experiencing so much as a flicker of emotion. No tears were shed for him when he was captured by the Russians in April, 1945, and taken to Latvia for “heavy interrogation” - which likely means they tortured the living hell out of him. And we can’t say we feel the least bit sorry about it. He was put in a military tribunal on February 3rd, found guilty, and hanged in front of a jubilant crowd of 4,000 that same afternoon. Not all monsters got the noose immediately… Number 14: As the commandant of two different brutal death camps, Sobibor and Treblinka, ex-cop Franz Stangl, has over a million human lives on his rap sheet. Before operating concentration camps, he was an SS officer and part of Aktion T4 - a Nazi initiative to murder disabled people as part of a wider eugenics program. After the war, he used the ratlines to flee to Brazil, eventually working at Volkswagen do Brasil for until his 1967 capture. Not once did he claim any responsibility for his horrific crimes, claiming he was acting in accordance with German law at the time. He was given a life sentence, which clearly took a toll on the already sickly Stangl. His health declined and he died of heart failure 4 years after getting locked up. Justice was swift for this next Reich member. Number 13: Following Heydrich getting blown up, Ernst Kaltenbrunner rose to the fore as one of the most powerful Nazi administrators out there. He acted as the third Chief of the Reich Security Main Office - which collectively oversaw dangerous groups like the Gestapo, the Kripo, and the intelligence department, the SD. His long record of aiding and abetting war crimes would come back to haunt him on October 1st, 1946, when he was sentenced to death by hanging. He was executed with the first batch of Nazis just 15 days later, being hanged and cremated - his ashes were rumored to be thrown into the River Isar in Munich. The list of dead Nazis leaders is growing… and the next name is about to be added. Number 12: Known as “The Beast of Belsen”, Josef Kramer was a walking SS nightmare. He was the commandant of both Auschwitz and the Bergen Belsen concentration camps, where he was personally responsible for the deaths of thousands. There’s no such thing as a nice death camp commandant, but Kramer was particularly sadistic. He delighted in beating and torturing prisoners, unleashing vicious dogs on them, and lining them up at mass graves to be gunned down en masse. He was captured by British forces and sentenced to death on November 17th, 1945, for his crimes against humanity. Albert Pierrepont, a professional British hangman with over 400 executions to his own name, was the one to tie the noose around Kramer’s neck and pull the lever, sending him off to Old Nick. The Nazi leadership thought they could walk free… they were wrong. Number 11: Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski was both a member of the Nazi top brass, and the spearhead of the Nazi security warfare - an initiative to undermine and destroy the

ideological opponents of the regime. He led the suppression of the Warsaw Uprising in 1944, killing thousands of civilians, and the cruel irony is, he didn’t even stand trial at Nuremberg. However, that didn’t mean he’d escape justice forever. He was arrested and tried in 1961 for his role in the violent Ernst Rohm purge, the Night of the Long Knives. He was then indicted again the next year for the murder of several Communists in 1933. He was sentenced to life imprisonment, and died of illness in 1972. Some Nazis thought time could protect them - the next learned the rope doesn’t wait… and it has backup. Number 10: Wilhelm Keitel was a figure so slimy that all the top Nazis except Hitler himself hated him. And that’s only because this military commander had a reputation for being Hitler’s number one fanboy. He ordered a number of brutal war crimes on Hitler’s behalf, and as such, when the war ended, there were some heavy consequences waiting for him. Keitel also experienced one of the most brutal deaths thanks to the incompetent team behind his 1946 hanging. The trap door that he and the other prisoners dropped through was too small, meaning he bashed his head on the way out, destroying the momentum of the drop. It resulted in a torturous 24 minutes of convulsions before eventually dying. This next Nazi met his maker but his body? No one knows where it is. Number 9: Known as Dr. Death and The Butcher of Mauthausen, Aribert Heim is lesser known than Josef Mengele, but may have been just as violent and sadistic. He conducted human experiments at the Mauthausen concentration camp - performing vivisections and amputations without anesthetic, injecting victims with gasoline, and even timing their deaths with a stopwatch for his own twisted amusement. He didn’t stand trial at Nuremberg, instead fleeing to Cairo, Egypt, and converting to Islam. He would later go by the name Tarek Farid Hussein. While many of the details are still foggy, a German court confirmed in 2012 that Heim had died back in 1992 from unknown causes. According to his son, Heim was buried in an unmarked grave, making it impossible for investigators to locate his remains for DNA testing. Now for someone who met his fate at the hands of the very people he terrorized. Number 8: Christian Wirth was so evil and despised that he was known as Christian the Cruel among his fellow officers. He threw himself into the mass euthanasia of the disabled and the murder of Nazi racial “undesirables” in Operation Reinhard with shocking, gleeful zeal. He was a force of terror across Yugoslavia in particular, so it would only be appropriate that he would meet his end at the hands of Yugoslavians. While traveling in an open-top car on military business on May 26th, 1944, he was shot by Yugoslav partisans, bringing his reign of terror to an end once and for all. The list keeps getting darker… and the next is one of the few women who belonged here. Number 7: A rare female high-ranking Nazi, Maria Mandl was yet another particularly cruel and violent concentration camp official at Auschwitz, Lichtenburg, and Ravensbrück. She was particularly infamous for physically beating prisoners to death, an act that she later framed as trying to do her duty to discipline prisoners. After her arrest, she was deemed complicit in the deaths of around 500,000 prisoners. Despite her attempts to receive clemency, she was sentenced to death by hanging, carried out on January 24th, 1948. Mandl paid the price for her brutality… the next escaped it entirely. Nazi Number 6: Eugen Fischer was a devoted Nazi thinker and director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics. His theories around the Aryan master race were one of Hitler’s big philosophical inspirations. His pseudoscientific research helped shape Nazi eugenics. You can see the origins of the Holocaust in everything Fischer did. And sadly, despite being a member of the Nazi Party, he never faced any consequences for the role he played - dying of natural causes in 1967, aged 93. Now for someone who helped lay the foundation for the SS… and never lived to watch it grow. Number 5: You’ve probably never heard of Julius Schreck, but he was one of Hitler’s favorites. Schreck was a World War One veteran and early supporter of Adolf in his right wing paramilitary days. After that, he became a member of the Storm Detachment, or SA, and then, the first ever leader of the SS. He was also Hitler’s personal chauffeur - a man he truly considered a friend. He contracted meningitis in 1936, and died on May 16th. Without him, who’s to know if the SS would have become what it eventually did? In the Reich, betrayal didn’t just end careers - and the next man would discover that the hard way. Number 4: Karl-Otto Koch was a trailblazing concentration camp commandant, playing early roles at Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen, and Majdanek - where he operated with his equally sadistic wife, Ilse. But

it wasn’t the Allies that sought punishment for Koch, it was the Nazis. They discovered that he’d embezzled huge quantities of stolen loot from the inmates of the Buchenwald camp. The problem wasn’t that he was stealing from all these innocent people, but the state by not cutting them in. He was arrested by his superiors and convicted of both embezzlement and the murder of 3 prisoners to cover up his crime. On April 5th, 1945, he was executed by his own government by firing squad. The Buchenwald Camp was liberated by the Americans a week later. Nazi Number 3: Amon Göth One of the more infamous concentration camp commandants among the general public, thanks to his role as the main villain of the movie Schindler’s List, where he was played by Ralph Fiennes. He was convicted of, quote, “personally killing, maiming and torturing a substantial, albeit unidentified number of people”, while ruling over the Kraków-Płaszów concentration camp with an iron fist. After a trial in Krakow, he was hanged on September 13th, 1946, before having his body burned and his ashes thrown into the Vistula River. This next death would be even more symbolic. Number 2: Joseph Goebbels was a Nazi true believer - someone who was literally with Hitler until the bitter end. Goebbels was a master of propaganda whose lies stoked racial hatred in the German people and helped build a pretense for war. However, when Hitler died - more on that soon - Goebbels was left adrift in the world... But he didn’t actually do that. Instead, he gathered his entire family and decided they should all go out together instead. The children were given morphine, and then when they were asleep, cyanide capsules were crushed in their mouths. As for Goebbels and his wife, Magda, accounts differ. But the general consensus is they took cyanide. And then, per Goebbels’ request, one of the Nazi soldiers double tapped them all with a rifle just to make sure they were dead. But there’s one more death we still get to savor… Number 1: When it was clear that the Nazis wouldn’t be taking the dub on the war they started, Adolf Hitler decided the best victory was not getting murdered by the advancing Red Army. After writing his last will and testament, Hitler and Eva Braun treated themselves to a cyanide supper. But Hitler didn’t fancy dying with his guts foaming out of his mouth, so he had the barrel of his service pistol for dessert. His remaining minions dragged his corpse out to the courtyard and set it on fire - probably so the Soviets couldn’t repurpose it as a pinata when they took the bunker. But what about the Nazi leaders who didn’t meet the reaper? Check out “What Actually Happened to Nazi Leaders After World War 2? And More Nazi Stories”, or watch this instead.