Tod durch das Fallbeil

In the name of the German people, he executed over 3,000 men and women with the guillotine. His death row candidates included murderers and resistance fighters, the Viennese poisoner Martha Marek as well as the 21-year-old student Sophie Scholl. On the orders of the American military government, he hanged 156 high-ranking Nazis at the gallows, including Oswald Pohl, head of the SS Economic Main Office. In the end, he himself stood trial: Johann Reichhart, (West) Germany's last executioner and during the Nazi era, the executioner throughout southern and central Germany as well as in Austria and Bohemia. After his release from the labor camp, he lived in hiding in Upper Bavaria since 1949. He died in 1972 in a nursing home near Munich. Accessible archival materials from the Bavarian Main State Archive and the Federal Archives, as well as numerous eyewitness reports, reveal the life story of a man who would have preferred to be a dog breeder or dance teacher, but who gained tragic notoriety as an executioner in one of the bloodiest periods of the 20th century.