The Curse of Hitler’s Executioner
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Johan Reichardt was the most famous executioner in Nazi Germany. In a career which spanned just over 20 years, it was said that he put more than 3,000 people to death using a guillotine. Then, in a bizarre twist of fate, at the end of World War II,

Instead of being sent away to a life in prison, he was used by the Allies to execute Nazi war criminals. But who was Reichardt? What drove him to assassinate so many people in record time? And what part did a top-secret country manor called Latimer House play in prizing highly classified information from top Nazi officials?

Johann Reichardt was the last great executioner of the modern era. He killed about 3,000 enemies of the state. Hitler must have loved this guy.

The German guillotine was quick and efficient. There was a bench. You were literally dragged, placed on the bench, head through and off. It was so dehumanising, so depersonalised. This man must have not seen his victims as people, but as things to be gotten rid of in as efficient a way as possible. He could pride himself that the person would come in and be dead within four seconds. He was a truly professional executioner.

Today, we associate the guillotine with the brutality of the French Revolution, when over 16,000 men and women were executed by the device. However, the Nazis were equally devoted to it. They are thought to have beheaded almost as many victims during their 12 years in power, here at Plotzensee Prison in Berlin, where many enemies of the German state were executed.

In the olden days, executions had been done with a sword for beheading, hanging with a rope broken on the wheel. But in 1853, the Germans took on the guillotine, which of course had been in France since the 1790s. But being Germans, of course, they adapted it and revolutionized it, and it became the most efficient form of execution ever devised anywhere in the world.

With any dictatorship, the most important thing is fear. And not fear necessarily the dictator, but fear of the people around you. And the thing that all of these dictators do is they make you feel that you can't rely on each other, that someone's always out to get you, that the people closest to you. And in fact, that's what ends up happening. There's so many executions because, you know, I can say something in, you know,

I don't know, in the heat of the moment that I think what Hitler's doing is wrong. But if I've said it and you've heard it and you point at me, well, then that's all it takes. The most infamous Nazi executioner was a man called Johann Reichert. He was born in Bavaria in southeast Germany in 1893 to a family of professional executioners, which went back eight generations. His own career started in 1924,

and went right up to the end of World War II as the premier executioner for the Nazis. He traveled across the country, taking his guillotine with him, dressed formally in a dark top hat and jacket, with white gloves. It's reported that he executed over 3,000 people in total, most of them during the war period of 1939 to 1945.

Reichardt came from a family who had been in the execution trade for generations. And the family, as well as executing people, were also knackers, which is the word used for people who are dismembering animals that are unfit for human consumption. So you have this equation between just killing a human being or killing an animal. It's all the same to the Reichardt family. They're just butchering animals and humans.

Reichardt executed whoever he was told to, and these are the people who received the harshest sentences from the People's Court. Political dissidents, those who were suspected of anti-war protest, those who were speaking out on the radio about the government. It's really anyone that stood in the way of the Third Reich doing what they wanted to do. That's who he was killing.

Reichardt executed enemies of the party. He believed that this party was going to take Germany forward, that they were doing good work, so anyone that was a threat to that was the person that he killed. And it didn't discriminate between male or female, or young or old, educated, uneducated. This was just about whether you're in the in-group or the out-group. People that I think are of value or people that I devalue completely.

Each beheading followed the exact same procedure. The accused is pushed into the garishly lit execution chamber. In front of them is a smartly dressed man in a frock coat and top hat, Johann Reichardt. In the center of the room is the guillotine, attached to which were buckles and straps. And rising above, hanging menacingly high, is a huge silvery black blade.

Within a few moments, the condemned person is bound face down on the guillotine and a steel rod is pressed onto their back. With their face looking into a basket, their nostrils detect the smell of dried blood over the stench of disinfectant.

and sawdust. He will have seen his trade not as the gruesome thing that it was, but actually as something to be done as effectively and as efficiently as possible. He actually adapted the guillotine so that it could be transported. They would literally have a smaller guillotine with just a heavier blade on the back of a truck and he would stop in places and get people onto this truck and then kill them one after the other.

The thing about Reichardt was he was an obsessive executioner and he was determined to make his mark. Being a good German, he was all for efficiency. And basically the idea was the least mess, the fastest execution is great. Reichardt was said to be a dour man who rarely smiled or showed any emotion as he went about doing his job. And at the end of the war,

it was reported that he tossed his famous guillotine into a river in shame. Why he did this isn't clear, but many suspect that he wanted to cover up his violent and brutal career. Richard Felix, a historian who runs Derby Jail in England, is an expert on crime and punishment in the 19th and 20th centuries. He has built an exact replica of Reichardt's guillotine.

Fallbeil, that's German for drop hatchet. It's a version of the guillotine, but a precision version created by the Germans. Made of oak and metal, much more efficient than any guillotine ever knew how to be. Johann Reichardt, the German executioner, designed this and made it probably the most efficient form of execution ever created. All that happened was that the

The blade was wound to the top in preparation. The delinquent was then dragged out of here by the two assistants and strapped onto the bascule. This was then tilted forward and he was then slid all the way through there. Reichardt then dropped the lunette, trapping the neck, and then all was ready. The judge then came forward and said, "Henke, auf retten zu Ihrem Aufgabe."

executioner, perform your task. And at that point, he pulled the lever and down came the blade and the head was off. It's the most efficient form of execution ever created.

Reichardt was utilitarian in every sense of the word. So he'd show up and he'd get the job done. There was no frills, there was no smiling or apologising. At the same token, there was no jeering or swearing or bullying. He was there to do a job and

In his case, there was almost a robotic nature to what he was doing. Everyone was more or less the same and it was just about getting through it as quickly and as effectively as possible.

One of the things that strikes you when you look at photographs of Breikart going about his desperately sinister business was not only the way he was dressed, like a very particular grotesque ringmaster of the circus, but also his face showed absolutely no emotion. It was as if it had been wiped clean. It was actually as if he was in the zone of an executioner's mind, whatever that might be.

Reichardt dressed like an undertaker. It's very funereal. And I think it's there to act as a kind of barrier between him and the victim. It's saying, "I am simply an anonymous person." And we see it today with ISIS, how the executioner in these awful, awful videos that ISIS put out is always dressed in a specific way. It's not there to create terror, I suggest. It's there to create formality.

What made Rijkaard really effective is his innovation. He abandoned the old French all-wooden guillotine and created his own. Smaller, shorter, eight foot high, heavy blade. So boom, the head's chopped off. There's a special funnel that takes the blood out in front where there's sawdust that absorbs it. He has all this innovation. He had to kill more people faster than anyone ever before.

Ryshock had the bascule removed. No more strapping you on, no more wriggling about. You were dragged out by the two assistant executioners, brought forward, slid straight onto it. That dropped and the blade dropped. He could get someone executed in three seconds and he could get this machine reloaded with another body and the blade down in 30 seconds.

It is often forgotten that when the Nazis took office, they were initially cautious about using the death penalty. Their grip on power was not as firm as it would come to be, and they were aware that public opinion might turn against them if they executed too many of their own citizens. However, in October 1936, acting on the advice of his Justice Minister, Franz Goettner, Hitler decided that the guillotine should be Nazi Germany's preferred method of execution.

Hitler ordered 20 Falweils to be built and put around the prisons in Germany. They were made smaller than the guillotine so they could fit inside small rooms with low ceilings, obviously prisons. But when Reichardt actually had to travel from one prison to another prison to do the executions, legend has it that he actually had a portable Falweil

mounted on the back of a van, the delinquent was actually dragged to the back of the van and beheaded on the back of it. Now that's quick. At the peak of Reichardt's professional career, he was executing tens of people a day and the governor would order this bell to be rung and so all the prisoners would know when this bell was ringing that an execution was taking place. And when the bell stops,

The execution was over and one of their prisoners was dead. And it was a fate that anybody in that prison, especially during the Nazi regime, knew that they too could face. They could be the person causing that bell to ring and then to stop. One of Johann Reichardt's most famous victims was a young girl called Sophie Scholl. She was a 21-year-old opponent of the Nazi regime who was beheaded on February 22nd, 1943. Her crime...

was to have been a leading member of the White Rose Movement, which had peacefully resisted the regime by writing anti-Nazi leaflets and distributing them around university students in Munich. At 5:00 p.m. that day, she was led from her cell to a small building which contained the guillotine and strapped down. Within seconds, the young woman's head lay in a bloodied basket.

They were arrested by the Gestapo handing out anti-Nazi leaflets and basically taken to the so-called People's Court. This was after being interrogated for four days by the Gestapo. Not fun. And then they were handed over to Johann Reichardt for execution.

Sophie Scholl has become one of the key figures that we associate with resistance to the Nazi regime. She was, of course, this incredibly tragic figure because she was betrayed, she was captured, and she was executed. And she was executed by Reichardt. And there must have been something crossing through his mind as he's taking this sort of young woman in her 20s onto his contraption. And he's, you know, chopping her head off.

It's estimated that some 16,500 people were killed by the Nazis using a guillotine, most of them between 1939 and 1945. As a result, executioners like Reichardt became wealthy. He was paid a basic salary of 3,000 Reichmarks a year and received an extra 65 Reichmarks bonus per execution. In the end, he amassed over 200,000 Reichmarks.

Worth well over one million dollars today. Being an executioner in Germany was a well-paid job. And of course, the more people you're executing, the more money you're going to earn. So when he starts off, he's earning 3,000 Reichsmarks a year, which is, you know, a decent kind of lower middle class wage. By the time the Nazis come into power and during the war, and as the insanity and madness of the regime and the murderousness of the regime comes into full effect,

his income's gone up to 36,000 Reichsmarks a year, which makes him a very wealthy man. The interesting thing is that Reichardt was killing enemies of the state faster than anyone ever had, and he wasn't fazed by that. You can argue that it was the most humane thing he could do, is just get on with it, kill them quick, chop the head off next, take away that anxiety. But in reality, he's getting paid. He's a professional killer, and he's making a lot of money doing it.

How and where did Reichardt and other important Nazis shelter during the final months of World War II? How did the Allies secretly eavesdrop on German commanders during the war? And what happened when Reichardt was eventually captured following the surrender of the Nazis? This show is sponsored by BetterHelp. Halloween is the spookiest time of year. A time where we get to have fun with what scares us.

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Visit BetterHelp.com slash ForbiddenUS today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P dot com slash ForbiddenUS. Johann Reichardt was the most famous executioner in Nazi Germany.

In a career which spanned just over 20 years, it was said that he put more than 3,000 people to death using a guillotine which he specially adapted for maximum killing speed.

As if having your relative executed by Reichardt and the Nazi state wasn't appalling enough, the family would then receive a bill from the state for the cost of the execution. It would have on it the cost of Reichardt's fees, some 600 Reichsmarks. You would be invoiced all the processing costs. And also, most awful of all, you'd also be invoiced 12 pfennigs for the cost of the stamp.

which was used to pay for the invoice to be posted to you. So in fact, Reichardt wasn't paid for by the state. He wasn't paid for by taxpayers' money. He was paid for by the people who he was killing. In the final months of World War II, Berlin was under constant air bombardment from the Allies. And yet Reichardt continued to carry out his executions in and around the capital.

As a result, he spent long periods of time alongside other top Nazi officials in underground bunkers as the city was destroyed above them. Most of the city has been redeveloped, and many of the old Nazi buildings and structures have been destroyed. Hitler's famous Führerbunker has been filled with cement and built over with a housing estate. But there are a couple of military bunkers left which you can still enter.

Jamie Theakston has been granted special access to a bunker found in the Berlin suburbs, which was used by senior Nazi officers and, it's said, Johann Reichardt himself. So, we have to go two floors down now. Then our feet will be six meters under Berlin. So how many floors does it go down? Two floors down and two floors up, so five floors in total.

and about 6,500 square meters. So tell me, who would have been down here in this bunker? It was supposed only for the high-ranking German officers and their families. But when the Russians were getting on Berlin and into Berlin,

All the Germans were pouring into the bunker and then were up to 14,000 people in here instead of the 3,500 who should be in this bunker. So it was only designed for 3,500 people and yet there would have been up to 14,000. Yes, and it was designed for one to two hours for one air raid. But at the end, they stayed in here for about one week, day and night. And so do they have like kitchens and bathrooms down here? Not kitchens, but bathrooms.

Some of the toilets are missing now, but the walls were just grey and there was no colour on the wall or anything like that. It was really simple.

But it feels more like a prison rather than a place where high-ranking Nazi officials would have come. Yes, but it was a time when they realized that the war was not going very well and so it was more important to be safe than being on a shiny nice place like the Führerbunker, where it was very nice, while here they had to build it in like 10 months. So it was very raw.

Berlin was in turmoil and was being smashed to pieces. And so something that was built for high-ranking German officers to shelter in, all of a sudden could well have ended up with disease-ridden people down there. The conditions were awful. There was no decoration. The sanitation was poor. The lighting was poor. And it was a very basic air raid shelter.

Without the luxuries found in Hitler's bunker, this bare, damp and disease-ridden shelter would have made life very uncomfortable to survive in, hardly fitting for high-ranking officials like Johann Reichardt. So hang on, so this thing here, this provided the power for the entire bunker, for all the people living down here? Yes, but only when the power from outside was cut off. There were only like five, six light bulbs powered.

in one floor and the ventilation system that you could have some air to breath but it was really only for emergency. So this would pump all the air around the bunker so without this everyone would have died down here? Yes, yes within a few days. These poor guys would spend

hours, sometimes days in the pitch black. Down there with people choking, vomiting, urinating, defecating. It must have been hell on earth. Did they have a sanatorium down here? No, they just died. There were some doctors around who tried to help, but it was not organised. They didn't have any equipment, no medicine and so on.

So they tried their best, but basically if you get ill you died and you could move dead bodies around with this. They took out the dead on these? They wanted to, but it was so crowded that they couldn't take them out. It was like on a rock concert. You were pushing them up and then just moving them over your head. You carried the dead people over their heads? Yes. Through the exit, then they piled them up and when there was a breaking in the bombings, they just threw them out.

The whole of Berlin was literally ridden with rats and disease, cholera. They were taking this down into the bunker with them. People were dying in there, not of bombing, but of disease, and were literally dragged out and thrown outside and the doors slammed shut again. It's certainly a dreadful, dreadful place and gives the most awful atmosphere of, I think, despair.

Following the surrender of the Nazis in 1945, Reichardt was arrested and imprisoned in Landsberg Prison in southern Germany. In a bizarre twist, he was offered a deal by the Allies: "Help us execute Nazi war criminals or spend the rest of your life behind bars." He accepted and put 156 Nazi war criminals to death by hanging.

Instead of sending him to prison immediately, they say, "Well, look, you've got a choice. We'll either put you away or you can come and work for us." And so he then becomes an executioner for the people that had ordered all of those executions over all those years. It shows how Reichardt has this kind of totally absent moral compass in which he's willing to execute people for whoever.

You could also argue, of course, that this is the Allies being incredibly sort of brutal and nasty at thinking and thinking, "Look, well, hang on a minute. It's your own man killing you now. This is how much power we have over you."

When you think about it from the Allies' perspective, they're not skilled at executions. They haven't been doing executions. So they're going to latch on to Reichardt. Of course they are, because he's a professional. But it's also this subtle sort of two fingers to the Germans. We're going to have your own famous executioner kill you. And imagine the revenge, the psychological warfare that that must have entailed.

Hi. Sorry, did I startle you? When you're used to hearing a certain type of commercial, something like this can, well, take you by surprise. That's kind of how it is with the Lexus RX, a vehicle that has continued to defy expectations for over 25 years. From the first luxury vehicle of its kind, to the first hybrid luxury vehicle, to the only plug-in hybrid worthy of the RX name, we understand you want more than the everyday SUV. And isn't being understood an amazing feeling?

Experience amazing at your Lexus dealer. It's not widely known, but a lot of the names of the German officers who were hung by Reichardt after the war came out of a super-secret bugging operation that took place at a country estate just outside London: Latimer House. It was run by MI5 and MI6 under the obscure name "Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Unit."

and it secretly bugged the conversations of dozens of leading Nazi generals. The thing about Latimer Place is that it is not your ordinary prisoner of war camp. It's more of a place of refuge. Here you have captured German officers who are given complete freedom to walk around the luxurious grounds

Why were the British allowing that to happen? Well, the rooms are bugged, the bars are bugged, and because you're so comfortable, the war has ended. They could just let their guard down and relax, but the information the British garnished was incredible. They find out about all sorts of different strategies and secrets and technologies. It was a goldmine and a brilliant approach to interrogation.

What's incriminating is the fact that all these German generals are talking about some of the crimes that they themselves have done or crimes they've heard of. This, of course, is massively important evidence for the Allied war crime units. And some of the evidence gathered was then used in trials or to find the guilty men. So, of course, who's then carrying out some of the executions of the people in those trials? It's Reichardt.

British journalist Jamie Theakston is on the trail of the career of executioner Johann Reichardt. When he starts to work for the Allies after the war, secrets and information gleaned from the Latimer House operation gave Reichardt a whole new list of Nazis to terminate. Jamie meets historian and author Helen Fry, who is an expert on what went on here at Latimer House and the intelligence and secrets gathered from its Nazi occupants.

To give an idea of the sheer volume of the intelligence that was gathered across these centres, there were 100,000 transcripts for the duration of the war time, taken from bug conversations of around 10,000 German prisoners of war. So a vast mass of intelligence that was gathered that fed into the war effort. So would they have kept prisoners down here? Some of the die-hard Nazis, yes, in isolation for a day or so.

One of those die-hard Nazis was Hitler's deputy Fuhrer, Rudolf Hess, who was taken prisoner by the Allies in 1941.

So there were rumours that Hess was brought to Latimer House for a few days. He was allegedly held overnight before they took him up to the Comforter upstairs. It would have been the die-hard Nazis, those that needed a bit, you know, to be more co-operative. They may have held them in isolation, disorientate them and hoped that they would then upstairs be more amenable in interrogation. Near the end of the war, a place called Latimer House was where high-ranking

German generals that had been captured were, when I say imprisoned, were kept. A little bit more like house arrest, to be honest with you, and there was a reason for it. They had quite a bit of freedom inside the place. They had their own officers' mess, and they were allowed to talk to each other. And the whole place was bugged.

This was beyond top secret. I mean, this was only declassified in the last decade. And in fact, one of Kendrick's, the commanding officer Kendrick's intelligence officers, when he started here, was told on his first day, "What is going on here is as top secret as anywhere in the country." And his pistol was slid across the desk and he said to him, "If you ever betray what goes on here, then you do the decent thing. And if you don't, I will."

The documents don't tell us precisely who was held here, but we know they had special areas for die-hard Nazis, uncooperative prisoners, perhaps holding them in isolation for a day, just to kind of break their will of resistance, really. And where did they do the listening from? Well, the listening wasn't here, it was in a separate, specially constructed block.

on the other side of the site. So what's fascinating is you have layers of secrecy and those that worked in the bugging operation didn't necessarily know what was going on on this side of the site. The Allies obviously try and extract information. They come up with this genius idea to take a bunch of these German generals and put them up in a stately home and say, "We've got to keep you here for a few days until we have these other official meetings so we can gather intelligence."

And they just, you know, ply them with, you know, there's good food there and there's drink and there's cigars. And they just sit back, bug the place and listen to what they say. How important was the intelligence that they gathered? Well, at this site, the prisoners began to talk about V1, the doodlebug, and eventually the V2, the rocket program, Hitler's secret weapons program.

And that enabled Churchill to order Operation Crossbow, which was the bombing of Peenemunde, which was the secret weapon development site. And that all came from information that was gleaned from the prisoners that were held here? Here and at the two sister sites of Trent Park and Wilton Park. But also lots of snippets of information which fed into the overall intelligence network. And there was very little we didn't know about Nazi Germany.

So as far as I understand it then, the sort of lower ranking prisoners were kept in cells like this, whereas upstairs in these houses the higher ranked officers were wined and dined, is that right? Yes, exactly. It was understanding the psyche of your enemy, if you like, and if you treat them well, because don't forget they thought they could still win the war, if you treat them well then they will start spilling the beans, they will start talking to each other when they think no one's listening.

and start bragging about their war and particularly about the technology, boasting that Germany had better technology and they were going to still win the war. And of course little realising that the walls had ears in a sense and everything was being picked up and recorded.

They're all held in this beautiful British country house north of London, and they're made to feel very relaxed. So they're given drinks and brandies and cigars and nice palatial surroundings that they feel befits their status as very, very senior officers. And so, of course, they relax, unaware of the fact that all the rooms

have got microphones in them. And you have a lot of former German refugees, who can obviously speak and understand German, listening away, transcribing all these conversations. The most secret part of Latimer House was the bugging and surveillance done on its German prisoners from the so-called M Room. Fritz Lustig was one of a small team of secret listeners who operated from a hut in the grounds of the house. Jamie met him

to find out just what a secret listener actually listened to. My role at Lettema House was secretly to listen to the conversations of German prisoners of war who had been selected specially to be sent here because it was expected that they provide certain important information to the British authorities. Give us an idea of the kind of military secrets that were given up

during that time? Well, the military secrets they talked about would be either technical from safe U-boat crews or safe ex-German Luftwaffe pilots. And they would talk, for instance, about new technical developments fitted to their aeroplanes, which of course it was very important for the British to know.

and the more details they gave, the more we recorded them, and there were microphones in the trees and the bushes and so on. So they could be listened to wherever they were. In this really lavish and comfortable setting,

The information that the British get from these officers, it's a goldmine. They get names. They're almost bravado where one is trying to one-up the other. Well, I know about this operation and this person is in charge. It was all about the names. And what did the British do? They took these names and they went and they got those people. And guess what? Reichardt would actually execute them.

All of these generals were trained how to withstand interrogation techniques, but they felt absolutely safe. They're in this stately home, they're waiting for their interrogation as it were, so they're sitting around just sharing stories from the field, talking about who they killed, talking about what their colonels and their generals did, and they were able, the Allies, to extract so much information from this and use it against them that it was absolute genius.

Did a prisoner ever find a bugging device? As far as I know, the prisoners never found the bugging devices. Some of them were more, as we said, security conscious and they would turn on the water taps when they were talking about something secret. But the microphones were of very high quality and usually we could even understand what they were saying when the water was running.

It sounds a little bit like the Big Brother house. Well, yes, it was. So there they were, quite happily bragging about what they'd done, telling each other about who they'd done it to, how they'd done it, who they'd killed. The guys were listening to their bugs and then passing back to the intelligence services. And what they were doing was building a case against themselves and creating more necks for Reichardt's noose.

It's incredible to think that information gleaned from the spying on top Nazi generals in this building helped to convict others of war crimes. Convictions that led many to be executed by Johann Reichardt himself back in Germany. We know Reichardt executed 3,000 people and he basically showed no remorse. The only remorse he ever showed was when the Allies got him to execute his own and then he became troubled.

Did he feel for these people or was that was his job to actually hang the people that he believed in, that had been his bosses, the Nazis? He was a highly efficient bringer of death. It has to take a very unique kind of person that can go home at night after being surrounded by that much pain and fear and misery.

and be able to sleep and eat and get up the next morning and do the same again. At the end of his life, Johan Reichardt was a lonely and disliked person. His marriage had failed, and one of his sons, Hans, committed suicide in 1950 due to his association with his father's profession. But he seems to have had something of a conversion in his old age, when in 1963, there were public demands during a series of taxi driver murders

for the reintroduction of the death penalty in West Germany. Incredibly, given his long career, Reichardt spoke out against capital punishment. He died alone in a nursing home in Dorfen, Germany in 1972, age 79.