Word: headsman
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...tried to drown himself. That made mild-mannered Mr. Emmanuel angry. Armed only with pince-nez, attache case and British passport, he went to Germany to find out what had happened to Frau Rosenheim. Instead, he found himself held on a trumped-up charge of political murder, escaped the headsman's block only through the intervention of a Nazi higher-up's mistress, the daughter of his old Magnolia Street friend Sam Silver...
...trial was a constructive lesson for inquisitive Nazis, sternly reminded the defendants: "In this country, we spread no sawdust on ... our prison yards." He meant that the U. S. did not behead its spies. (In war time, it could shoot or hang them.) Next day in Berlin, a Nazi headsman decapitated two spies for "unnamed foreign powers...
Wound up to such a pitch that even the medieval headsman's ax, reintroduced by Nazis, has begun to seem tame. German Justice, the official organ of Minister of Justice Dr. Franz Gürtner, called last week for a harsher German punishment to be known as "living death...
...dawn that day in a misty Berlin prison courtyard two cringing figures in suits of coarse sacking were led out, their hands chained behind their backs. Headsman August Gröber, 67 and spry for his age, advanced in impeccable full dress exuding Eau de Cologne. An artist, as are all great executioners, Gröber keeps his blade on ice until the last second, figures that blood has a tendency to congeal on an iced blade and hence will not spout on his boiled shirt. Swish-clump! Swish-clump!-two heads rolled in the sand. One of them, declared...
...details, finally satisfied themselves that an axing had occurred. With the backs of their heads shaved bald, the Baroness von Berg and Frau von Natzmer were led in coarse, nondescript prison garb to the blood-caked block from which so many heads now roll in the sawdust. The headsman, incongruous in his yellowish celluloid shirtfront, his old silk hat and his red-spotted tailcoat, raised the gleaming ax. Twice it swished down to sever a lovely neck and send the blood of a German woman spouting high. According to Nazis, the Baroness von Berg was the first female aristocrat...