Word: headsman
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Visitors to the 870-year-old Tower of London used to be fascinated by three pairs of ravens that strutted around Tower Green, where so many heads have rolled. A legend, probably the work of one of the Tower guides, has it that the ravens fed off the headsman's victims. More probably they were first attracted by the garbage dumped out of Tower windows until sanitation set in during the 19th Century. When the Tower was opened as a show place, the ravens' wings were clipped, and they also became an exhibit...
Hollywood Headsman...
...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...