Word: sommerance
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...whipping block-where prisoners were forced to count the strokes aloud as Sommer beat them with a heavy stick. When they lost count, Sommer started again. One man sentenced to 25 strokes got 60 lashes this way. He died on the spot. Sommer blandly admitted the beatings and even built a cardboard model of the whipping block to show the court. "I can't claim to have hit the last strokes as hard as the first," he said. "You always get a little tired...
...singing forest"-so called because of the screams of the victims who were hung by their wrists to trees. Shown a photograph of prisoners hanging in this fashion, Sommer was asked, "Is that you standing beside the men?" Replied Sommer matter-of-factly: "No, we did not hang our prisoners so high...
...Sommer's bunker-where, according to former SS Judge Konrad Morgen, Sommer kept a secret compartment, concealed in the floor under his desk, to hide torture instruments and the needles with which he shot carbolic acid and air into his victims' veins. Sommer often laid the bodies beneath his bed for the night...
Other testimony: Sommer beat a Weimar pastor, hung him outside, dashed buckets of water on him and left him to freeze to death. He beat a Catholic priest to death for hearing the confession of a fellow prisoner...
Tears of Pity. To keep the trial from going on indefinitely, defense and prosecution finally threw out all charges except one-23 murders by injection. Sommer denied that he had killed anyone...