Word: landsberg
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...Attention!" called Colonel Walter R. Graham, Landsberg's U.S. commandant. Blobel stiffened; the hangman and his assistants slipped a black hood over Blobel's head, adjusted the heavy noose. A priest intoned a prayer. The trap sprang open with a clatter...
Former SS Colonel Paul Blobel was the first to go. Shortly after midnight, four husky MPs led him across the floodlit yard of Landsberg Prison. On the gallows platform, a U.S. Army hangman was waiting for him. Blobel (responsible for the killing of 30,000 Jews at Kiev in 1941) got 90 seconds for his last words. Thrusting out his spade-bearded chin, he cried: "I die in the faith of my people. May the German people be aware of its enemies...
Dressed in the scarlet death-cell garb, the seven condemned Nazis waited in Landsberg prison for their midnight appointment with the hangman. The hearses with the empty coffins were ready to take the bodies to home-town cemeteries. Late in the evening the men said goodbye to their wives...
Commissioner McCloy, said aides, was "thunderstruck" and "confounded" by the reprieve. Still in the basement death row of Landsberg prison, the seven would now wait for the federal courts to rule on whether Attorney Magee's argument had merit, a procedure which could take months. But Frau Schmidt, relieved of her death watch in a Landsberg hotel, remarked: "Now we must immediately cancel the coffin and the hearse...
Only seven men in Landsberg still wore the red jacket; they would hang within a week...