TWELVE DEFENDANTS WERE sentenced to death with no right of appeal. They included Frank, Rosenberg, and Seyss-Inquart, who didn’t have long to wait for the act of execution by hanging. The pope made a plea for mercy for Frank, which was rejected. The penalty posed no moral dilemma for Lord Justice Lawrence; his daughter Robby told me that her father had condemned several criminals to the gallows in England.
“He considered it to be the just punishment for people who had done very evil things,” she explained. “He was glad when the death penalty ended in Britain, but I don’t think he ever doubted that it was proper in this case, for these defendants.”
Between the day of judgment and the day of execution, President Truman wrote to Lord Justice Lawrence. He expressed appreciation for the “faithful services” the judge rendered to “the strengthening of international law and justice.”
Two weeks later, on the morning of October 16, a headline appeared in the Daily Express. “Göring is executed first at 1 a.m.,” it reported, followed by ten other defendants. The article was famously wrong. Göring escaped the noose, having committed suicide shortly before the scheduled hour of execution.
Ribbentrop was the first to hang; Frank moved up the pecking order to number five. The execution took place in the gym of the Palace of Justice, to which he was accompanied by the U.S. Army priest Sixtus O’Connor. Nervous, he walked across the courtyard and into the gym, closing his eyes, swallowing repeatedly as a black hood was placed over his head. He said a few final words.
The Times correspondent R. W. Cooper was in France when news of the hangings emerged later that day. “The end came in a little Paris restaurant,” he wrote in his memoir. The musicians were strumming a composition called “Insensiblement,” later to become Django Reinhardt’s favorite tune. The photographs of the hanged, including Frank, were posted on the back of the evening paper, available in the restaurant for all to see.
“Ça, c’est beau à voir,” a patron murmured. “Ça, c’est beau.” Then he idly turned the page.