GERMAN SPY FIGHTS HIS HANGMAN IN DEATH CELL
Hangman Albert Pierrepoint pulls a pint at his pub in retirement
“I know how to die, yet not as a Nazi spy on your gallows, but as a brave man.”
THESE were the words of German spy Karel Richter sentenced to hang at Wandsworth Jail on December 10, 1941. He was speaking to the Press shortly after fellow spy Josef Jakobs was executed by firing squad at the Tower of London.
The British newspapers had recorded Jakobs’ bravery in facing his death and his last words were: “Shoot straight Tommies!”
But Richter it turned out was not quite as brave. And the horrific drama in his death cell in the shadow of the gallows, gives us a chilling insight into the horrors of that day as Britain’s executioner Albert Pierrepoint arrived to do his duty.
I came across a transcript of what happened in an old copy of After the Battle magazine. And it makes chilling reading.
Pierrepoint tells how he arrived at Wandsworth late in the afternoon before the execution the next day, and was allowed to view the prisoner, through a spy hole without being seen, to assess Richter’s physical characteristics.
His build, thickness of neck, etc. together with his height and weight, given as 6ft 2in and 15 stone 4lb on his medical card, would be used to calculate from a table of figures, the precise length of rope required.
Pierrepoint then had his dinner and stayed overnight, as he always did. The following morning, he arrived outside the condemned cell. The Sheriff; Governor; doctor, priest and warders joined him a few minutes before eight o’clock and they went through the lightning-fast procedure. The hanging usually took Pierrepoint between seven and 20 seconds.
Spy Richter: Tore straps
In the transcript he says: “I was outside his cell and when the door swung open, I got my first shock. Richter should have been sitting at the table with his back to me. This allowed me three quick strides to be behind him, tapping him on the shoulder and taking his arms to pinion his wrists behind his back as he stands up.”
But Richter was standing at the far side of the table, glowering at the open door and Pierrepoint. His face was angry, the transcript revealed.
“I had to walk all round the table to reach him,” the hangman says. “His eyes were staring, very blue and dangerous. His big fists were clenched. Before I could reach him, he heaved away the nearest prison officer and dived like a bullock at the stone wall. His head cracked against the masonry.
“My first impression was the flurry of robes of the Catholic priest as he tried to get out of the way of the battle which followed. It may have been Richter’s intention to stun himself so that he was hanged unconscious. I do not know. He lay like a log on the floor, then raised himself and shook his head.
“The two death-cell officers dived on top of him. He clawed and kicked them away. Two more officers rushed in from the corridor. There were five bodies thrashing on the floor, and one of the men in blue was an accomplished judo expert. Fists were flying. “Someone gasped: ‘Get your straps on him, Albert, for God’s sake’!”
Pierrepoint was apparently circling round the melee, waiting for his chance to strap his man.
He says: “I managed to engage one of his wrists. Then I brought the strap round the other. Officers were sitting on his legs and then they began to drag him to his feet. I turned to go through the cell into the execution chamber.
“It was not the sort of occasion when I should say sympathetically, ‘Follow me, lad. It will be all right.’ Suddenly there was a shout from behind me: ‘Albert! Albert! Come back’!”
Pierrepoint turned and saw that Richter’s arms were free, and it was a free-for-all again. With his hands behind him he had strained on the pinioning strap around his wrists and split it from eyehole to eyehole.
“I would not have thought such strength was possible. I went back and got into the fray. Richter fought me, fought everybody. But I was strong, and I dug my knee into his back and pulled until the strap was secure in a second hole.”
Once more Richter was now brought to the scaffold. A strap was quickly fastened round his ankles, the cap and noose were adjusted, and still he fought for his life. Just as Pierrepoint was crossing to the lever, Richter jumped with bound feet.
“The drop opened, and he plunged down,” says Pierrepoint, “and I saw with horror that the noose was slipping. It got caught halfway up the hood – and was stopped on his upper lip by the projection of his nose. The body jerked down and became still. I went down into the pit. He was dead.”
His death took an agonising 17 minutes.
Albert Pierrepoint died on July 10, 1992, in Southport, England, at the age of 87. He carried out over 400 executions during his career.
Happy Christmas: How British Tommies swapped bullets for buttons in the Trenches
Our lads in the trenches 1914
AS THE year drew to an end in December 1914 and the slaughter of thousands of soldiers on both sides of the First World War on the Western Front, stretched for about 475 miles, from the North Sea to the Swiss Alps, a strange event occurred — an unofficial truce at Christmas.
Many Tommies wrote home about this, and their letters make compulsive and sad reading, written by our lads who expected to get a bullet in the head at any time. I have been reading a few, in the newspaper archives. Here is one from the Trenches published in the Liverpool Daily Post on December 30, 1914.
It reads:
An unofficial truce on Christmas Day is described by an English soldier.
“I will tell you about a thing that I couldn’t imagine happening until it did. We have actually met the Germans half-way between our trenches and exchanged cigarettes and buttons etc.
“On Christmas Eve we were shouting across to each other: ‘A Merry Christmas!’ And they shouted back ‘Don’t shoot until New Year’s Day!’ and all that. On Christmas morning it was a bit foggy and there was no shooting, so we went out at the back of our lines and had a game of rounders.
“Getting tired of this, we went out to the front and started wandering over to the Germans. When the mist cleared a bit, we saw the Germans were doing the same thing, unarmed. We got so close that five of us met and talked. They nearly all talked English.
“After dinner. Nearly all our boys went out, and we found the Germans had also turned up in force. The result was a huge mixed crowd of men swapping buttons and cigarettes.”
The letter, which was also published in the London Evening News, concludes: “Then some Germans strolled across and took our photos, all sitting on the ground. I wouldn’t have missed the experience of yesterday for even the most gorgeous Christmas dinner in England.”
More than 20,000 British troops died on the first day of fighting in 1914 and 885,000 Tommies died during World War I, with a large proportion of these deaths occurring in the trenches of the Western Front.
What brave boys they were to give their lives to our country, and it is upsetting to think of how our country is today with broken borders, hatred on the streets and many who would burn our flag. You can’t but help agreeing with old soldiers wondering if it was worth it.
MYSTERY CLOUD DESCENDS AS OUR
LADS FIX BAYONETS AND CHARGE
THE BRITISH battalion, heads held high and bayonets fixed, charged towards the Turkish artillery hidden in the woods. Their target was a village on a ridge overlooking the battlefield.
But at that moment, as their Commanding Officer, Sir Horace Proctor-Beauchamp, shouted “Go get ‘em Norfolks!” a thick, eerie mist descended over the area without warning, and hid the men of E Company, the Royal Norfolk Regiment, from view.
Witnesses watched them run into the great white cloud, so dense they couldn’t see each other. When the cloud lifted an hour later, there was a strange silence. They had vanished. No bodies, no weapons, no clues were ever found about what happened to them.
They did not even turn up as prisoners of war. It was as if the scorched earth had swallowed them up and the strange event was to leave officers in the field and the public back home baffled to this day.
Newspapers in London headlined the story from the Gallipoli Campaign as ‘The Ghost Battalion That Vanished’. The Sandringham lads became a legend in the British armed forces of the day.
The men of E Company had grown up together, played cricket for the same village team, chased the same girls and drank in the same pubs and inns in Norfolk. And they all belonged to the staff of the of the Royal Estate at Sandringham.
The company had been formed in 1908 at the personal request of their employer, King Edward VII. He asked his land agent Frank Beck to undertake the task, which he did, recruiting more 250 part-time soldiers (Territorials).
As was the custom in the territorial battalions of the day, military rank was dictated by social class. Members of the local gentry like Beck and his two nephews became the officers.
The estate’s foremen, butlers, head gamekeepers and head gardeners were the NCOs. The farm labourers, grooms and household servants made up the rank and file.
After they disappeared in the mist, General Sir Ian Hamilton, the British Commander-in-Chief in Gallipoli, appeared as puzzled as everyone else. He reported to the War Office and the King: “There happened a very mysterious thing.”
He went on: “When the fighting grew hotter, and the ground became more wooded and broken, their commander with 16 officers and 250 men, kept pushing on, driving the enemy before them. They charged and conducted themselves with honour and dash! We never saw them again.”
One of them was Captain Beck, who at 54, need not have led his men to war. But despite his age, he was determined to go.
“I formed them,’ he told reporters before he sailed. “How could I leave them now? The lads will expect me to go with them; besides I promised their wives and children I would look after them’.
Back home, their families had nothing to go on but rumours and a vague official telegram stating that their loved ones had been ‘reported missing’.
Queen Alexandra made inquiries via the American ambassador in Constantinople to discover whether any of the missing men might be in Turkish prisoner-of-war camps. But to no avail.
Grieving families contacted the Red Cross and placed messages in the national newspapers, hoping for news of their sons and husbands from returning comrades. But nothing transpired.
In 1918 when the war had ended, the War Graves Commission searched the Gallipoli battlefields. Of the 36,000 Commonwealth servicemen who died in the campaign, 13,000 rested in unidentified graves, another 14,000 bodies were simply never found.
The Turks, fighting alongside the Germans, were known for not taking prisoners and would shoot anyone they captured. Was this the fate of the Norfolk lads? Some think so.
During one of these searches a Norfolks’ regimental cap badge was found buried in the sand along with the corpses of a number of soldiers. A further search of the area uncovered the remains of 180 bodies; 122 of them were identifiable from their shoulder flashes as men of the 5th Norfolks. The bodies were scattered over an area of one square mile.
Four years later news came from Turkey of a gold fob-watch, looted from the body of a British officer in Gallipoli. It was Frank Beck’s. The watch was later presented to Margeretta Beck, Frank’s daughter, on her wedding day.
In April 1965, at the 50th anniversary of the Gallipoli landings, a former New Zealand sapper called Frederick Reichardt supported by three other veterans, claimed to have witnessed the supernatural disappearance of the 5th Norfolks in August 1915.
He and his comrades had watched a formation of ‘six or eight’ loaf-shaped clouds hovering over the area where the Norfolks were pressing home their attack. Into one of these low-lying clouds marched the advancing battalion.
An hour later the clouds rose and joined the other clouds overhead and sailed off, leaving no trace of the soldiers behind them.
TERRY MANNERS
1 December 2025
