404
"Oopsie"
(thelemmy.club)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_C._Woods
Before D-Day, U.S. military executions by hanging in the European Theater of Operations occurred in Southern England only and were performed by the civilian executioner Thomas Pierrepoint, with assistance by Albert Pierrepoint (his nephew) and other British personnel. When in autumn of 1944 military executions by hanging were scheduled in France, the Army looked for a volunteer enlisted hangman and found Woods, who falsely claimed previous experience as assistant hangman in two cases in Texas and two in Oklahoma. He later told newspaper reporters that his career as an executioner had started when he "attended a hanging as a witness, and the hangman asked me if I wouldn't mind helping."[3] There is no evidence that the U.S. Army made any attempt to verify Woods's claims—if they had checked, it would have been easy to prove that he was lying; the states of Texas and Oklahoma had both switched to electrocution during the period he claimed to be a hangman. The last hanging in Texas took place in August 1923 when Woods would have been twelve. Oklahoma did not carry out hangings during the relevant period, the last one taking place three months before Woods was born. There was a single hanging in 1936 under federal jurisdiction, while all other executions in Oklahoma between 1915 and 1966 were carried out by electric chair.
Woods also participated in the execution of about 45 war criminals at various locations which included Rheinbach, Bruchsal, Landsberg, and Nuremberg. Donald E. Wilkes Jr., a professor of law at the University of Georgia Law School, wrote that many of the Nazis executed at Nuremberg fell from the gallows with a drop insufficient to snap their necks, resulting in their death by strangulation, which in some cases lasted up to 15 minutes.[1]
