Master Sergeant John C. Woods: The Nuremberg Hangman Who Lied About Almost Everything

Jun 5, 2024

10 min read

Updated: Oct 16

Collage of US Army hangman John C. Woods holding a noose over a crouching man, posing with a coiled rope, and a row of nooses hanging above a laid dining table

In the early hours of 16 October 1946, ten of the most senior surviving figures of the Third Reich climbed thirteen steps in a prison gym in Nuremberg and dropped through a trapdoor. The man pulling the lever was Master Sergeant John C. Woods, a short, scruffy, hard-drinking soldier from Kansas who told the world he'd hanged 347 people in 15 years. He hadn't. He also wasn't 43, wasn't from San Antonio and, depending on who you ask, wasn't very good at his job either.

Here's what the record actually shows about the hangman of Nuremberg, from his Navy psychiatric file to the botched drops and a death on a nuclear test atoll that people still argue about.

Quick Answers

Who was John C. Woods? A US Army master sergeant who served as the military's main hangman in Europe from 1944 to 1946 and executed ten Nazi leaders at Nuremberg.
Were the Nuremberg hangings botched? Several almost certainly were. Some men struck the trapdoor on the way down and some strangled slowly rather than dying from a broken neck. The Army denied it at the time.
How many people did Woods hang? He claimed 347. His biographer French MacLean found a real career of roughly two years and somewhere between 60 and 100 hangings.
How did John C. Woods die? He was electrocuted on Eniwetok Atoll in the Marshall Islands on 21 July 1950, aged 39.

A Navy Deserter With a Psychiatric Diagnosis

John Clarence Woods was born in Wichita, Kansas, on 5 June 1911. His parents split up, he was largely raised by his grandparents and he dropped out of Wichita High School after his first year, MacLean's research shows.

In December 1929 he joined the US Navy and was posted to the aircraft carrier USS Saratoga. He lasted a few months before deserting. He was picked up in Colorado, shipped back to California and court-martialled, and in April 1930 a Navy medical board examined him. They found he repeatedly defied authority, bit his nails and had a growth on his soft palate he wouldn't let them remove. The board's diagnosis was "Constitutional Psychopathic Inferiority without Psychosis" and the Navy let him go.

That old diagnosis roughly lines up with what we'd now call antisocial personality disorder. The same board, as one detailed write-up of his file notes, also concluded he was "not considered a menace to himself or others." Given what came next, that's a line that's aged badly.

Civilian life didn't go much better. He was kicked out of the Civilian Conservation Corps in 1933 after going AWOL for six days and refusing to work, and by 1941 he was on probation for passing bad cheques, which kept him out of the draft. He did manage to marry, though. He wed Hazel Chilcott in Eureka, Kansas, on 30 September 1933 and the couple never had children.

John C. Woods in US Army uniform with master sergeant stripes, smiling beside his wife Hazel in a fur coat, 1946 — John C. Woods with his wife Hazel in 1946

From Omaha Beach to the Gallows

Once his probation ended, the Army took him. He was inducted on 30 August 1943 and by March 1944 he was in England with Company B of the 37th Engineer Combat Battalion. That unit landed on Omaha Beach on D-Day, and while nobody can say for certain what Woods did that morning, his company lost four men killed, fifteen wounded and three missing on the first day.

Later in 1944 the Army needed a hangman. Before D-Day, American military executions in Britain had been carried out by civilian hangman Thomas Pierrepoint, uncle of the far more famous Albert Pierrepoint. Once the war moved to France, the Army wanted one of its own. Woods volunteered, telling anyone who'd listen that he'd assisted at hangings in Texas and Oklahoma. No records back that up.

It didn't matter. The blurb for MacLean's biography says he went from private to master sergeant in a single day, and his monthly pay jumped from about $50 to $138. Attached to the 2913th Disciplinary Training Center near Le Mans, he hanged at least 23 American soldiers and possibly as many as 35, and assisted at several more. MacLean also found that reports of several botched jobs reached the War Department long before Nuremberg.

The Man the Nazis Met at the Bottom of the Steps

Woods didn't look much like the grim professional the press later made him out to be. He stood about 5ft 4in and weighed around nine stone, and Herman Obermayer, a young Jewish GI who worked with him on earlier scaffolds, remembered him as noticeably sloppy in appearance. His nieces told MacLean a warmer story. He adored Hazel, loved dogs, drank Wild Crow bourbon, told a good yarn, enjoyed making officers uncomfortable and could apparently blow cigarette smoke out of his ears.

He was also a relentless self-promoter. Time magazine reported him as a 43-year-old from San Antonio with 15 years and 347 hangings behind him. In reality he was 35, from Kansas and had been a hangman for about two years. MacLean spent over a decade digging through military records and concluded the 347 figure was a huge exaggeration.

The Night of 16 October 1946

The trials had sentenced twelve men to hang. Martin Bormann was tried in his absence, having died in Berlin in 1945, and Hermann Göring cheated the rope by biting into a cyanide capsule in his cell a couple of hours before he was due on the scaffold. Göring's psychiatrist at Nuremberg, Dr Douglas Kelley, would later follow him in exactly the same way.

That left ten men:

Joachim von Ribbentrop, foreign minister
Wilhelm Keitel, chief of the armed forces high command (the same Keitel whose letter was carried to Erwin Rommel along with the poison in 1944)
Ernst Kaltenbrunner, head of the Reich Main Security Office
Alfred Rosenberg, Reich minister for the occupied eastern territories
Hans Frank, governor-general of occupied Poland
Wilhelm Frick, minister of the interior
Julius Streicher, publisher of the antisemitic paper Der Stürmer
Fritz Sauckel, head of the forced labour programme
Alfred Jodl, chief of the operations staff
Arthur Seyss-Inquart, Reich commissioner for the occupied Netherlands

The venue was the prison gym, a shabby room about 33ft by 80ft where American guards had played a basketball game three days earlier. The pool report filed by Kingsbury Smith describes three black-painted wooden scaffolds, two used in turn and one kept spare, each with thirteen steps up to a platform eight feet high. A fresh rope was used for every man and the drop space underneath was screened off with boards and a dark canvas curtain.

Ribbentrop went first, entering at 1.11am. The last, Seyss-Inquart, dropped at 2.45am. Göring's body was brought in on a stretcher and laid between two of the gallows so the witnesses could see for themselves that he was dead. Woods later bragged to the Sioux City Journal that it had been "Ten men in 103 minutes," Coffee or Die reports, which is a bit longer than the pool report's own timings but you get the idea.

Streicher made the biggest scene. He shouted "Heil Hitler!" at the foot of the steps, spat out a final threat that the Bolsheviks would hang his executioners one day and yelled "Purim Fest 1946." That last jibe compared the ten hanged Nazis to the ten sons of Haman hanged in the Book of Esther, a parallel Emmanuel Bloch and Zvi Ron have unpicked in detail. Groans were heard from below the platform after he dropped.

So Were the Hangings Botched?

Officially, no. Woods told Stars and Stripes everything had gone perfectly and Time quoted him saying "A fellow can't afford to have nerves in this business," as History News Network's reprint shows. Life magazine even ran photographs of the bodies specifically to knock down rumours that something had gone wrong.

The trouble is those photographs did more to start rumours than stop them. Several of the dead men had bloodied faces. Woods's explanation was that they'd bitten their tongues. The London Star's Cecil Catling reported that the drop was too short and there wasn't enough room beneath the trap, so the men struck their heads on the way down and died of slow strangulation rather than a broken neck. Telford Taylor, one of the American prosecutors, noted the bloody faces in his memoirs. Law professor Donald E. Wilkes Jr later argued that many of the men simply didn't fall far enough to break their necks.

Just how long each man took is where it gets murky. Kingsbury Smith's report has Rosenberg dead within about 90 seconds, while Keitel wasn't pronounced dead until 1.44am. German historian Werner Maser later claimed Jodl took 18 minutes and Keitel up to 24, and some modern accounts push Keitel's ordeal to 28 minutes. HistoryNet's Andrew Nagorski points out that Maser's figures don't square with the official pool report, so treat the more extreme numbers with caution.

Albert Pierrepoint, who'd spent his career calculating a different drop for every prisoner based on height and weight, wasn't impressed. He put the clumsiness down to Woods using the same fixed drop of about five feet for everyone and tying "the old-fashioned four-coiled cowboy knot" rather than the British-style noose. Compare that with Pierrepoint's own reputation for getting the whole thing done in seconds and you can see why British hangmen sneered at the American method. It's worth remembering that in the Soviet Union, men like Vasily Blokhin didn't bother with the pretence of a clean death at all.

John C. Woods in uniform holding a hangman's noose around the neck of a crouching man in a tweed jacket during a demonstration — Woods demonstrating on a journalist.

Was It Deliberate?

This is the question that keeps the story alive, and the honest answer is that nobody can prove it either way. The strongest claim comes from Lieutenant Stanley Tilles, who worked alongside Woods and later wrote a memoir about it. Tilles said Woods deliberately set Streicher's noose off-centre so he'd strangle rather than die quickly, supposedly because Streicher had insulted him on the scaffold. That's one man's account written decades later, and it hasn't been independently corroborated.

The more boring explanation fits the evidence just as well. Woods had a documented history of sloppy work, he didn't calculate individual drops and the gallows were knocked up in a gym in a matter of days. A man who was careless, overconfident and a bit drunk on his own celebrity doesn't need to be a sadist to make a mess of ten hangings in one night.

Landsberg and the Hangman of the Third Reich

Nuremberg wasn't the end of Woods's work. He spent much of 1946 hanging convicted war criminals at Landsberg prison in Bavaria, the same place Hitler had written Mein Kampf two decades earlier. For part of that time he worked next to Johann Reichhart, the Nazi state's own executioner, with the two men using side-by-side gallows.

Reichhart's CV made even Woods's invented one look modest. WW2 Gravestone credits him with 3,165 executions, the vast majority between 1939 and 1945, including the guillotining of Sophie Scholl and her brother Hans in 1943. After the war the Americans kept him on to hang the very regime he'd served, at least until about May 1946. It's one of the strangest working partnerships of the whole post-war period, and it's rarely mentioned in the standard accounts of Woods's life.

The Allied machinery of justice rolled on for years afterwards. Some of the men it chased were caught much later, like Adolf Eichmann, while others such as Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss and Lidice butcher Kurt Daluege were tried and hanged by the countries they'd terrorised. In Tokyo, the Americans hanged Hideki Tojo in 1948, though Woods had no part in it.

Death on Eniwetok

Woods stayed in the Army after the war and ended up on Eniwetok Atoll in the Marshall Islands, part of the Pacific Proving Grounds where the United States tested its nuclear weapons. On 21 July 1950 he was electrocuted there. He was 39.

Exactly how it happened depends on which version you read. MacLean's research says he was repairing an engineer lighting set. Other accounts have him changing a lightbulb while standing in water, or working on a power line. All agree it was quick, which, as more than one writer has pointed out, is more than could be said for some of the men he hanged.

Inevitably, rumours grew up around it. One story says he was killed while building an electric chair. Another says German scientists brought to the US under Operation Paperclip murdered him on the atoll and staged an accident. MacLean dismisses both as myths, although the marketing for his own book still teases that the death might not have been the accident the Army reported. There's no hard evidence it was anything else.

Woods was buried in the city cemetery in Toronto, Kansas, about 60 miles east of Wichita, next to Hazel. He received no individual medals for his work as a hangman.

Why John C. Woods Still Matters

It's easy to say the men Woods hanged didn't deserve much sympathy, and most people would agree. But Nuremberg was meant to show the world that the Allies did things properly, with evidence, lawyers, appeals and a clean, dignified end. The man chosen to deliver that end was a Navy deserter with a psychiatric diagnosis, a fake CV and a habit of getting the drop wrong.

That gap between the grand idea and the scruffy reality is what makes Woods worth remembering. Executioners have always been strange figures, from the medieval headsmen who lived on the edge of town to Pierrepoint pulling pints in his pub between jobs. Woods might be the strangest of the lot: the man who closed the most famous trial in history and then spent the rest of his short life telling stories that weren't true.