Image MAZAL LIBRARY
. EXECUTIONER PIERREPOINT (extracts)
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Executioner at War 151
were taken off the rope, placed in coffins and taken away at once for burial in the ground outside the condemned cells. The morning progressed slowly, but the business was over by one o'clock. However, the winter dark was already on us when RSM O'Neil came to me before the last double burial and said: 'There has been a mistake — we are a coffin short for one of the men.' We wrapped the body in hessian and put it in the grave. He was the thirteenth person to be hanged on Friday the thirteenth before thirteen official witnesses, and there was no coffin for him. But at Belsen they had been buried by bull-dozers, and without hessian.

In the evening I went to a mess party. The boys suggested that I should be given a memento of my visit to Germany, perhaps an engraved clock. I said I should be returning to Germany very shortly and would be proud to accept it — I have the clock now: it is a treasured possession. In the morning I flew back to London and faced the mob of the Press once more. I was to go back to Germany many times, as the only British executioner ever called on, often under difficult conditions in that post-war wilderness peopled by desperate displaced persons, Major Thompson, of the Judge Advocate General's department of the War Office, said they were putting up my name for a commendation, I said that I refused to be considered, and this was accepted, though I was glad to know later that Regimental Sergeant Major O'Neil was recognized. The war, with all its grey treachery and inhumanity, was moving into the past, except for the final showpiece of Nuremberg. When a newspaperman asked Anne what was my most vivid memory of it she replied — with absolute accuracy — that it was the knowledge that I had shaken hands with Winston Churchill. But, for so many bereaved, the war would not be over for a long time. Not only mourning, but the thought of vengeance, could not be stilled, Every Christmas, for years after that act of finality in Hameln Gaol, I received a plain envelope with a five pound note in it, On the first occasion there was a scrap of paper enclosed, with the one word BELSEN. Later there was no message. Then the gift was stopped, presumably through death. Who sent it? What person, with what emotion? Did he find peace?
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