Johann Reichhart

Johann Reichhart (29 April 1893 – 26 April 1972) was a German state-appointed judicial executioner in Bavaria from 1924 to 1946. During the Nazi period, he executed numerous people who were sentenced to death for their resistance to the German government. After the war, he was employed as executioner by the US Military Government in Germany. In total, he executed 3,165 people.

Reichhart spent one week in Stadelheim Prison for the purposes of denazification. He was not tried for carrying out his official duties as judicial executioner. He was subsequently employed by the U.S. Office of Military Government, until the end of May 1946, to help execute dozens of Nazi war criminals on the gallows at Landsberg am Lech. The technique required for this must have been known to him since 1942 at the latest, when he submitted a design proposal for British-style gallows with trapdoor (Long drop), which was rejected by the Reich Ministry of Justice. (Hanging had been introduced in Germany as an additional form of execution on 29 March 1933 by President Hindenburg after the Reichstag Fire; the method used was the Austro-Hungarian short drop pole method of strangulation hanging). On 16 October 1946, Woods hanged the war criminals convicted in the Nuremberg trials, assisted by Joseph Malta.

Post-executioner life In May 1947, Reichhart was imprisoned for a second time. After a denazification trial process in Munich in December 1948, he was "incriminated" and sentenced to two years in a labour camp and confiscation of half of his assets. During his trial, Reichhart said, "I have carried out death sentences in the firm conviction that I should serve the state with my work, and to comply with lawfully enacted laws. I never doubted the legality of what I was doing."

Reichhart was temporarily confined in psychiatric hospital.