tographs of the chosen hangman, Master Sergeant John C.
Woods, fingering his heavy hempen rope. Woods boasted that it
would soon hang Hermann Göring.
Fifteen miles away, out at Sackdilling, Emmy and Else sent
their little girls out to play in a forest glade, then clustered
around the white portable radio set that an American girl had
given them at the courthouse.
There, the president summed up the case against Göring
first. The Reichsmarschall watched gravely, shaking his head in
barely perceptible disagreement. “His guilt is unique in its
enormity,” Sir Geoffrey Lawrence concluded. “The record dis-
closes no excuses for this man. The court finds the defendant
guilty on all four counts of the indictment.”
Not a flicker of emotion had crossed Göring’s brow. But
when Biddle now announced Schacht’s acquittal, he slammed
down his earphones in disgust.
At : .. he stepped alone from the elevator at the
courtroom’s rear, to hear sentence. He came to attention, and
Lawrence read it out, in the oddly disembodied voice of the
English upper crust. “Defendant Hermann Wilhelm Göring,
the International Military Court sentences you to death by
hanging.”
As he was led back to his cell, Göring was astonished to see
German police mustering to re-arrest Schacht and the other two
who had been acquitted. He loathed Schacht now, but he
gagged at the humiliating spectacle.
He found Dr. Gilbert hovering near his own cell door.
“Death,” said Göring reaching for the book that he had left
on his cot. His eyes blurred, and he asked to be left alone.
The prisoners had been notified that they had four days to
petition the Control Council for Germany for clemency, and
that the hangings would take place fifteen days (excluding Sun-