Two things that people may not know about Hitler are that, when his mother was dying of a malignant tumour in her chest, he spent many hours in conversation with her doctor, Edmund Bloch, who was Jewish. After his mother died, Dr Bloch said that he had, "... never seen anyone grieve as much as Adolf Hitler." (Joshua Rubinstein) And, when he was a young man, Hitler was repulsed by anti-Semitism until he saw someone, "with long sidelocks wearing a black kaftan," (Alan Bullock, Hitler: A Study In Tyranny) and bought himself a pamphlet on anti-Semitism.

I am not defending Hitler, don't get me wrong, but he didn't start out as the evil man that he became. And Hitler wasn't the only person to have evil policies; his henchmen, Himmler (Himmler, himself was a character indifferent to human suffering, but if he had a pet that was sick or injured, he would be worried and upset) and Goebbels had plenty of input, too.

I remember reading about Reinhard Heydrich and the only unfortunate thing about his fate is this. My father worked with a Dutchman who was the guard for Adolf Eichmann when the Dutchman was 19. The Dutchman said that the only regret he had was that he shoot Eichmann when he had the chance. My father said, "Well, you were the bigger person by not killing him. AND, if you had shot him when you had the chance, you would have known how evil he was, but when he was hanged, the whole world saw just how evil his crimes were and he had nowhere to hide."

Now don't get me wrong. But, I say, in some ways, the executions of the top ten Nazis (botched though they were by John C. Woods) were of the top ten Nazis they could capture. As was said in a newspaper article, "Two were missing: Martin Bormann, Hitler's Deputy, presumed dead, tried, in absentia, and Hermann Goering, who committed suicide several hours earlier with a cyanide pill." Martin Bormann's mortal remains were later found and his death confirmed, Himmler committed suicide when arrested, Goebbels had his wife and kids killed and committed suicide. Joachim von Ribbentrop was the first to be executed, and fifth in line was Hans Frank (another truly evil person). The execution of Julius Streicher must go down as questionable as despicable though he was, and despicable though most of what he said and wrote was, he was hanged for things he said not things he did.

These men were evil, but having seen that Streicher was a dwarfish man, I have read that Woods may have gotten the weights wrong and he didn't leave enough space from the platform into the pit below to ensure neck breaking drops, thus causing some to die by strangulation. In Streicher's case, he went down kicking and may have dislodged the knot. A more experienced executioner would have had Streicher, assuming he was the lightest man, last, and have said, "Okay, the heaviest man would go first, the lightest man last. And said, "Okay, Ribbentrop weighed so many pounds, so the drop had to be so many feet so many inches.""

Not just brave people, but evil people have had their contributions ignored or forgotten only to be discovered by history decades later. Had the Czech paratroopers not executed Heydrich, the whole world may have seen how evil he was and he, too, may have died in ignominy.