October 16: ON THIS DAY in 1946, how 11 top Nazis died
ON THIS DAY IN 1912, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle reported, “Various opinions were expressed today by Brooklyn surgeons and those familiar with the effect of bullet wounds regarding the strength shown by Colonel [Theodore] Roosevelt at Milwaukee after the bullet fired at him lodged in his breast. The surgeons were generally of the opinion that it was almost miraculous that the Colonel should have been able to keep on his feet, proceed with the delivery of an hour-long speech, and pursue his wonted activity for hours. ‘Only a giant could have done it,’ said one of the surgeons interviewed. ‘There are mighty few instances on record of such a thing. The ordinary man would have dropped in his tracks at once, simply from the shock of such a blow. Viewing it from the information given by the newspapers, I believe that Colonel Roosevelt’s actions, under the circumstances, showed him to be a man of tremendous physical strength. That is about the only thing which could account for his activity, wounded as he was.’”
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ON THIS DAY IN 1946, the Eagle reported, “Nuernberg — Reichsmarshal Hermann Goering succeeded in cheating the gallows of allied justice by committing suicide in his prison cell a short time before the 10 other condemned remnants of the Nazi hierarchy were hanged earlier today. Despite the fact that an American security guard was supposed to be watching his every movement, the Crown Prince of Nazidom managed to place in his mouth, chew and swallow a vial containing cyanide of potassium. The vial of poison was hidden in a copper cartridge shell. Goering swallowed the poison while Col. S. Burton Andrus, American security commandant, was walking across the prison yard to the death block to read him and the 10 other condemned Nazi leaders the International Military Tribunal’s sentence of death … Goering had not previously been told that he was going to die this morning, nor had any of the other condemned men. How he guessed that this was to be his day of doom and how he managed to conceal the poison on his person is a mystery that has confounded the security forces.”
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