MAZAL LIBRARY
.	EXECUTIONER PIERREPOINT (extracts) Page 146
.	146 Executioner Pierrepoint children's saying that I had used on the morning when we had moved house into Lancashire thirty years ago. I found my way to the prison and knocked on the gate. A German prison officer, very roughly dressed, asked my business with impressive alacrity. I began to explain, but he could not understand English. I was rescued by a Regimental Sergeant Major in the Control Commission for Germany, as smart as paint in his freshly-pressed uniform. I took to RSM O'Neil at once. He spoke fluent German, and in a few minutes he was escorting me around the prison. 'I've never seen an execution,' he told me cheerfully, 'but I'm going to see one now, because I am to be your assistant.' I was rather startled at being given a novice, but as it turned out, I could not have hoped for a better man. Eventually he was to be my assistant at about two hundred executions of war criminals in Germany. Inside Hameln Gaol on this day the Royal Engineers had just finished building the execution chamber, at the end of one of the wings. It lay on the right hand side of a long corridor adjoining the condemned cells, which were the smallest cells I had ever seen human beings confined in. I got my first glimpse of the Belsen prisoners, all peering silently through the bars of their cell doors, as I walked down the corridor. The first one I saw was Josef Kramer, the former commandant. I recognized him at once. As I went down this dark corridor I could hear shovelling and scraping in the prison yard outside. It was a jarring and nerve-wracking noise in what would otherwise have been dead silence. I looked through a window and saw a gang of workmen busily digging thirteen graves for the following morning. There was no doubt that the condemned prisoners could also hear this sound. I complained about this to a prison official, but was told that nothing could be done to stop it. 'The graves have to be dug and the ground is frozen. It's full of pebbles and flints, and we must do the job today to be ready in time.' I went on to test the gallows. We carried out a number of drops which convinced me that it was satisfactory. I walked back down the corridor, and the thirteen Belsen faces were still pressed to the bars, watching me. Never in my experience have I seen a more pitiable crowd of condemned prisoners. I knew their crimes were monstrous, but could not help feeling sorry for them. When I mentioned this to some young British
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