Shortly before midnight Bruno Perzenowski and Heinrich Busch climbed up the thirteen steps. Once there, Branchaud led each man, his final stride placing him above one of the two steel trapdoors. As December 17 ended and the new day began, the hangman still waited, but no telegram arrived with a reprieve. At 12:10 a.m., the hangman with practiced hand “pinion[ed] their legs, dropped the hoods [over their faces], adjusted the ropes and pulled the lever.” Twenty minutes later, Perzenowski’s and Busch’s bodies were cut down, examined by the coroner, pronounced dead, and carried directly to the common grave they had been forced to dig the previous day. At 12:45, Walter Wolf and Willy Müeller were executed. Their bodies too were brought to the common grave. The child murderer, Donald Sherman Staley, was hanged at 1: 30 p.m., bringing an end to what would be the last mass hanging in Canadian history.
Hanged in Medicine Hat is a book I requested more or less on a whim — I spent my teenaged years on the “bald prairies” of Southern Alberta without ever hearing the story of the Nazi POW camp that once was there, let alone the story of the last mass execution in Canadian history, so my interest was piqued — and historian Nathan Greenfield’s account is well-researched, well-told, and presents a nuanced question: In the immediate aftermath of WWII, what should justice have looked like in the handling of unrepentant Nazis who killed some of their own “within the wires” of Medicine Hat’s Camp 132? Full of fascinating details, shining a light on a near-forgotten episode in Canadian history, what’s not to like?
Opened early in 1943 and representing a sizeable increase in employment and economic activity for the city, Camp 132 was welcomed by Hatters. That the prisoners were available for farm labour and the occasional hockey game only made their presence more welcome. The locals treated the captives with courtesy, and their manners were reciprocated. The existence of Camp 132 was as positive an experience as could be expected for both sides, except for the shocking killings of Private August Plaszek in 1943 and Sergeant Dr. Karl Lehmann a year later.
Along with the interesting history behind how German POWs (including members of Rommel’s Afrika Korps, surrendered to British troops) ended up in Medicine Hat, Alberta, I was fascinated to learn that, because Canada had signed the Geneva Convention, not only did these POWs receive 3500 calories a day (most prisoners would gain fifteen pounds over the course of their detainment), but they would have complete control of their own leadership and policing (which meant senior Nazis and the Gestapo ran the show within the camp). With coded messages and a secret radio bringing orders straight from Berlin, the POWs remained under German military command, and as the Russians marched on their capital and things began to look dire in the Fatherland, any POW who whispered that Germany might lose the war could be accused of treason and risk being dealt with by military tribunal. So when prisoners were found murdered within Camp 132 — and the Canadian government decided to treat it as a civil matter and subject the perpetrators to our civil justice system — was that a miscarriage of justice? Should the Germans, per the Geneva Convention, have had the right to administer punishment according to their own military rules? This is the crux of Hanged in Medicine Hat and with the presentation of court transcripts, newspaper articles, and interviews with eyewitnesses, Greenfield makes a persuasive case that the Canadian government didn’t have the right to bring these men to civil trial, let alone subject them to capital punishment.
The government’s intention and the appeals court’s decisions may have settled the matter in 1946 but they do not do so today. The violation of the Geneva Convention and the War Measures Act may seem to be technical legal points. They are not. For, by trying the POWs in civilian court, Canadian authorities deprived them of something vitally important: jurors of their peers, that is jurors who understood military ethos.
On the other hand: I was telling my family about this story over dinner last night and both my husband (an old conservative) and my daughter (a young progressive) said that the Nazis murdered within the camp and the Nazis hanged for their crimes were simply fewer Nazis in the world and they couldn’t get worked up about their deaths. I tried to explain that Greenfield presented some of the POWs as radicalised youth who had never known another way of life (which I thought might sway my daughter’s stance, but she just said it was less likely someone like that could be reformed after the war), and while at least one of the hanged men went to his death calling out, “My Führer, I follow thee”, Greenfield didn’t believe any of them deserved the death penalty (and especially not as the consequence of a civil trial). Perhaps it takes a book length explanation to be persuaded by Greenfield’s position (as I was), but at any rate, I found the whole thing utterly fascinating. I'm so glad this caught my attention and that I had the opportunity to read it.
