The HORRORS of Alfred Jodl Execution Method *Warning REAL FOOTAGE

At 2:34 in the morning, inside a dimly lit gymnasium in Nuremberg, a man who once commanded the entire German war machine climbed 13 wooden steps to the gallows.

His uniform collar was half turned up, his lips trembling.

Six words left his mouth.

Then the trap door opened, and what followed was far worse than anyone in that room expected.

If this is your first time here, this channel covers the darkest chapters of military history that the world tried to forget.

Hit subscribe and turn on notifications so you never miss a story.

Yodel entered this world on May 10th, 1890 in Vertzburg, Bavaria.

His younger brother, Ferdinand, would also rise to the rank of army general.

His uncle Friedrich Yodel was a respected philosopher at the University of Vienna.

The Yodel family breathed discipline, order, unendut, three words that would define Alfred’s existence and eventually destroy him.

As a teenager, Yodel enrolled in a military cadet school in Munich.

He graduated in 1910 and joined the fourth Bavarian field artillery regiment.

By the time the Great War erupted in 1914, Udel was ready.

He was sent to the Western Front with a field artillery regiment.

The trenches of France nearly killed him twice.

He took a severe thigh wound early in the fighting.

Shrapnel ripped into his body again during a separate engagement.

For his bravery under fire, the German Empire awarded him the Iron Cross second class in November 1914.

He pushed through the pain, transferred briefly to the Eastern Front in 1917, and returned to the West as a staff officer.

By 1918, he held the Iron Cross first class, one of Germany’s highest military decorations.

When when the war ended and Germany collapsed, Yodel considered leaving the army entirely, he thought about becoming a doctor, but the pull of the military was too strong.

He stayed on with the drastically reduced rice.

Germany’s post-war army kept at just 100,000 men by the Treaty of Versailles.

This decision changed the trajectory of his life and the fate of millions.

Through the 1920s, Yodel quietly built his career inside Germany’s Ministry of War and the intelligence apparatus.

He married in 1913, but would become a widowerower.

He married again in 1944, near the end of everything.

In 1923, Yodel crossed paths with a man who would reshape the entire world, Adolf Hitler.

The future dictator took an immediate liking to the Bavarian officer.

Unlike many of Hitler’s top military figures, a yodel did not come from the Prussian aristocracy, the old noble military families that dominated German officer ranks.

This made him more relatable to Hitler who distrusted the old guard.

By 1935, Yodel had been promoted to general major and appointed to the national defense section in the high command of the armed forces.

He served directly under Wilhelm Kitel who ran the entire military apparatus.

Yodel was his right hand.

When Germany absorbed Austria in the 1938 anelless, Yodel was sent to Vienna as head of the 44th artillery command.

After the Sudetan land crisis played out, he returned to the heart of German military planning.

Then came August 23rd, 1939.

Hitler personally selected Yodel to become chief of the operation staff of the newly formed OKW.

the supreme command of the German armed forces.

This was not just a desk job.

Duodel would become the operational brain of the entire German war effort, translating Hitler’s ambitions into military reality.

One week later, German tanks rolled into Poland.

The Second World War had begun.

Yodel was never the man standing in front of cameras delivering speeches.

He was the man behind the maps, behind the charts, behind the orders.

He played a direct role in planning the invasions of Norway, Denmark, Belgium, and the Netherlands in the spring of 1940.

When Germany turned its guns on Yugoslavia and Greece in 1941, Yodel’s fingerprints were all over those campaigns, too.

He spent most of the war at the Wolf’s Lair, Hitler’s forward command post in the forests of East Prussia.

There, surrounded by bunkers and barbed wire, Yodel worked alongside Hitler daily for years.

But Yodel did not just plan invasions.

He signed orders that crossed a line no soldier should ever cross.

On June 6th, 1941, he signed the Commasar Order, a directive commanding German troops to execute Soviet political commasars upon capture.

These were not combatants being killed in battle.

These were prisoners.

Yodel’s signature turned soldiers into executioners.

Then on October 28th, 1942, he signed the Commando Order.

This one went even further.

It instructed German forces to execute Allied commandos, including uniform soldiers, if captured behind German lines.

Partisans, resistance fighters, and even properly uniform soldiers operating in enemy territory, were to be killed immediately without trial.

An order bearing his signature also directed the deportation of Danish citizens, including Jewish civilians, to concentration camps.

N when confronted later about the mass shootings of Soviet prisoners of war in 1941, Yodel offered a cold, calculated defense.

He claimed the only prisoners shot were not those who physically could not march, but those who refused to, as if that distinction made it acceptable.

On July 20th, 1944, Yodel stood inside the wolf’s lair when a bomb planted by Colonel Klaus von Stalenberg detonated in an assassination attempt against Hitler.

The blast injured Yodel.

He suffered a concussion, but he survived.

Hitler survived, too.

The failed plot only tightened the inner circle’s grip on power.

By early 1944, Yodel had been promoted to General Oburst, Colonel General, a four-star rank.

He remained at Hitler’s side until the very end.

On April 30th, 1945, Adolf Hitler put a pistol to his head in his Berlin bunker.

Before pulling the trigger, he had named Grand Admiral Carl Dunit as his successor.

Germany was finished.

Armies were surrendering across Europe.

Donuts needed someone to deliver the final blow.

the official capitulation.

He chose Yodel.

On May 6th, 1945, Yodel arrived at General Dwight D.

Eisenhower’s Supreme Headquarters in the French city of Reams.

His mission was to negotiate a partial surrender, handing over only the forces fighting the Western Allies while the Eastern Front against the Soviets would keep fighting.

Eisenhower refused.

The American general made it crystal clear.

Surrender everything everywhere unconditionally or he would seal the Western Front and force every German soldier into Soviet hands.

Yodel radio donuts.

The response came back fast.

Sign it.

At 2:41 in the morning on May 7th, 1945, it Alfred Yodel put his signature on the German instrument of surrender at Rams.

The war in Europe was over.

The man who had helped plan its most devastating campaigns had now signed its death certificate.

6 days later, Dunit’s entire government was arrested by British troops.

Yodel was transferred to a special allied detention facility known as Camp Ashkin.

The gallows were waiting.

In October 1945, the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg formally indicted Alfred Yodel on four charges: conspiracy to commit crimes against peace, planning and waging wars of aggression, war crimes, and crimes against humanity.

The prosecution built its case around his own handwriting.

His signature appeared on the commasar order, the commando order in deportation directives.

And these were not secondhand accusations.

These were documents Yodel himself had approved.

Yodel’s defense rested on a single argument.

He was following orders.

He claimed he had privately opposed many of Hitler’s directives and tried to soften their impact.

The tribunal did not buy it.

The defense of superior orders had already been rejected as a legal shield by the participating nations.

The French judge Hri Don Devor actually dissented.

He believed the evidence against Yodel did not fully support all the charges.

Yodel’s wife, Louise, joined his defense team and later alleged that the prosecution used documents they never shared with the defense.

Yodel himself disproved certain charges such as the claim that he had helped Hitler seize power in 1933.

None of it mattered enough.

A yodel pleaded not guilty.

His exact words were, “Before God, before history and my people.

” The tribunal found him guilty on all four counts.

The sentence, death by hanging.

Yodel made one final request.

He asked to face a firing squad.

The traditional military execution for a soldier.

The tribunal denied it.

He would hang like a common criminal.

October 15th, 1946.

The evening before his execution, inside the Nuremberg prison cell block, correspondents were allowed to observe the condemned men.

one last time.

Udel sat quietly writing a letter.

Others paced their cells.

Others spoke with chaplain.

At 9:45 p.

m.

, guards noticed Herman Guring twitching on his cot.

By the time the doctor arrived, the death rattle had already begun.

Guring had bitten down on a cyanide capsule hidden inside a copper cartridge shell.

In the man scheduled to hang first had cheated the executioner.

That left 10 men for the gallows.

Three black painted wooden scaffolds had been erected inside the prison gymnasium.

A room roughly 33 ft wide and 80 ft long.

Two would be used in alternating order.

The third stood as a spare.

A fresh rope was prepared for each man.

The executioner was Master Sergeant John C.

Woods, a 43-year-old American military hangman who claimed to have executed 347 people in his career.

His assistant was military policeman Joseph Malta.

They used the standard drop method, not the long drop method favored by British executioners.

This distinction would prove significant.

Yodel was the ninth man called.

He entered the gymnasium wearing his Vermach uniform, the black collar half turned up at the back as though he had put it on in a rush.

In hard witnesses noted, he was visibly nervous.

He wet his lips constantly.

His face was drawn and haggarded.

His walk was unsteady, nothing like the rigid military bearing of Kaidel, who had gone before him.

He climbed the 13 steps to the platform.

Standing on the trapdo, his feet were bound with a webbed army belt.

The hangman held the noose of 13 coils ready.

A black hood was placed over his head.

His voice, despite everything, remained calm when he spoke his last six words.

My greetings to you, my Germany.

At 2:34 a.

m.

, the trap door opened.

Yodel plunged into the darkness beneath the scaffold.

The standard drop used by Sergeant Woods was designed to break the neck instantly, but multiple reports from that night suggest something went terribly wrong.

Woods had reportedly miscalculated the rope lengths.

The trapoor opening was too narrow.

Several condemned men smashed their heads on the edges as they dropped through.

Some of the 10 men executed that night took between 14 and 28 minutes to die.

The US Army officially denied that any of the men died from slow strangulation rather than a broken neck.

But journalist present told a different story.

One British reporter stated plainly that there was insufficient room for the men to drop properly, meaning their necks were not broken.

They strangled.

Whether Yodel’s death was quick or prolonged, no official record confirms either way.

What is known is that his body remained hanging inside the scaffold, concealed behind dark canvas curtains, while the 10th and final man, Arthur Seace Inquart, was brought in at 2:38 a.

m.

The bodies of all 10 executed men.

He along with the corpse of Guring were loaded onto trucks and driven to a crematorium at Ofraighhoff in Munich.

Every one of them was reduced to ash.

Those ashes were then scattered into the Benbach, a small stream that feeds into the river Esar.

The Allies made this decision deliberately.

There would be no graves, no headstones, no shrines, no pilgrimage sites for those who might one day try to honor these men.

Years later, a memorial cross for Yodel appeared at his family grave on the island of Fraenhim in Bavaria.

In 2018, the local council ordered its removal.

A Munich court ruled in 2019 that the family could keep the grave, but the family voluntarily agreed to remove his name.

In 1953, Yodel’s widow, Louise, sued to recover his pension and estate.

A West German denassification court postumously declared him not guilty, exciting the disscent of the French judge at Nuremberg.

But within months, the United States objected.

The acquitt was revoked.

His estate, however, remained with his family.

Alfred Yodel lived 56 years.

He served two world wars.

He signed orders that sent thousands to their deaths.

He signed the document that ended the largest war in human history.

And in the end, he climbed 13 steps and dropped through a trapo in a prison gymnasium at 2:34 in the morning [snorts] while the world slept.

If this story gripped you, watch this next video about another military figure whose final moments were just as haunting.

Click now before this story disappears from your feed.