Hat tip Ferris Barracks.com
On the night of October 15-16, 1946, the hangings of the major war crime defendants convicted at Nuremberg were carried out in a gymnasium located in the courthouse-prison complex. Hermann Goering managed to avoid execution by biting a cyanide capsule shortly before he was to be hanged. From there, the bodies were loaded onto lorries and transported to the Munich area, where they were cremated and the ashes dumped into a tributary of the Isar River, which flows though Munich. I have read various accounts as to where the cremations took place. According to some sources, they were burned at the Dachau concentration camp, just outside Munich. Colonel Burton Andrus, who was in charge of the prisoners, stated in his book, "I was the Nuremberg Jailor", that the bodies were taken to Dachau. One German TV documentary I have seen stated that it happened at Munich's Ostfriedhof (East Cemetery) crematorium. Wikipedia states that this latter account is accurate, and that the cremations were carried out at the Ostfriedhof.
What is also not clear is how the bodies got to Munich (or Dachau). By some accounts they were taken in the lorries and by other accounts, they were flown to Munich from a nearby airfield. Once the lorries left the Palace of Justice in Nuremberg, news reporters tried to follow them but were blocked by US Army military vehicles. It is reported in some accounts that the lorries were last seen on Fuertherstrasse (which is where the courthouse is located. It is still a functioning courthouse today.)Years ago, I read one account that suggested the bodies were taken to a small airfield near Erlangen and flown to Munich.(See Joe Heydecker and Johannes Leeb, "The Nuremberg Trial: A History of Nazi Germany as Revealed Through the Testimony at Nuremberg", World Publishing Company, 1962. pp 387-388.) I addressed this issue in my own book, Erlangen-An American's History of a German Town, University Press of America, 2005, pp 269-270.
If that is true, I surmise that the airfield in question was at the caserne which the US Army took over in 1945, and which became known as Ferris Barracks-and where I was stationed from 1966-1968.
A few days ago, one of the members of Ferris Barracks.com, an online site dedicated to those who served at Ferris Barracks, posted a photo of the small airstrip, which just so happened to be located near my barracks and our motor pool (404 Military Police Company). In the above photo, the brick building in the foreground is the motor pool. (This photo was taken at a different time and the motor pool was being used by a different unit.) One of the two white buildings, a small portion of which can be seen at the extreme right, was my barracks (marked by a red arrow). Today, it is a Montessori school. The vehicle in the picture is parked on a portion of what was the airstrip.
So I am wondering if this airstrip, just yards from our barracks and motor pool, is where the bodies of Goering, Ribbentrop, Keitel, Jodl, Frank, Streicher, Sauckel, Kaltenbrunner, Seyss-Inquart, Frick, and Rosenberg were put on a plane bound for the Munich area to be cremated. I will try to find out more and report back.
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