News From The Dark
Herta Kasparova was a young woman living in Czechoslovakia before & during WWII. She was sought out by the Germans to use as a spy since she spoke both the Czech and German languages. The cost of becoming a German spy was extremely high and once the war ended, she would be forced to pay this debt with her life.
Kasparova was born with a birth defect which caused her to walk with a limp. In her childhood and adolescence, she was mercilessly mocked by other children. The remaining years of her life she would harbor resentment about the days. As you’ll soon learn this resentment may have led to her demise.
Her bilingual skills made her valuable to the Gestapo and she translated numerous conversations and documents for them all throughout the war against the allies.
She also served as a spy for them and also reported her own countrymen as dissidents to the Germans. Among those she reported were four young men, rumored to have been among her tormentors in her youth. The young men were captured & executed by the Germans.
Following the war, Kasparova was arrested and charged with crimes against humanity, eventually being sentenced to death.
What is pole hanging? People executed using the method known as pole hanging were intended to suffer. It consisted of the condemned being loosely tied to a vertical structure, usually a wood board or pole. They would then been place and left standing on a small platform. A noose would be circled around the person’s neck and secured at the back of the structure.
When the execution time approached, the platform would be kicked out from under the person’s feet and the executioner would stand behind the pole and pull on the rope. At the same time, an executioners assistant would push up on the prisoner’s head to help speed up the execution. Pole Hanging was always slower and much more painful than the long drop method you are probably familiar with, because whether the neck was broken or not depended on how suddenly the executioners could cause the prisoner’s neck to break.
Eyewitnesses of the execution stated that before Herta made it to the pole she collapsed to the ground at the mere sight of the hanging pole and had to be forced to walk to her place of execution. Witnesses also said before and during the event she urinated down her leg and onto the ground.
The image below was taken during her execution. The platform would have just been removed and the executioner would be pulling on the noose in back of the structure. The man you see is the assistant and he would be trying to apply upward pressure to her head so the weight of her body would strangle her more quickly. She would likely still be conscious at this point
Below you see a deceased Herta Kasparova being checked by a doctor for a pulse.
Below you can clearly see the puddle of urine in the dirt around the base of the wooden board.
Below you see the body of Herta Kasparova hanging above the box which will be used to carry her body away.
Below is the last image taken of the deceased body of Herta Kasparova. The German spy who was hanged by the neck until she died in 1946 at the age of 23-years-old.
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