Another, happier anniversary

It was a year ago today that I discovered the awesome history/death penalty blog Executed Today. It profiles an execution every single day of the year: “On this day in this year, so-and-so was executed, and here is the story.” It’s been running for a couple of years now. I was happy to take some of the burden off the blogger’s hands and have written many guest entries. I specialize in Holocaust/Nazi stuff but have written entries about other cases too.

Check ’em out:

January 15, 2000: Kasongo, a child soldier from the Democratic Republic of Congo
January 17, 1945: Not Szymon Srebrnik, who survived his execution at the little-known Nazi extermination camp Chelmno
February 23, 1629: John Dean, an eight-year-old arsonist and probably the youngest person ever executed in England
April 1, 1942: Not Hersh Smolar, a Jewish resistance leader from the Minsk Ghetto who escaped death through a ruse
April 6, 1945: Kim Malthe-Bruun, a resistance member in Nazi-occupied Denmark who also wrote awesome love letters
April 8, 1943: Otto and Elise Hampell, for writing seditious postcards in Nazi Germany (theirs was the story behind one of my favorite novels, Every Man Dies Alone)
April 13, 1942: Anton Schmid, a German who saved Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland
May 19, 1942: Shimon Cohen, a Lithuanian Jew in hiding who was caught by the Nazis
May 20, 1943: Wilhelm H., for writing anti-Hitler graffiti in a toilet
May 23, 1673: Thomas Cornell, whose allegedly murdered mother allegedly implicated him in a dream
May 27, 1941: Mirjam Sara P., a victim of the Nazis’ T4 program designed to eliminate people with disabilities
June 12, 1903: Ora Copenhaver and William Jackson, two murderers who happened to be hanged on the same day
July 30, 1419: The First Defenestration of Prague, wherein rioters invaded the town hall and threw a bunch of people out the window
August 15, 2004: Atefah Rajabi Shalaaleh, an unchaste Saudi Arabian teenager
August 18, 1775: Thomas Jeremiah, a black guy in pre-Revolutionary South Carolina who got too rich and successful for his own good
September 5, 1942: Children’s Action in the Lodz Ghetto, wherein the Nazis deported almost all the ghetto’s children and old people to their deaths
September 15, 1944: Mala Zimetbaum and Edek Galinski, who were caught after they escaped from Auschwitz together
September 29, 1941: Babi Yar Massacre, when the Nazis killed over 33,000 people in two days in Kiev, Ukraine
November 23, 1499: Perkin Warbeck, who pretended to be one of the lost Princes of the Tower
November 24, 2009: Two Chinese men implicated in a horrific international product-tampering scandal involving baby milk
December 23, 1942: Sasha Filippov, a teenage Russian spy during the Battle of Stalingrad (he was a minor character in the movie Enemy at the Gates)
December 27, 1944: Not Sim Kessel, an inmate of Auschwitz who survived one execution and escaped another, on the same day
December 30, 1818: Robert Johnston, a robber whose hanging was botched so badly that they had to do it to him four times

I’ve got more coming up too, including two later this month. I love researching and writing these things, and the owner of Executed Today loves having some of the responsibility taken off his hands. It’s a win-win situation. 🙂