When World War II ended, captured war criminals were brought out into public squares, expected to face quick executions. But what they were met with instead was a method the Allied forces elsewhere in Europe never used. It was called pole hanging, and the name barely captures how disturbing it really was.
The method came from older traditions connected to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. A tall wooden pole was placed in a public area, often inside a prison yard or town square, where large crowds could gather. The condemned prisoner was brought out and fitted with a chest sling that went under the arms.
A noose was then tightened around the neck, and the prisoner was slowly lifted upward until the rope became fully tight. There was no trapdoor and no sudden drop to break the neck. Instead, the prisoner slowly died from strangulation. The rope gradually cut off blood flow and air to the brain while the chest sling kept the body upright. Because there was no drop, death could take several painful minutes.
The executions were designed this way on purpose. The governments carrying them out did not want these deaths to happen quietly behind closed doors. They wanted people to see them. Executions were announced ahead of time, and crowds gathered to watch. Looking back today, these public executions can seem shocking.
But to understand why they happened this way, you have to understand the level of destruction the Nazi occupation had caused across Eastern and Central Europe. Entire villages had been erased. Families had disappeared. Tens of thousands of civilians had been murdered in prisons, camps, hospitals, and city streets.
By the time the war ended, many survivors no longer cared about mercy for the people responsible. And every person executed on those poles had played a role in that destruction. The first man we need to talk about was not one of the most powerful Nazis in Europe. But what made him especially disturbing was that he had once been a Catholic priest.
His name was Andr s Kun. Kun had originally been ordained as a Franciscan friar in the Catholic Church. But during World War II, he became deeply involved with Hungary s Arrow Cross Party, a fascist and violently antisemitic movement closely allied with Nazi Germany. By late 1944, the war was collapsing around Hungary.
Soviet forces were approaching Budapest, and the Arrow Cross government knew defeat was getting closer every day. Instead of backing down, many members of the movement became even more violent. Budapest quickly turned into one of the most dangerous cities in Europe. Jewish civilians who had survived years of persecution were now being hunted through the streets, apartment buildings, hospitals, and shelters.
Armed Arrow Cross militias carried out executions across the city while Soviet artillery could already be heard in the distance. Kun did not stay in the background during this violence. According to witnesses and survivors, he personally led armed death squads through Budapest while still wearing his priest robes. He reportedly entered Jewish hospitals alongside Arrow Cross gunmen, dragged sick patients from their beds, and ordered executions inside buildings that should have been safe places for civilians. Witnesses later described him shouting orders during raids and encouraging
the killings. Some survivors claimed he even participated directly in shootings himself. The attacks connected to Kun killed dozens of people, while the larger Arrow Cross terror campaign in Budapest killed tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews during the final months of the war. When Soviet forces captured Budapest in February 1945, Kun was arrested afterwards.
His trial became one of the first major war crimes proceedings in postwar Hungary. The evidence against him was overwhelming. He was convicted of war crimes and sentenced to death. On September 19, 1945, Kun was executed in Budapest using the pole hanging method.
Reports from the time stated that he was still wearing clerical clothing when he was brought out before the crowd. His execution became an early symbol of how seriously Hungary intended to punish collaborators and war criminals after the occupation ended. But the men who followed Kun to the gallows were even more powerful. They were not local militia members or street-level killers.
They were senior Nazi officials who had helped organize terror across entire countries. And one of the next men to face execution, named Karl Hermann Frank, had played a major role in the destruction of two Czech villages that became symbols of Nazi brutality during the war. It happened on June 10, 1942, when Nazi forces entered the Lidice village and rounded up the population.
Every male over the age of 15 was separated from the women and children and shot dead. In total, 173 men and boys were executed that day. The women were deported to Ravensbr ck concentration camp, where many later died from disease, starvation, and abuse. Most of the village s children were eventually murdered in gas vans at Che?mno extermination camp. After the killings, the Nazis completely destroyed Lidice itself.
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Homes were burned down, buildings were demolished, and the ground was flattened so thoroughly that it was meant to look as if the village had never existed. Just two weeks later, the nearby village of Le ky suffered a similar fate. These massacres happened after the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, one of the most powerful figures in Nazi Germany and one of the main architects of the Holocaust.
Heydrich was attacked on May 27, 1942, by Czech and Slovak resistance fighters trained in Britain during a mission known as Operation Anthropoid. He later died from his wounds on June 4. Hitler reacted with fury and demanded brutal retaliation against the Czech population. Karl Hermann Frank was one of the main men responsible for carrying out that retaliation.
Frank had already spent years helping run Nazi rule inside occupied Czechoslovakia. After Heydrich s death, he became the acting senior security official in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia and oversaw a huge crackdown across the region. Thousands of suspected resistance members, civilians, and political opponents were arrested.
Executions became common, prisons filled up, and fear spread throughout the country. When the war ended in 1945, Frank was captured by American forces and later handed over to Czechoslovakia for trial. His case drew enormous public attention because many people across the country personally connected him to the terror of the occupation years.
He was convicted of war crimes and crimes against humanity. On May 22, 1946, he was executed at Pankr c Prison in Prague using the pole hanging method. Thousands of people attended the execution. The location itself carried enormous meaning. During the Nazi occupation, many Czech prisoners had been executed inside Pankr c Prison under Nazi rule.
Now one of the men responsible for that terror was dying in the exact same place. But Frank was not the only senior Nazi leader connected to the destruction of Lidice. Kurt Daluege was one of the senior officials above him who helped give that terror official authority. Daluege was the head of the Ordnungspolizei, also known as the Order Police.
This was not a small police force. It was a massive organization spread across occupied Europe with hundreds of thousands of personnel involved in deportations, mass arrests, shootings, and occupation control during the war. By the early 1940s, Order Police units had already taken part in some of the worst atrocities committed by Nazi Germany.
After Reinhard Heydrich s assassination, Hitler appointed Daluege as the new Deputy Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia. That placed him in one of the highest positions of authority inside occupied Czechoslovakia. His time in the position was relatively short because he suffered a serious heart attack later in 1942 and gradually disappeared from active leadership during the rest of the war.
During his postwar trial, his defense tried to use his poor health to argue that he should not be held fully responsible for the crimes committed under his command. The court rejected that argument. Judges concluded that the massacres and reprisals happened as part of a system Daluege had personally helped build and lead for years.
After the war, he was captured and extradited to Czechoslovakia, where he faced trial for war crimes. The evidence against him was extensive, and he was sentenced to death. On October 24, 1946, Kurt Daluege was executed at Pankr c Prison in Prague using the same pole hanging method that had already been used against Karl Hermann Frank months earlier.
While Prague was carrying out justice against Nazi officials, Hungary was dealing with crimes on an even larger scale. By early 1944, Hungary still had one of the largest remaining Jewish populations in Europe.
Around 750,000 Jews were still living in the country, and although discrimination and antisemitic laws had already made life extremely dangerous, many Hungarian Jews still believed they might avoid the kind of mass extermination already happening elsewhere in Nazi-occupied Europe. That hope collapsed on March 19, 1944. On that day, Germany occupied Hungary during a military operation called Operation Margarethe.
German troops entered the country, and a new Hungarian government was quickly installed that fully cooperated with Nazi demands. Soon after the occupation, Adolf Eichmann arrived in Budapest to oversee the deportation of Hungarian Jews. One of the key Hungarian officials working alongside him was L szl Endre. Endre had spent years building a reputation as a radical antisemite inside Hungarian politics.
After the German occupation, he became State Secretary in Hungary s Interior Ministry, a position that gave him enormous control over how deportations would be organized across the country. And he approached the job with shocking enthusiasm. Between April and May 1944, Hungarian Jews were forced into ghettos, stripped of property and legal rights, and prepared for deportation.
Entire communities were rounded up and loaded onto trains heading toward Auschwitz-Birkenau. The deportations happened at an incredible speed. Between May 15 and July 9, 1944, around 437,000 Hungarian Jews were deported, most of them sent directly to Auschwitz. The vast majority were murdered soon after arrival.
It became one of the fastest mass deportation operations of the entire Holocaust. Endre was not simply signing paperwork behind a desk. Witnesses and records showed that he actively pushed the deportation process forward. He visited ghettos personally, attended planning meetings, and pressured officials to move faster.
Even some German officials involved in the deportations were surprised by how quickly the Hungarian administration carried out the operation. As the war collapsed in 1945, Endre attempted to escape Hungary but was eventually captured and brought back for trial. The evidence against him was extensive.
Government records, deportation orders, and witness testimony clearly connected him to the deportation of hundreds of thousands of people. In December 1946, L szl Endre was executed in Budapest using the pole hanging method. His execution received less international attention than some of the more famous Nazi trials in Germany or Czechoslovakia.
But inside Hungary, many people understood exactly what he had helped make possible. The number 437,000 is almost impossible to fully imagine. But one man, Ferenc Sz lasi, had played a major role in turning that number into reality. Sz lasi had once been an army officer in the Austro-Hungarian military during World War I and later served in the Hungarian army.
Over time, however, he became increasingly radicalized by fascist ideology and extreme nationalism. During the 1930s, he developed a political movement he called Hungarism, which mixed ultranationalism with violent antisemitism and borrowed heavily from Nazi Germany. In 1940, he was the one who officially founded the Arrow Cross Party.
Even before the war reached its final stages, Hungarian authorities had already viewed Sz lasi as dangerous. He spent time in prison during the late 1930s because his political activities were considered too extreme and destabilizing. But by 1944, Germany needed loyal allies inside Hungary more than ever.
That year, as Soviet forces pushed closer and the Axis position collapsed across Europe, Hungarian leader Mikl s Horthy attempted to negotiate a separate peace with the Soviets. Germany responded immediately. On October 15, 1944, German forces backed a coup that removed Horthy from power and installed Ferenc Sz lasi as Hungary s new leader.
What followed became one of the bloodiest periods in Budapest s history. Although Sz lasi s government lasted only around four months, those months were filled with mass murder, terror, and chaos. Arrow Cross death squads roamed through Budapest murdering Jewish civilians in the streets, apartment buildings, and along the banks of the Danube River.
Victims were often shot beside the river so their bodies would fall directly into the water. At the same time, tens of thousands of Jews were trapped inside the Budapest ghetto under horrifying conditions. Disease, starvation, violence, and executions became part of daily life. There were even fears that the entire ghetto might be massacred before Soviet forces reached the city.
That disaster was narrowly avoided as the Red Army advanced into Budapest and foreign diplomats like Raoul Wallenberg worked desperately to save civilians. Sz lasi s government also fully cooperated with German deportation demands during the final months of the war. As Soviet forces surrounded Budapest in early 1945, Sz lasi fled toward Germany. But after Germany surrendered, he was captured and extradited back to Hungary.
His trial focused not only on the mass murder carried out under the Arrow Cross government, but also on his decision to continue fighting a hopeless war that caused enormous destruction across Hungary. He was convicted of war crimes and high treason. On March 12, 1946, Ferenc Sz lasi was executed in a public square in Budapest using the pole hanging method. He was not executed alone.
Three other senior officials were put to death alongside him that same day. One was D me Szt jay, who had served as prime minister during the deportations of Hungarian Jews. Another was G bor Vajna, one of the key organizers of Arrow Cross terror inside Budapest. The third was Jen? Sz ll?si. The executions were carried out one after another while crowds watched.
Reports from the time stated that Sz lasi remained calm until the end and believed history would eventually prove him right. It never did. He died slowly in front of the public as the regime he had led collapsed completely around him. And while famous political leaders like Sz lasi became symbols of postwar justice, there were also many lesser-known people swept into the same wave of trials and executions.
One of those figures was M ria Nagi, whose name is sometimes also written as Mancy Nagi in historical records. She was an older Hungarian woman who was convicted after the war for crimes connected to Arrow Cross activities during the occupation. The accusations against her involved collaboration and alleged participation in the abuse and torture of Jewish prisoners during the final months of the war.
That placed her inside one of the most violent periods in Budapest s history, when Arrow Cross militias and collaborators carried out arrests, beatings, robberies, and executions across the city. Her case stood out partly because she was both older and female at a time when most of the well-known executions involved male military officers or political leaders.
But she was far from the only civilian prosecuted after the war. Hungary carried out around 27,000 postwar legal proceedings connected to wartime crimes and handed down several hundred death sentences. Courts were overwhelmed with cases as the country tried to deal with the scale of collaboration and violence that had taken place during the occupation years.
Some trials were carefully documented and became internationally famous. Others happened quickly, with far fewer surviving records. That is one reason why historians know much less about M ria Nagi today compared to figures like Sz lasi or Karl Hermann Frank. What her case does show, however, is that the pole hanging method was not reserved only for top-ranking Nazi leaders or government officials.
Hungarian courts also used it against ordinary collaborators who were found guilty of helping carry out Arrow Cross crimes. These executions were not only about punishment. Czechoslovakia had spent six years under Nazi occupation after Germany took control of the country in 1939.
During that time, resistance fighters were executed, villages were destroyed, and thousands of civilians were sent to concentration camps. Czech culture and political life were heavily suppressed while Nazi authorities tried to reshape the country under German control. Hungary s experience during the war was different, but it still ended in disaster for much of the population.
By the time the war ended, both countries were filled with survivors who had spent years watching neighbors disappear, families get deported, and entire communities destroyed. People wanted visible justice. That is one reason the pole hanging method was used publicly.
The executions were designed so ordinary people could witness the fall of the men responsible for the occupation, deportations, and massacres. The trials at Nuremberg were mainly focused on the international stage. They were meant to document Nazi crimes for history and establish legal precedents after the war. But the executions in Prague and Budapest were aimed much more at local audiences.
The people watching were often survivors, relatives of victims, or civilians who had lived through the occupation themselves. There was also politics involved. By the late 1940s, both Czechoslovakia and Hungary were falling under Soviet influence. The new governments wanted to publicly destroy the image of the old fascist regimes and present themselves as the force bringing justice and rebuilding the country.
The executions helped serve both purposes at once. By the same time, the use of the pole hanging method had mostly disappeared. The large wave of postwar war crimes trials slowly came to an end. Over time, new political trials began to replace them, this time targeting people accused of opposing the Communist governments rather than Nazi collaborators.
Pankr c Prison, where Karl Hermann Frank and Kurt Daluege had been executed, remained active during the Communist period and was later used for political imprisonment and executions by the secret police. The prison ended up becoming connected to several different eras of violence during the twentieth century.
The pole hanging method itself left behind very little physical evidence. The wooden poles were temporary, and after the executions ended, the crowds eventually disappeared. Historians still debate how much these executions were about justice and how much they were influenced by politics. In reality, both were true at the same time.
