André Obrecht

André Albert Obrecht (born August 9, 1899 in Paris , † July 30, 1985 in Nice ) was an executioner in the French Republic from 1951 to 1976 . Including his time as an assistant executioner (1922-1943, 1945-1947), he worked on a total of 322 beheadings with the guillotine .

The years up to 1951

Obrecht lost his mother, who came from the traditional executioner family Rogis and whose sister was married to the executioner Anatole Deibler , at the age of five months. The Deibler couple developed a close family relationship with him. At the age of 14 Obrecht left school and took up a job as a machinist in a factory in Paris, and at 18 he joined the French army. On October 20, 1921, at the invitation of his uncle, who might want to win him over as an assistant , he was in Strasbourg as a spectator at a double execution of two robbery murderers. On February 25, 1922 he also took part as a spectator at the beheading of the famous serial killer Henri Désiré Landru in Versailles . After the end of his military service, André Obrecht was officially appointed second class assistant by Anatole Deibler on April 4, 1922. Since 1871, all beheadings in France have been carried out by an “exécuteur en chef des arrêts criminels”. He worked with two first class assistants and three second class assistants. In addition to the executioner himself, a first-class assistant and two second-class assistants participated in an execution. Obrecht's first execution as assistant was that of the double murderers Emile Loeuillette and Louis Cadet on May 23, 1922 in Paris.

In 1926 Obrecht married a music teacher and they divorced in 1941.

Anatole Deibler died on February 2, 1939. His successor as executioner was his previous first class assistant Jules-Henri Desfourneaux , who in turn was married to a niece of Deibler's wife and cousin Obrecht. Obrecht was promoted to first class assistant. One of Desfourneaux's first executions was the last publicly executed beheading in France on June 17, 1939 of the German national and six-time murderer Eugen Weidmann in Versailles. A viewer secretly made an amateur film about this execution, which is currently being published on Internet portals. André Obrecht can be seen how, after the delinquent has been thrown down on the folding board of the guillotine by the two second-class assistants, he positions Weidmann's head on the lower bezel. Executioner Desfourneaux then uses a lever to fix the upper bezel and triggers the ax. Immediately after severing the head, the two second-class assistants tip the body sideways into the waiting chest, while Obrecht, who had observed the beheading from a few meters away (so as not to be stained by the splashing blood) on the side of the delinquent's head, went to the guillotine hurries to get the executed man's head out of the vessel intended for it. However, the lifting of the head is no longer included on the film. The executioner and assistants are dressed in black frock coats and hats. It takes less than ten seconds from the condemned man to prostrate himself on the folding board to the severing of his head. Since there were unworthy folk festival-like scenes in the vicinity of Weidmann's execution, the Ministry of Justice prohibited public executions. From then on, all executions were carried out behind prison walls so that they could not be seen by the public.

During the years of the Second World War, French courts collaborating with the German occupiers and the Vichy regime passed death sentences against those whose only “crime” was being communists and against members of the Resistance who had not committed a homicide. After Desfourneaux had executed five Resistance members in 1943, André Obrecht and two colleagues, the Martin brothers, left the team for reasons of conscience and protest. They accused Desfourneaux of being too compliant to the collaborators . Since the factory in which Obrecht worked as a machinist closed due to the war, he earned his living as a bookmaker in greyhound races. He also started a company that sold popsicles to cinemas in Paris.

From June 1944 to January 1947, most executions in France were carried out by firing squads. On April 26, 1945, Obrecht rejoined Desfourneaux's team. The first decapitation of the post-war period - one of the few among the shootings in the period up to January 1947 - took place on May 25, 1946 of the serial killer Marcel Petiot . At the end of 1947, the constant disputes between André Obrecht and Jules-Henri Desfourneaux escalated again, so that Obrecht resigned from the service as an assistant executioner. In the same year he had married for the second time, and he settled with his wife in Casablanca . When Desfourneaux died on October 1, 1951, Obrecht applied to the Ministry of Justice for his successor. On November 1st of that year he was hired as exécuteur en chef des arrêts criminels and returned to Paris.

Executioner of France since 1951

André Obrecht's first execution as "exécuteur en chef" took place on November 13, 1951 in Marseille on the double murderer of the police officer Marcel Ythier. Obrecht took office at a time when executions in France were noticeably decreasing. From 1947 to 1951 there was roughly an average of about 20 executions per year (1948 even 43), the number dropped to seven in 1952 and two in 1953. 1954 was the first calendar year since the execution moratorium, which lasted from 1906 to 1908, during which there was not a single enforcement. Between 1955 and 1959 there were one to six executions at a time. An exception to the trend was 1960, when 19 convicts lost their heads under the guillotine. The majority of these were convictions for murders committed in the context of the FLN during the Algerian war . From 1961 until Obrecht's resignation in 1976, the trend of fewer and fewer executions continued again. In 1964 and 1965, Obrecht traveled to the overseas department of Martinique for one execution each . From March 1969 to November 1972 more than three and a half years passed without the execution of the death penalty, and from May 1973 to July 1976 another three years. After the execution of Christian Ranucci on July 28, 1976 in Marseille, the almost 77-year-old Obrecht, who had Parkinson's disease and had been a widower since 1967 , submitted his resignation. In France, it has long been a tradition that the executioner's office was passed on within the same family. Since Obrecht had no children from both marriages (although he was the father of a daughter from a youthful relationship), he proposed his niece's husband, Marcel Chevalier , who had worked for him as an assistant since 1958, as his successor. Chevalier took over the post on October 1, 1976 and only had to perform two beheadings before the death penalty was abolished in France .

In contrast to the executioners in the United Kingdom , who performed their duties very discreetly and whose names were kept as secret as possible (→ List of British executioners ), the French executioners were public figures. André Obrecht gave numerous interviews, the journalist Jean Ker wrote his biography in collaboration with Obrecht since 1981, which was published only posthumously in 1989.

André Obrecht spent the last years of his life in Paris and Nice. He was involved in a total of 322 executions, of which about 150 under Deibler, over 100 under Desfourneaux and 63 he carried out himself as an executioner, 51 of them in the first ten years of his almost 25-year term in office.

Table: Executions by André Obrecht as acting executioner from 1951 to 1976

year	Persons beheaded by Obrecht	Remarks
1951	5	First enforcement by Obrecht as exécuteur en chef  : Marcel Ythier (November 13, Marseille), murder of two police officers. - 14 executions by predecessor Jules-Henri Desfourneaux earlier in the same year.
1952	7th	-
1953	2	-
1954	0	-
1955	1	-
1956	2	Including the so-called "Public Enemy No. 1", gang boss Émile Buisson (February 28, Paris), mastermind of over 20 murders
1957	4th	Including Jacques Fesch (October 1st, Paris), robbery with murder of a police officer. Converted from atheist to devout Catholic in prison, opening of a beatification process at diocesan level by Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger in 1993
1958	4th	-
1959	6th	-
1960	19th	Among them Georges Rapin, son from a wealthy family, known as a pimp under the nickname "Monsieur Bill" (July 26th, Paris), double murder. - Most of the executions this year were for murders in the vicinity of the FLN during the Algerian war .
1961	1	-
1962	0	-
1963	0	The only execution that year was by shooting under military criminal law (Lieutenant Colonel Jean Bastien-Thiry , March 11, Fort d'Ivry , attempted murder of President Charles de Gaulle ).
1964	4th	including one execution in the overseas department of Martinique
1965	1	in the overseas department of Martinique
1966	1	-
1967	1	Günther Volz, ex- legionnaire of Austrian descent , (December 16, Metz ), rape and murder of a 12-year-old girl
1968	0	-
1969	1	Jean-Laurent Olivier (March 11, Amiens ), rape and double homicide of children; last execution under the presidency of Charles de Gaulle
1970	0	-
1971	0	-
1972	2	Claude Buffet and Roger Bontems (November 28, Paris), hostage-taking and double murder during attempted prison break. The execution of Bontems made his lawyer Robert Badinter a vehement fighter against the death penalty.
1973	1	Ali Benyanès (May 12, 1973, Marseille) strangled a 7-year-old child in a robbery and seriously injured his pregnant mother.
1974	0	-
1975	0	-
1976	1	Christian Ranucci (July 28, Marseille), kidnapping and murder, guilt highly controversial

literature

• Jean Ker: Le carnet noir du bourreau: mémoires d'André Obrecht, l'homme qui exécuta 322 condamnés. De Villiers, Paris 1989. ISBN 2-7386-0045-X

Web links

• Sensible executioner - Der Spiegel 1989 about the publication of Obrecht's memoirs in German
• Illustrated biography of André Obrecht on site.voila.fr (French)
• Audio samples from André Obrecht's diaries (French)

predecessor	Office	successor
Jules-Henri Desfourneaux	Executioner of France 1951–1976	Marcel Chevalier