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Peter Chemy prepares to be executed by firing squad
Piotr Chemy, a young Polish man who survived a concentration camp, is readied for his execution after being convicted of murdering a German family. The family had found him wandering on a snowy night, fed him, and gave him a bed. Chemy killed them as they slept, Landsberg Prison, 1947.
Hardly any information about the case is available since it wasn't readily published (I assume the details are stashed deep away in the National Archives).
Peter Chemy was born in Tarnopol in 1918. During World War II, he was detained by Nazi officials and sent to a concentration camp. He was freed by U.S. soldiers in May 1945. Chemy spent the next few months wandering Germany after the war.
On a snowy night in December 1945, a German family found Chemy wandering aimlessly and decided to take him in for the night. They fed him and gave him a bed. After they went to sleep, however, Chemy found a hatchet and murdered the couple and their young daughter in their beds. He was arrested by U.S. occupation police shortly after.
Since Chemy committed his crimes in the American occupation zone, he was under the jurisdiction of the U.S. military. He was tried by an American military court in the town of Ochsenfurt. On August 6, 1946, Chemy was found guilty of three counts of premeditated murder and sentenced to death.
Chemy's conviction and sentence were upheld on appeal. The American military governor declined to intervene. Chemy, 28, was executed by firing squad at Landsberg Prison in Allied-occupied Germany on March 21, 1947.
Chemy was shot without a hood. He had been offered a hood, but declined to wear one.
Landsberg Prison was chosen by American occupation authorities as their prison for the Nazi war criminals they had tried. They executed 252 Nazi war criminals there between 1945 and 1951, and 33 common criminals, all of them for premeditated murder, between 1947 and 1949.
All of the war criminals were hanged, whereas all but four of the common criminals were shot. My assumption is that since men such as Chemy were not war criminals, the American military government thought they deserved to be treated with some level of dignity. The firing squad is considered a far more honorable way to die.
Nobody claimed Chemy's body, so he was buried in the cemetery of Spottingen Chapel, which is next to Landsberg Prison. He was buried in Grave #156. The cemetery is ironically the burial site for the war criminals executed at Landsberg whose bodies were not claimed either.
The British military executed 192 people at Hamelin Prison, their main execution site. Of those prisoners, 36 of them were common criminals. The vast majority of the common criminals executed by the U.S. military and British military (I don't have statistics for the French military and Soviet military) were displaced people. Most of them were Polish.
The military occupation of Germany from 1945 to 1949 was not a good time. I just started searching through old articles about the occupation. The United States, British, French, and Soviet military governments were trying hard to maintain order, but there was still chaos.
One problem was that Germany had large numbers of foreign nationals who had been displaced by the Nazi regime. Some of them had no simple way of returning home, so they just wandered around. One article discussed how officials in the American occupation zone had to calm down tensions when an angry crowd of Jews marched through an area which they heard was suffering from a spate of anti-Semitic murders.
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