This Date in History: April 7

 

On Saturday, April 7, 1944, official executioners Thomas Pierrepoint and Herbert Morris hanged U.S. Army Private William Harrison Jr. at Shepton Mallet Prison for the crimes of rape and murder of a seven-year-old girl.  (The Fifth Field: The Story of the 96 American Soldiers Sentenced to Death and Executed in Europe and North Africa in World War II)

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Kurt von Schleicher, Army General, born April 7, 1882 in Brandenburg, last chancellor of the Weimar Republic, Minister of Defense, murdered by gunfire probably by SS men on June 30, 1934 at his villa at Neubabelsberg, near Potsdam, Germany during the purge of the SA “Night of the Long Knives,” on the Nazis:

“If there were no Nazis it would be necessary to invent them.”  (2,000 Quotes From Hitler’s 1,000-Year Reich)