The family name was synonymous with Death. It was notorious across Britain. Everyone knew the hangmen, the country’s official executioners, were called Pierrepoint.
And 75 years ago this weekend, it was a Pierrepoint who was summoned to Germany, to mete out justice to 13 of the most evil and depraved Nazis to be captured at the end of WWII concentration camp commandant Josef Kramer, the Beast of Belsen, and his psychopathic cadre of guards.
This was perhaps the most macabre meeting of the war . . . between a cigar-smoking grocer’s book-keeper from Manchester and part-time Angel of Death, and a fanatical SS officer with an insatiable appetite for murder.