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newspaper articles missing from preceding page pasted on this page.

24 April 1968 Dear Jack

newspaper clipping Potluck [[handwritten: Chi Daily news 24 april 1968 Colorado U. grill to bear name of only convicted U.S. cannibal BOULDER, Colo. (UPI) -- University of Colorado students voted Tuesday to rename the Student Union grill in honor of Alfred E. Packer, the only man ever convicted of cannibalism in U.S. history.

  The student resolution said the grill, long the target of gibes for alleged poor food, "has consistently striven to attain the high standards exemplified by the life of Mr. Packer."
   Packer was convicted in Lake City, Colo., in 1883 of having killed and eaten five companions caught with him in a blizzard while prospecting for gold in Colorado's Uncompahgre Valley.
   A Democratic judge later sentenced Packer to die for the crime.
   "There were only seven Democrats in Hinsdale County and you, Alfred Packer, you man-eating so-and-so, you ate five of them," the judge said.  "I sentence you to be hanged by the neck until you are dead, dead, dead."

arrow pointing to last paragraph [[handwritten note: How about an underlined: "Alfred Packer Club" for Nixon?]]

newspaper clipping Last Executioner Finds the Germans Misunderstand Role handwritten: 22 April 1968

  MUNICH, Germany (UPI) -- The gaunt, shabby old kennel keeper fondled a Schnauzer puppy and said with a sigh:
  "Nobody understands . . . even my own son and daughter won't visit me.  I was just a a civil servant, doing a necessary job."
   Johann Reichart, lonely and shunned at 75 years of age, is Germany's last living public executioner.
  paragraph underlined in ink  He worked the guillotine for the Weimar Republic that Hitler crushed.  He worked it harder still for Hitler.  And, ever adaptable, he turned hangman after World War II to execute Nazis for the victorious Allies.
  When postwar West Germany abolished the death penalty, remainder of paragraph underlined in ink Reichart retired to a tumble-down cabin near Deisenhofen in a quiet valley south of Munich.  There he breeds Schnauzers and is bitter agains a world that prefers to forget him.
  "Nobody executed as many people as I did, nobody in the whole world," Mr. Reichart told a rare visitor.  "How many?  More than 3,000 on the guillotine alone.  I don't count hangings."
  arrow pointing left;  handwritten comment : Altho Johann Reichhart did his work well - none of the customers returned.  The guillotine was Germany's legal means of execution right up through the Third Reich of gas chambers and Nazi firing squads.
   "I was an expert with the guillotine," Reichart said, not without pride, as he gently tweaked his puppy's ears.  "A few seconds and it was all over, every time.  Not like hanging and all those inhuman modern ways."

Served 21 Years

   In a 21year career as public executioner, "everything I did was legal."
   Until the war, most of his victims were murderers, Mr. Reichart said.
   "But then came the war and a lot of people were caught looting in air raids," he went on.  "That got the death penalty then.  It wasn't easy for me.
  sentence underlined in ink  "But I didn't sentence them.  I just did my job."
   He said he was "never a party member myself."  Nevertheless, a German denazification tribunal sentenced him to 10 years at hard labor in 1947 -- "I can't remember exactly why."  He was released after he served two years and given a pension.

JC Diggles. NN (Chronicler)