Through the cold, wet darkness, the people hurried homeward silently, drawing threadbare coats tightly around hunched shoulders. Policemen paced beneath feeble street lights, stamping their feet. A sharp wind whispered through shattered walls and broken towers, bringing shivers to everyone in Nürnberg. This was a night which had been longed for by millions in death cells, in all of Europe's fearful prisons and pens. But now, in the piercing wind, victors and vanquished alike felt the chilling doubts that invariably attend man's deliberate killing in the name of justice.
9 p.m. The eleven men for whom this night held no dawn ate a last supper of potato salad, sausage, cold cuts, black bread and tea. At 9 p.m., the prison lights were dimmed. At 10:45, U.S. Army Security officer Colonel Burton C. Andrus walked across the prison courtyard to set the night's lethal machinery in motion. The whole prison was permeated by the thought of impending death. (The Courthouse movie announced the next day's attraction: Deadline for Murder.)
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