There are many reasons to be outraged by those who lie and cheat their way into the world's most important positions out of self-interest. People who line their pockets to the brim, abuse children, or ignore massacres of their own population in order to preserve their power and potentially their immunity from prosecution.
And just so I am not misunderstood: Such people have always existed. Some nations in this world have simply succeeded better than others at keeping such individuals away from the levers of power.
Unfortunately, I have the impression that this has changed in recent years. For me, there is hardly a clearer example of the ongoing decay of societal standards than the idea of broadcasting the planned execution of Nidal Malik Hasan live on the internet.
Hasan was sentenced to death for the fatal attack on the Fort Hood military base in 2009. Thirteen people were killed and 32 injured in the attack. The US Department of Defense has announced plans to live-stream the execution by firing squad scheduled for December 3, 2026. However, according to recent reports, it has not yet been definitively decided whether the live stream will actually take place. Representatives of the Catholic Church, human rights activists, and politicians have criticized the plans.
Yet the mere fact that such a broadcast is being seriously considered shows, in my view, where we have ended up.
For Historical Context
According to widespread historical accounts, the last public executions on German territory took place in October 1864. On October 14, Ludwig Hilberg was executed in Marburg, and on October 21, Marie Rosine Strauß in Greiz. Strauß was beheaded with a hand axe; the execution site was located in a field near the former Kammergut Dölau.
An important turning point on the path toward the abolition of public executions was the Prussian Penal Code of April 14, 1851, which came into force on July 1 of the same year. It significantly restricted the public execution of the death penalty and enabled executions within enclosed areas.
The legal scholar Georg Beseler explained as early as 1851 in his commentary on the law that executions in public places surrounded by large crowds were associated with considerable problems. All too easily, they turned into a spectacle for the curious. Contemporary reports describe the behavior of spectators as partly resembling a macabre folk festival. As a result, the supposedly deterrent purpose of such executions was increasingly called into question.
Even the National Socialists generally did not carry out their judicially ordered death sentences in public. They set up execution sites inside prisons and killed thousands of people there. This by no means meant that their violence was any less brutal or less public: they utilized propaganda, show trials, and public announcements, while the actual execution usually took place behind prison walls.
The writer Charles Dickens was also outraged by the effect of public executions. On November 13, 1849, he wrote a letter to The Times newspaper after attending the public execution of the married couple Frederick and Maria Manning in London. He particularly criticized the sensationalist and sometimes cruel behavior of the spectators. The crowd, he conveyed in essence, shook him more than the actual act of execution itself.
Cases in which spectators or residents explicitly demanded mercy before an execution or attempted to rescue the condemned are historically documented, though not always easy to reconstruct. In my research so far, however, I have found no reliable evidence for a case that matches the narrative of villagers scattering sand along the path to the execution site to lessen the suffering of a couple transported together in a sack.
A Particularly Bitter Irony
That of all people Pete Hegseth, the US Secretary of Defense, supports the public broadcast of an execution leaves a particularly bitter taste for me. His public rhetoric is strongly influenced by religious language. This makes it all the harder for me to reconcile a claim to moral superiority with the idea of turning the state-sanctioned killing of a human being into a media spectacle.
With these planned proposals, the US joins a very small group of states where public executions are still documented. Amnesty International registered at least 17 such cases for the year 2025: eleven in Iran and six in Afghanistan under Taliban rule.
My Opinion
Fundamentally, I oppose both the imposition of the death penalty and its execution. Even sentencing someone to death is, in my view, a form of psychological torture unworthy of a state governed by the rule of law.
Of course, I can understand people who wish death upon a mass murderer like Anders Behring Breivik. Nevertheless, no state and no institution should presume the right to take a human life, thereby lowering itself to a moral level it denies to the perpetrator. This holds true even if the act was committed in the name of a god, a prophet, or a political ideology.
The public execution of the death penalty is, for me, another step back into barbarism. A society demonstrates its strength not by publicly celebrating the death of a human being, but by enforcing justice without turning killing into a spectacle.
