The Germans execute people by burning them alive

In 1532, German law explicitly mandated death by fire. By the 20th century, Nazi courts preferred the guillotine—but outside the courtroom, the SS still burned thousands alive.

During the era of the Holy Roman Empire, which encompassed modern-day Germany from the Middle Ages to the early 19th century, burning alive was the standard legal penalty for witchcraft, heresy, and arson. The Constitutio Criminalis Carolina, the 1532 penal code issued by Emperor Charles V, codified this brutal standard for the realm. Germany became the epicenter of the European witch trials, particularly in the 16th and 17th centuries. In cities like Bamberg and Würzburg, authorities systematically tried, tortured, and burned thousands of people alive at the stake in highly formalized public executions.

While the Third Reich abandoned the stake for the courtroom, German military forces routinely deployed fire as an instrument of reprisal and genocide in the field.

As the war turned against Germany, retreating forces committed numerous atrocities using fire to quickly annihilate large groups of prisoners and civilians. In April 1945, during the Gardelegen massacre in northern Germany, SS and local troops herded over 1,000 slave laborers into a large masonry barn, doused the straw-covered floor with gasoline, and set it ablaze, shooting anyone who attempted to escape the flames. A year earlier, in the French village of Oradour-sur-Glane, the Waffen-SS locked over 400 women and children inside the local church before igniting incendiary devices, killing nearly everyone inside.

This tactic was also deployed systematically on the Eastern Front. Penal units like the SS Dirlewanger Brigade frequently destroyed entire Belarusian villages, such as Khatyn in 1943, by forcing the inhabitants into wooden barns or sheds and burning them to the ground. In these instances, the distinction between a formal execution and a state-sanctioned massacre ceased to matter to the victims.

The Isenschnibbe barn in Gardelegen, Germany, where over 1,000 slave laborers were locked inside and burned alive by SS troops in April 1945. Photo by IMLS Digital Collections & Content is licensed under CC BY 2.0.