The last public execution in the Austro-Hungarian Empire!


On May 30, 1868, the 23-year-old journeyman carpenter Georg Ratkay, who had previously been sentenced to death, was...



...publicly executed at Vienna...:



He had previously crept in as an assistant to a family of carpenters under the false name Eduard Reinbold, killed Marie Henke, his master's wife, with a planer on January 9, 1868 in order to get to the valuables in the apartment and was found guilty of completed robbery and murder been.

His death sentence has been preserved...:



The execution site on the Wienerberg in front of the city, then called "Galgenhügel", is packed with spectators, for whom a wooden stand has been specially built.

For the executioner Heinrich Willenbacher, Ratkay's execution is a first - but he can rely on his experienced assistant named Seyfried, who comes from a family of executioners in Brno (now Brno).

According to several reports, the spectacle is said to have taken on a "folk festival-like" character, since the majority of onlookers were drunk, as a report in the "Constitutionale Wiener Vorstadtzeitung" reported at the time...:



Drunken rioters bring down the grandstand during the ongoing execution - there are injured.

The authorities then decide that Ratkay's execution was the last to be carried out publicly in Austria-Hungary!

From now on, the death row inmates are killed on the so-called "strangling gallows", a special feature of the Imperial and Royal Kuk, behind closed doors.

In this particularly Austrian type of execution, a noose was placed around the offender's neck, the other end of which was attached to an eyelet on top of the beam of the execution instrument.

Then the executioner, who was standing on a pedestal behind the beam, pressed down the condemned man's head - and an assistant hung on his upper body and pulled him down as well. This procedure can be seen on the next picture in the background...:



So the death row inmate was slowly strangled.

Today this torture instrument (it can hardly be called any other way) is in the Crime Museum in Vienna - the dates of the individual executions are scratched into the beam...: