The first Yugoslav executioner was an Austrian, Alois Seyfried. He was born in the small town of Brunn am Gebirge on 27 May 1856, to father Franz and mother Caroline nee Herger. Two of his brothers – Joseph (b. 1854) and Rudolf (13.04.1852–31.01.1892) were executioners as well. All three had inherited their trade from the long-serving Viennese hangman Heinrich Willenbacher, who was either their uncle or Rudolf’s father-in-law.
On 1 August 1886, Alois was appointed temporary executioner (provisorischer Scharfrichter) for Bosnia. Unlike other civil servants, he was not placed in any career category. His annual salary was 800 florins and he also received an annual supplement of 400 florins. In addition to the salary and the supplement, Seyfried received 500 florins p.a. for his deputy (whose appointment required official approval). He was entitled to a reimbursement for certain out-of-pocket expenses and a special payment called “tax” for each hanging. The “tax” amounted to 25 florins for the executioner and 5 florins each for his deputy and assistants (the assistants were hired ad hoc by the executioner himself and their employment did not require official approval). He was also entitled to 5 florins per hanging as a reimbursement for the depreciation of his hanging equipment (the gallows, the rope and the gloves). He was reimbursed for actual transport expenses involving his appearance at the scaffold and the removal of the executed body after the event. When officiating outside Sarajevo, Seyfried received per diems (5 florins each for himself and his deputy to buy meals with), as well as costs for travel and lodgings. (He himself paid the per diems and costs for his assistants.) He was entitled to travel third class by train and second by boat. All this was detailed in a decree issued by the Bosnian Provincial Government in 1884 .
After eleven years of temporary status, Seyfried was appointed as permanent executioner for Bosnia by the Provincial Government on 1 February 1897, but his terms of employment remained unchanged. As his deputy he first selected one Johan Lorenz Plachovitz. When Plachovitz died in 1915, Seyfried replaced him with a former assistant, Florian Mausner, a knacker from Sarajevo. The fact that Seyfried had not been categorized within the general classification of civil servants caused him considerable trouble. Not being in the official hierarchy, Seyfried did not benefit from the automatic annual salary increase nor could he be promoted to any higher grades of the service. In consequence, his salary remained the same for decades and was increased only in 1910 and then again in 1912, when he received a total of 3,200 Kronen, supplements included. (By a monetary reform of 1892, the Austro-Hungarian Florin was replaced by the Krone at the rate of 1 Florin = 2 Kronen.)
This rise was inadequate, as in the meantime Seyfried had married and now had a son. Accordingly, he kept asking for an improvement in his status. His other argument was that he was wholly dependent on his official salary, as no other source of income was available to him, in view of the prejudice of employers against executioners. The Sarajevo government supported his pleas in Vienna, stressing that the executioner’s workload and the importance of his job had greatly increased with the onset of the war. In its letter to the Joint Austro-Hungarian Ministry of Finance, written in 1917 , the local government asked for an increase in Seyfried’s salary not only in view of general price increases, but also because Seyfried was unable to secure any other income “because of his co-citizens’ prejudices against his position”. In its reply , the Ministry acknowledged this and suggested that the local authorities should provide a secondary job for Seyfried: “Since, as is known to this Ministry, he is intelligent and good at foreign languages, he should be given work to copy and translate at home and be paid for it” – i.e. if the citizens were prejudiced, the Government needn’t be. The outcome was that Seyfried’s salary was increased by a further 400 Kronen in March 1918.
After the new Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (Yugoslavia) was created on 1 December 1918, the new authorities started to look for a professional executioner to hang those who had been sentenced to death in the western provinces, where hanging was the only legal mode of execution. As the only available professional, Seyfried therefore remained a government employee.
Together with his deputy Mausner, Seyfried kept pleading with the authorities for a more secure position and for more regular payments. Every so often Mausner would threaten to resign. Seyfried used this as an additional argument writing, “In his official capacity and in the context of modern justice, the undersigned must have an experienced deputy, in the interests of correct performance of his duty”. ”. Otherwise, “certain unpleasant facts could become visible whilst they were on duty, which should never be allowed, in the interests of the authority of justice”. The provincial government took these warning in earnest, advising its superiors in Belgrade that there existed “a real danger that the courts be left without an executioner, and it would be extremely inhuman if the convicts had to wait for their execution, possibly for as long as several months”. A partial solution to this roblem was eventually found, but only after Seyfried’s retirement in August 1922. His last “patient” was liX0 liX0gi, whom he was to hang in Zagreb on 7 March of that year.
An Austrian One Year Volunteer Cadet (Einjähriger Freiwillige), M. Kosti, met Seyfried in 1916 in Kolašin, where the latter was on duty, to hang six convicts. This is how Kosti described the meeting:
An elderly gentleman appeared before us. His back was bent and he was wearing a dark coloured suit and a bowler hat. [...] His red face, criss-crossed with purple veins and heavily creased and freckled, reminded one of an alcoholic’s physiognomy. In his hand the old man held a small leather bag and a pair of gloves.
It is an honour to introduce myself... – he said, extending his hand to the Senior Lieutenant Dr. Eberle – I am Seyfried, an executioner for the Royal and Imperial Government in Sarajevo.
While Seyfried shook my hand, Dr. Eberle wiped his on the back of his trousers.
- Have no fear, Mr. One Year Volunteer – he said jestingly, as he saw me withdraw. – I am not terrible to all. I only do my duty, just like any other official. [...] Please believe that I sympathize sincerely and deeply with those who had had the misfortune to become my patients. I always strive to execute the act of hanging in the most humane and efficient manner. I do it because I respect the tragic moment of a violent death. My new system of hanging is far better than the old one, which relied on a “” shaped gallows. Now death comes in a second! I never fail to advise my patients of this fact before I proceed. And now, look at my hands. Yes, gentlemen, they tremble. And yet, my most difficult moments come when I am to hang political offenders, not a rare occurrence in these days of war. [...] In private, I am a good father, just like all family men are. I love my children. One of my sons will study engineering in Vienna. In my free time, I play the zither. I even compose. You have no idea how deeply I am moved by music. Schubert and Chopin are my favourite composers.
Little is known about Seyfried’s private life. According to a news report from 1900, in Bosnia he married a former snake charmer. They had at least one son. A journalist who interviewed Seyfried when he was retired met Seyfried junior in Sarajevo in 1928: “a young man of short stature, rather hunchbacked”, standing by an easel. He turned out to be an amateur painter, mostly doing watercolours of landscapes around Sarajevo.
Seyfried’s lodgings in number 7, Kapetana Gradaš
evia Street consisted of one room, which doubled as the kitchen, and an anteroom with an earthen floor, used by his son. Bragging about his expertise, Seyfried showed the journalist an anatomy textbook from which, he said, he had learned about the human body. “Ask me a question and you shall see that my trade is science-based”, he added with pride. Of his former deputy Mauzner, who had inherited his job, he spoke badly and called him “an ignorant swine”, although he had praised him and recommended him for the job not long before. There was a zither on Seyfried’s desk and he played some pieces for the journalist.
Seyfried’s claim about “his” new method of hanging was utterly groundless. In reality, he was using the then standard Austrian gallows, which consisted of a single beam with a hook on the top to tie the noose to. This technology had long been used in Austria and was inferior to the English gallows, which had a long rope and a trapdoor. Seyfried’s claim about death “coming in a second” was not true either – in reality, the victim’s agony on the gallows lasted about ten minutes on average.
Seyfried was fully literate and had nice handwriting, as shown by the various submissions he made to the authorities, in both German and Serbian , as well as by the hefty invoices he submitted after each execution. A good example is his invoice for hanging of one Šiljegovi, a brigand from Herzegovina, in Nevesinje in 1920.
In the end, Seyfried returned to Austria, where he told a journalist in 1933: “At the end of the war, I was taken over by Yugoslavia and retired as a Yugoslav civil servant. Thereafter I came back to my birthplace, where I wait for friend Death to call upon me”. He did die there, on 9 October 1938.
In Serbia, Seyfried is best remembered for having hanged thre persons sentenced to death for the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo. He is mentioned in many historical accounts (e.g., Vladimir Dedijer, Sarajevo 1914, Beograd: Prosveta, 1966, p. 587), as well as in some works of fiction (e.g., Mirko Kova
, Vrata od utrobe, Beograd: BIGZ, 1979, p. 18). He is the eponymous hero of a novel Bosanski d~elat (The Bosnian Executioner) by Ranko Risojevi (Banja Luka: Glas srpski, 2004).